Dutch language

Dutch
West Low Franconian, North Low Franconian
Nederlands
Pronunciation[ˈneːdərlɑnts] ⓘ
Native to
Ethnicity
Native speakers
25 million (2021)[1]
Total (L1 plus L2 speakers): 30 million (2021)[2][3]
Early forms
Standard forms
Standard Dutch
Dialects
Signed Dutch (NmG)
Official status
Official language in
Regulated byNederlandse Taalunie
(Dutch Language Union)
Language codes
ISO 639-1nl
ISO 639-2dut (B)
nld (T)
ISO 639-3nld Dutch/Flemish
Glottologmode1257
Linguasphere52-ACB-a
Dutch-speaking world (included are areas of daughter language Afrikaans)
Distribution of the Dutch standard language (dark blue where a majority language, light blue for Brussels, Friesland and Low Franconian dialects in France and Germany) in Europe
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A Dutch speaker

Dutch (endonym: Nederlands [ˈneːdərlɑnts] ⓘ) is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, spoken by about 25 million people as a first language[4] and 5 million as a second language and is the third most spoken Germanic language. In Europe, Dutch is the native language of most of the population of the Netherlands and Flanders (which includes 60% of the population of Belgium).[2][3] Dutch was one of the official languages of South Africa until 1925, when it was replaced by Afrikaans, a separate but partially mutually intelligible daughter language[5] of Dutch.[a] Afrikaans, depending on the definition used, may be considered a sister language,[6] spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia,[b] and evolving from Cape Dutch dialects.

In South America, it is the native language of the majority of the population of Suriname, and spoken as a second or third language in the polyglot Caribbean island countries of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. All these countries have recognised Dutch as one of their official languages, and are involved in one way or another in the Dutch Language Union.[7] The Dutch Caribbean municipalities (St. Eustatius, Saba and Bonaire) have Dutch as one of the official languages.[8] In Asia, Dutch was used in the Dutch East Indies (now mostly Indonesia) by a limited educated elite of around 2% of the total population, including over 1 million indigenous Indonesians,[9] until it was banned in 1957, but the ban was lifted afterwards.[10] About a fifth of the Indonesian language can be traced to Dutch, including many loan words.[10] Indonesia's Civil Code has not been officially translated, and the original Dutch language version dating from colonial times remains the authoritative version.[11] Up to half a million native speakers reside in the United States, Canada and Australia combined,[c] and historical linguistic minorities on the verge of extinction remain in parts of France[12] and Germany.[d]

Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English,[e] and is colloquially said to be "roughly in between" them.[f] Dutch, like English, has not undergone the High German consonant shift, does not use Germanic umlaut as a grammatical marker, has largely abandoned the use of the subjunctive, and has levelled much of its morphology, including most of its case system.[g] Features shared with German, however, include the survival of two to three grammatical genders – albeit with few grammatical consequences[h] – as well as the use of modal particles,[13] final-obstruent devoicing, and (similar) word order.[i] Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic; it incorporates slightly more Romance loans than German, but far fewer than English.[j]

  1. ^ Dutch at Ethnologue (19th ed., 2016) Closed access icon
  2. ^ a b European Commission (2006). "Special Eurobarometer 243: Europeans and their Languages (Survey)" (PDF). Europa. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 21, 2007. Retrieved February 3, 2007. "1% of the EU population claims to speak Dutch well enough in order to have a conversation." (page 153).
  3. ^ a b "Dutch". Languages at Leicester. University of Leicester. Archived from the original on May 2, 2014. Retrieved July 1, 2014.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Feiten was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Wouden, Ton van der (June 27, 2012). Roots of Afrikaans: Selected writings of Hans den Besten. John Benjamins Publishing. p. 258. ISBN 978-90-272-7382-6.
  6. ^ Kirsner, Robert S. (February 15, 2014). Qualitative-Quantitative Analyses of Dutch and Afrikaans Grammar and Lexicon. John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 1. ISBN 978-90-272-7104-4.
  7. ^ "Taalunie". taalunie.org (in Dutch). Archived from the original on January 5, 2024. Retrieved April 23, 2024.
  8. ^ Netherlands, Statistics (April 4, 2019). "Caribbean Netherlands; Spoken languages and main language, characteristics". Statistics Netherlands. Archived from the original on October 19, 2023. Retrieved April 24, 2024.
  9. ^ Groeneboer, K (1993) Weg tot het westen. Het Nederlands voor Indie 1600–1950. Publisher: KITLEV, Leiden.[1]
  10. ^ a b Maier 2005.
  11. ^ Lindsey, Tim; Butt, Simon (September 6, 2018). Indonesian Law. Oxford University Press. p. 307. ISBN 978-0-19-166556-1.
  12. ^ Willemyns, Roland (2002). "Language Contact at the Romance-Germanic Language Border". In Jeanine Treffers-Daller, Roland Willemyns (ed.). Journal of multilingual and multicultural development. Multilingual Matters. p. 4. ISBN 1853596272. Archived from the original on March 24, 2023. Retrieved March 19, 2023.
  13. ^ "A Guide to Dutch – 10 facts about the Dutch language". Languages. BBC. 2014. Archived from the original on December 2, 2019. Retrieved December 20, 2019.


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