Dutch language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dutch
Nederlands 
Pronunciation: [ˈneːdərlɑnts]
Spoken in: as native language in the Netherlands, Belgium (Flanders and Brussels), Suriname, Aruba, Netherlands Antilles, Indonesia, French Flanders (France), Lower Rhine (Germany).

notable immigrant minorities in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States; small ex-colonial minority in Indonesia.

Afrikaans, albeit derived from Dutch, is considered a separate standard language and is spoken in South Africa and Namibia.

Total speakers:

• Native: +22 million[1][2]
• Total: ~27 million[3] 

Ranking: 37 (according to the Nederlandse Taalunie),[4] 40,[5] 46 (ranking by SIL estimate)
Language family: Indo-European
 Germanic
  West Germanic
   Low Franconian
    Dutch 
Writing system: Latin alphabet (Dutch variant) 
Official status
Official language in:  Aruba
 Belgium
 Netherlands
 Netherlands Antilles
 Suriname
 Benelux
 European Union
 Union of South American Nations
Regulated by: Nederlandse Taalunie
(Dutch Language Union)
Language codes
ISO 639-1: nl
ISO 639-2: dut (B)  nld (T)
ISO 639-3: nld 
Dutch-speaking world.
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Dutch ( Nederlands (help·info)) is a West Germanic language spoken by over 22 million people as a native language,[1][2] and about 5 million people as a second language.[3] Most native speakers live in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname, with smaller groups of speakers in parts of France, Germany and several former Dutch colonies. It is closely related to other West Germanic languages (e.g., English, West Frisian and German) and somewhat more remotely to the North Germanic languages.

Dutch is the parent language of several creole languages as well as of Afrikaans, one of the official languages of South Africa and the most widely understood in Namibia. Dutch and Afrikaans are to a very large extent mutually intelligible, although they have separate spelling standards and dictionaries and have separate language regulators. The Dutch Language Union coordinates actions of the Dutch, Flemish and Surinamese authorities in linguistic issues, language policy, language teaching and literature.[6]

Names

In English the language of the people of the Netherlands and Flanders is referred to as Dutch; or rarely as Netherlandic.[7] Flemish is a popular informal term to refer to Belgian Dutch, Dutch as spoken in Belgium.

The origins of the word Dutch go back to Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of all Germanic languages, *theudo (meaning "national/popular"); akin to Old Dutch dietsc, Old High German diutsch, Old English þeodisc and Gothic þiuda all meaning "(of) the common (Germanic) people". As the tribes among the Germanic peoples began to differentiate its meaning began to change. The Anglo-Saxons of England for example gradually stopped referring to themselves as þeodisc and instead started to use Englisc, after their tribe. On the continent *theudo evolved into two meanings: Diets (meaning "Dutch (people)" <archaic> [8]) and Deutsch (German, meaning "German (people)"). At first the English language used (the contemporary form of) Dutch to refer to any or all of the Germanic speakers on the European mainland (e.g. the Dutch, the Flemings and the Germans). Gradually its meaning shifted to the Germanic people they had most contact with, both because their geographical proximity, but also because of the rivalry in trade and overseas territories: the people from the Dutch Republic, the Dutch.[9]

In Dutch, the language is referred to as Nederlands. It derives from the Dutch word "neder", a cognate of English "nether" both meaning "low", and "down" (same meaning in both English and Dutch), a reference to the geographical texture of the Dutch homelands, the western and lowest portion of the Northern European plain.[10][11][12]

Classification

• Indo-European languages
  • Germanic
    • West Germanic
      • Low Franconian languages or Dutch → Nederlands
        • (Afrikaans, Dutch-based creole languages)

Dutch is a descendant of several Frankish dialects spoken in the High Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, and to a lesser extent of Frisian, that was spoken by the original inhabitants of Holland. It did not undergo the High German consonant shift (apart from the transition from /θ/ to /d/), and is a Low Franconian language. There was at one time a dialect continuum that blurred the boundary between Dutch and Low Saxon. In some small areas, there are still dialect continua, but they are gradually becoming extinct.

Geographic distribution

Dutch is an official language of the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles. Dutch is also an official language of several international organisations, such as the European Union and the Union of South American Nations.[13] It is used unofficially in the Caribbean Community.

Europe

Netherlands

Dutch is the official and foremost language of the Netherlands, a nation of 16.4 million people, of whom 96 percent say Dutch is their mother tongue.[14] In the province of Friesland and a small part of Groningen, Frisian is also recognised, but is spoken by only some hundreds of thousands of Frisians. In the Netherlands there are many different dialects, but these are often overruled and replaced by the language of the media, school, government (i.e., Standard Dutch). Immigrant languages are Indonesian, Turkish, Moroccan Berber, Papiamento, and Sranan. In the second generation these newcomers often speak Dutch as their mother tongue, but sometimes alongside the language of the parents.

Belgium

Belgium has three official languages, which are, in order from the greatest speaker population to the smallest, Dutch (sometimes colloquially referred to as Flemish), French, and German. An estimated 59% of all Belgians speak Dutch, while French is spoken by 40%.[15] Dutch is the official language of the Flemish Region (where it is the mother tongue of about 97% of the population)[14] and one of the two official languages —along with French— of the Brussels Capital Region. Dutch is not official nor a recognised minority language in the Walloon Region, although on the border with the Flemish Region, there are four municipalities with language facilities for Dutch-speakers. The most important Dutch dialects spoken in Belgium are West Flemish, East Flemish, Brabantian and Limburgish, the latter having a continuum in northeastern Wallonia (as Low Dietsch).