My Dictee Is Better Than Yours

The Prize!

I don't recall ever once a playground taunting contest coming down to, "I can take dictation better than you can."

But then, this is no playground game; this is a life-and-death matter of national pride!

I don't mean me, actually, I mean for the people who participated last night in "Het Groot Dictee der Nederlandse Taal" and the two countries that they represent. The Dictee (The Dictation) is an international contest held annually. The 60 participants are drawn from four pools:

• 20 Prominent Dutch people
• 10 Prominent Flanders people
• 20 Readers of a Dutch newspaper 
• 10 Readers of a Flanders newspaper

The prominent people are primarily journalists, actors, and politicians.

Small rewind: Netherlands is a country in western Europe that we also call Holland. There are 16.7 million residents, and the primary language is Dutch (Nederlandse Taal = Dutch Language). Neighboring Belgium has three official languages and none of them are English. Dutch is the first language of 59% of the 11 million Belgians, French is the first language of 40%. The third official language is German. Which should give you a really good idea of where Belgium lies, geographically. Its languages are those of its neighbors. In Belgium, though, Dutch is usually called Flemish, and the people who live in the north part of Belgium (called Flanders), where 97% of the population speaks Dutch, are the Flemish. 

Which is to say, this is a fight for national pride between the Dutch and the Flemish. The rules of engagement call for the participants to write down what is being read to them. Accurately.

Yep. That's the whole contest. All 60 participants are in one room. Never mind the details of the scoring or detail-oriented rules, that's the heart of it. 

And on the foundation of this exercise stand bragging rights. The Flemish have won 12 times now. The Dutch have won 11 times. (It was 11 to 10 until last night when a Flemish celeb tied with a Dutch newspaper reader. This was the first tie and the first time a celeb participant actually won, in this case a journalist.) You'd think that's about even except that there are twice as many Dutch participating. There are good reasons for a population isolate to hold more tightly to their language than the parent group. Never mind all that.

What strikes me is whether or not it would be possible to run such a contest in English, and who would win? The potential list of competing countries, in order of number of number of persons with English as their first language (millions of people, from the Wiki):

• USA (226)
• UK (58)
• Canada (18)
• Australia (15)
• Ireland (4)
• Nigeria (4)
• New Zealand (4)
• South Africa (4)
• Philippines (3)
• Jamaica (3)

I'm making the cut-off 2 million people, cuz that's the number of Flemish people. And cuz if we let the 300,000 Germans who speak English as their first language play, they'd probably win. So they can't play.

Never mind how to work out the rules such as what dictionary to use (the Dictee uses the Netherlands variation for some words and the Flanders variation for others), I just really want to see this group of people sit down together and have a conversation and conclude that they all speak the same language. 

Would the US college student newspaper entrant please, for the fifth time, put away your iPad? There is no spell check in Dictation, dammit.
Yes, Mr. Speaker of the US House of Representatives, you do have to sit next to the Prime Minister of Australia. Her socialism will not get on you like "cooties." Please stop saying that.
No, British actress, we specifically said we would be using the American variant of "deflection." There's no x in it. Americans reserve the X for showing breasts on TV.

*gets popcorn*