This article addresses a hitherto unnoticed contrast between the phonologies of Northern and Southern Dutch. This contrast concerns two phenomena, viz. the resyllabification of a morpheme-final consonant in the next syllable and the deletion of vowels, especially in pronouns and articles, when they can cliticize to other words. It is shown that both phenomena can be analyzed as the result of that fact that Southern Dutch, just like French, does not bother to make morpheme boundaries and syllable boundaries coincide. Next, it is shown that a classical input driven rule oriented phonological theory cannot express this state of affairs as on single fact. In an output driven theory, like Optimality theory, in which constraints, instead of rules, play a central role, this is indeed possible: the phenomenon is expressed by a single, minimal, difference in the constraint order. Thirdly, the conjecture is advanced that, given the intensive language contact, Southern Dutch has adopted this specific way of phonological organization from French. Finally, it is concluded that not only lexemes, phonological and syntactic elements, but also principles of phonological organization like the constraint order, can be borrowed from one language to another.