Last night on the 8 o’clock news: a new gadget was introduced that warned users if a stalker would come too close. A woman was interviewed anonymously about the advantages of wearing such a gadget, saying how happy she was with the police monitoring it all in the background. “Gelukkig dat hun het allemaal screenen,” she said. For some unclear reason, the text was subtitled, and for another unclear reason, the speaker’s non-standard use of hun as the subject pronoun, a shibboleth in Dutch, had been edited out:
“Gelukkig dat zij het allemaal screenen,” the subtitle read.
Comments please!
Bridging the Unbridgeable 
I am very curious to hear whether the woman had a local accent, or whether she used words from a specific Dutch dialect. I have noticed that lately more subtitles have appeared for (for me) perfectly understandable Dutch pronunciation, but I wonder if this shows a trend of lesser understanding of other dialects/accents than people’s own.
An example of this development can be clearly found in Czech Republic, where I live now. My friends (aged 29-35) can understand Slovak perfectly well, but my students (aged 13-19) at times really struggle, despite having some Slovakian teachers. The Slovakian teachers in question (aged 26-48) do not speak Czech, because they have never learned the language and do not generally need it. This shows an interesting discrepancy between generations, but also geographical differences. The Czechs, on average, have always understood Slovak, but do not speak it, and vice versa. For teenagers, however, this is actively changing. Children’s TV shows are not being dubbed from Slovak (most languages are here), and they are also not subtitled. This makes me think that Czech children nowadays watch less Slovak content than in earlier generations.
Going back to the Dutch fragment, I wonder if this is a signal that there is either not enough variation of Dutch dialects/accents in TV content, or that there is less interaction with Dutch content in general, making people less flexible in the understanding of different language uses.
She didn’t speak dialect, that is, not so strongly that we needed help in interpreting her. What I do think is that the subtitler couldn’t get the non-standard hun out of their pen as it were, so edited it out in the process.
I live in a part of the country (near Nijmegen) where hun/hen is frequently used. Shouldn’t it be ‘hen’ rather than ‘hun’ here? In any case, I suspect they’re using subtitles to help language learners/foreigners follow, so want to display standard usage.
They may even be using AI to produce the subtitles with a quick post-transcription check, so it may be AI following prescriptive rules, then a checker who only sees the AI text without listening to the source.
Bedankt voor je reactie! Ik weet 100% zeker dat ze hun zei ;-). AI is heel interessant, en dan die correctie al helemaal! Daar moeten we meer onderzoek naar doen.