No, now that I pay close attention to it I do hear a difference. "Been" sounds like English "bane" indeed, "beer" goes a bit in the direction of English "beer".

No, now that I pay close attention to it I do hear a difference. "Been" sounds like English "bane" indeed, "beer" goes a bit in the direction of English "beer". I would never have noticed on my own. I don't think there's difference between the two in the south, but maybe there is and I just never heard it. (Of course we pronounce the "ee" differently anyway (more like the Luxemburgish pronunciation on https://nl.forvo.com/word/ee/ https://nl.forvo.com/word/ee/ than the Dutch one), and our "r" is different too, hence also the transition from "ee" to "r"; maybe that changes the whole thing.)