1 - Dutch: the language, its history, its dialects

Summary

Dutch (ISO 639–3: nld) is a West Germanic Indo-European language spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium (Flanders), as well as in Suriname, on Aruba, and on the Netherlands Antilles, by a total of over 21 million speakers (Lewis 2009).

Dutch is an English-language exonym, a cognate of the archaic endonym duits/diets and also of German deutsch ‘German.’ The current endonym in the Netherlands is Nederlands; in Belgium we also find endonymic Vlaams ‘Flemish’ and exonymic (French) flamand. Next to Dutch and Nederlands (German Niederländisch), a third name one may encounter is Hollands (French hollandais) deriving from the name of the western part of the Netherlands. This name is also used by speakers of Dutch dialects when referring to the Dutch standard language (a testimony to the linguistic and cultural dominance of the western provinces of the Netherlands, Noordholland and Zuidholland).

The two languages most closely related to Dutch are Afrikaans (afr, a seventeenth-century offspring of Dutch spoken in South Africa) and Low German (Low Saxon/Niederdeutsch, nds), the German of North Germany, which has given way to High German (Standard German, deu) as the German standard language. Somewhat further removed, but still quite similar to Dutch, are High German and Frisian (also known as Western Frisian, fry). The two remaining West Germanic languages, Yiddish and English, are historically close to High German and Frisian, respectively, but have developed in such a way that their syntax is now quite different, and hence also quite different from the syntax of Dutch.