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Standard Dutch has two open vowels: a long front vowel [a] as in the word "maan" (linguistic variable in this paper) and a short back vowel [A], as in the word "man" (linguistic variable in this paper). The dialects of Utrecht and Amsterdam, however, have a different feature distribution, with pronounced at the back of the mouth, and at the front. In Amsterdam, place of articulation appears to be the only difference with Standard Dutch, but in Utrecht there seems to be an additional difference: the vowel in the word "man" is often heard as long. This paper investigates the validity of these impressions by measuring the durations and formant frequencies of ten minimal - pairs, pronounced by about ten speakers of both dialects and of Standard Dutch. The results show that the Utrecht and Amsterdam pronunciations of do have the same degree of backness as the Standard-Dutch pronunciation of , and that the Amsterdam and Utrecht versions of are, relatively speaking, front vowels. However, their positions are much less advanced than that of the Standard-Dutch realisation of , which stands out here as an extremely front, extremely open vowel. The durational measurements show that in Utrecht is significantly longer than in Amsterdam and in Standard Dutch, but still considerably shorter than . Finally, a perceptual test showed that experienced listeners are quite capable of assigning the various realisations of and , after they have been excised from the words in which they occur, to the right vowel category and the right dialect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]