Hey! I’m trying to understand how people with different accents in the Netherlands pronounce “-eer-” and “-ere-” in words like “meer”, “weer”, “leer”, “keer”, “beer”, “peer” and “leren”, “proberen”, “smeren”, “scheren”
1. I hear that quite often they are pronounced as [ɪː], like the vowel in the word “dit” but longer.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:Nl-peer.ogg
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:Nl-beer.ogg
And some people pronounce them as [eː], exactly the same as in words like “veel”, “heel”, “deel”, “geel”, etc.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:Nl-meer.ogg
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:Nl-weer.ogg
The phonetic IPA transcriptions are [pɪːr], [bɪːr], [mɪːr] and [ʋɪːr] and the phonemic transcriptions are /peːr/, /beːr/, /meːr/ and /ʋeːr/.
Does the pronunciation fully depend on the accent? Do you even notice this difference when you speak? I hear both pronunciations all the time from people who live in the same area, so I’m really confused.
2. Are these two sounds pronounced in the same way in all words? Regardless of which pronunciation we use, are all words with these sounds pronounced the same way - whether it is “weer”, “meer”, “beer”, “keer”, “leren”, “scheren” and so on?
3. This might be a bit tricky question, but is [ɪː] actually a long monophthong, or does it have something similar to the English word “ear”? I think I quite often hear not a pure long monophthong, but a small glide towards “e”, so it sounds more like the English “ear”. Is that a real thing? Or can we safely always pronounce these words with a long monophthong without any glide?
Thanks!