‘The Brabant quarter’ and ‘don’t take it all so seriously’, these are pleasant qualities in today’s hectic times. Dialect singer Hein Augustijn from Den Bosch knows why he loves our province so much, he explains in the fourth episode of the podcast series ‘Hee gaode mee’: ”Brabanders are like Buddhists. The proof for this is the verb to be. That’s Brabant.”
It shows how Augustijn feels, his roots are in Brabant. His songs in their own language are full of small observations. For example, he once paid tribute to ‘Meskes meej ‘n zaachte g’. It even became a minor hit.
An ode to the language that he was not always allowed to speak at home. It wasn’t allowed to be too flat there. That is why he now speaks ‘generally civilized Brabant’ as he calls it. “The dialect is a bit repressed in Brabant.”
“Everyone comes from somewhere. But what would it sound like if I was born somewhere else.”
He believes it is important to put one’s own language on a pedestal. He wrote the song ‘From here’ and it eventually became a kind of ‘We are the world’ in the dialect. He asked other dialect singers throughout the Netherlands to also sing phrases in their own language. “Everyone comes from somewhere. But what would it sound like if I was born somewhere else? Everyone did something like that.”
You can hear these and other stories from Hein Augustijn in the podcast ‘Hee gaode mee’ by Omroep Brabant.
Would you like to listen to the entire podcast? Click below and subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. Also listen to previous episodes starring other well-known Brabanders.
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