As a child, our own Jasper Stads (29) already dreamed of working at the radio. And preferably in Hilversum, as a newsreader at the NOS. He managed to make it that far, but for that the Tilburger had to unlearn his Brabant accent. With success, but also a bit with pain in the heart. “Over time I was told that my G was too loud. You couldn’t insult me worse.”
Jasper grew up in Tilburg, but consciously left for Utrecht after high school to study journalism. “I thought: if I really want on the radio, it makes little sense to stay under the rivers. I talked some Boers, muttered a lot and I knew that I had to sound less Brabant.”
Jasper received that confirmation when he went to do an internship at the NOS. “They said there: a bit of Brabant is not bad, but you have to be understandable. So that G had to be more neutral. And then I really started doing my best for that.” Jasper followed numerous speeches and did everything to get rid of his Brabant dialect.
And that had more impact than he had thought in advance. “During the weekend I went home, and there I was” the boy from the Randstad. “And then I came to my studies and then I was that Brabander again. I thought that was really stupid, you suddenly don’t belong anymore.”
“With carnival I sounded like a Randstadeling was trying to do a soft G.”
And that feeling was sometimes painfully confirmed. “With carnival they asked me at the NOS to speak in a carnival item on Instagram, because I was ‘De Brabander’. But that sounded like a Randstadeling was trying to do a soft G. Under the item there were angry reactions again.”
After a while, Jaspers soft G had almost disappeared. “I woke up with a terrible sore throat and from that moment I had a hard G. Maybe I damaged something or is it a muscle that has adapted. No idea.”
Moments later he entered the process to become a newsreader and the goal seemed to be achieved. “Then my chef suddenly said, your G is actually too hard. So you have to look at that. You couldn’t insult me worse,” he laughs.
“I now shout everywhere that I am really a Brabander.”
After a few years of reading news at the NOS, Jasper thought it was time for something new. Friend and radio producer Mark asked him to come and work at Omroep Brabant. “I doubted, because my soft G is gone. So one of my questions during the application was whether I was actually allowed on the radio with that hard G.”
In the meantime you hear Jasper on our radio every day, but that soft G is still not back. “I sometimes try to find him again, because I sometimes feel the intruder at the party here,” he laughs. “And I now shout everywhere that I am really a Brabander. That I know the whole oeuvre of Gerard van Maasakkers, have been to Groots with a soft G and really know where the tastiest sausage roll comes from.”
Yet the question remains, does Jaspers ever return to? “I am curious how I will sound when I will still work at Omroep Brabant in five years,” he says. “The hard G eventually came naturally, so I curious if it will leave that way. I just hope that I will not have a sore throat again for three days.”