Van Old noar Jong: reinforcing the village community using the Groningen dialect

The Van Old noar Jong teaching programme will be launched on Thursday 28 October in the presence of the King’s Commissioner for the Province of Groningen, René Paas. This is the first time that digital tools are being deployed locally to promote the sense of community between the different generations in a village in the province of Groningen using the regional dialect. Van Old noar Jong is Gronings for ‘from old to young’. The aim for the future is to introduce this method in more villages and regions in Groningen, and possibly outside the province too.

The idea for the teaching programme was developed by Goos Gosling Slotegraaf on behalf of resident interest group Dorpsbelangen Zandeweer, Eppenhuizen & Doodstil and professors Martijn Wieling and Goffe Jensma, both from the Centre for Groningen Language and Culture (CGTC)/University of Groningen (UG). Jensma: ‘This project is an excellent example of how a request from the community to pay more attention to dialect in education can lead to a beautiful result through pleasant collaboration.’

Dialect speakers provided input for app

What makes this teaching programme so special is that older generations of villagers provided input for the teaching material that introduces school children to the Groningen dialect. This input has been used to develop an app. Wieling: ‘This app is wonderful in that it contains the words that dialect-speaking residents of Zandeweer, Eppenhuizen and Doodstil wanted to pass on to the children.’

Practising Gronings

Author Kunny Luchtenberg processed the collected words into short stories in Gronings, enabling children to practise their Gronings reading, listening, writing, and pronunciation skills in a fun way using the app. Gosling Slotegraaf: ‘This is a great novelty for regional language teaching! Primary school children can now be introduced to our dialect using modern teaching resources.’ The app comes with a series of 10 lessons that school classes can use to do their own research on the Groningen dialect. They will learn, for example, that Gronings is not a variant of Dutch but of a different language: Lower Saxon. In addition, they will investigate in what ways Gronings differs from Dutch, and that there are many different varieties of Gronings.

Taster session by Olaf Vos

The Van Old noar Jong teaching programme will first be introduced at the ODBS Nijenstein primary school in Zandeweer. On Thursday 28 October, the children of Zandeweer can follow a taster session in Gronings by Olaf Vos and enjoy short performances by the Gronings dialect bands Swinder (solo) and Wat Aans!. Singer Marlene Bakker will read to the children from her book De Gruvvalo.

Development collaboration

The first version of the app was developed by students of the Alfa College in Groningen (degree programme in Game Architecture & Design), after which the current version was further developed by PhD student Wietse de Vries from the CGTC/UG. The accompanying teaching programme was created by the UG Pre-University Academy, with support from the Speech Lab Groningen of the Faculty of Arts of the UG. The development of the app and the teaching programme was supported by a Google Community Grant.

Free of charge

The Van Old noar Jong app is freely available to download from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Schools in Groningen that are interested can request the teaching programme, including the book De Gruvvalo, free of charge via the website www.rug.nl/lespakketten.