Dutch language

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Dutch (Nederlands (help·info)), sometimes referred to as Netherlandic in English, is a Low Germanic language spoken by around 22 million people, mainly in the Netherlands and Belgium (2005).

History

The West Germanic dialects can be divided according to tribe (Frisian, Saxon, Franconian, Bavarian and Swabian), and according to the extent of their participation in the High German consonant shift (Low Germanic against High Germanic). The present Dutch standard language is largely based on Low Franconian dialects spoken in the Low Countries deriving from Old Frankish, the language of the Franks. Dutch left the prehistoric phase in 476-496 when the Salic Law was written, containing a great number of Low Franconian words, and even a few sentences.

An early Dutch recorded writing is: "Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan, hinase hic enda tu, wat unbidan we nu" ("All birds have started making nests, except me and you, what are we waiting for"), dating around the year 1100, written by a Flemish monk in a convent in Rochester, England. For a long time this sentence was considered to be the earliest recorded Dutch, but since its discovery even older fragments were found, such as "Visc flot aftar themo uuatare" ("A fish was swimming in the water") and "Gelobistu in got alamehtigan fadaer" ("Do you believe in God the almighty father"). The latter fragment was written as early as 900. Professor Luc De Grauwe from Ghent University disputes the language of these sequences of text, and actually believes them to be Old English, so there is still some controversy surrounding them. Low Franconian bits of text however have been dated back to the Salic Law (476-496)

A process of standardization started in the Middle ages, especially under the influence of the Burgundian Ducal Court in Dijon (Brussels after 1477). The dialects of Flanders and Brabant were the most influential around this time. The process of standardization became much stronger in the 16th century, mainly based on the urban dialect of Antwerp. In 1585 Antwerp fell to the Spanish army: many fled to Holland, strongly influencing the urban dialects of that province. In 1637 a further important step was made towards a unified language, when the first major Dutch Bible translation was created that people from all over the United Provinces could understand. It used elements from various (even Low Saxon) dialects, but was mostly based on the urban dialects from Holland.

Etymology of the word "Dutch"

The word Dutch comes from the old Germanic word *þiudiskaz,later transliterated by the Romans into Latin as theodisk, meaning 'of the people', 'vernacular' as opposed to official, i.e. Latin or later French. Theodisk in modern German has become Deutsch and in Dutch has become the two forms: Duits, meaning German, and Diets meaning something closer to Dutch but no longer in general use (see the Diets article). Theodisk survives as tedesco ("German") in modern Italian.

The English word Dutch has also changed with time. It was only in the early 1600s, with growing cultural contacts and the rise of an independent country, that the modern meaning arose, i.e., 'designating the people of the Netherlands or their language'. Prior to this, the meaning was more general and could refer to any Germanic-speaking area or the languages there (including the current Germany, Austria, and Switzerland as well as the Netherlands). For example:

• William Caxton (c.1422-1491) wrote in his Prologue to his Aeneids in 1490 that an old English text was more like to Dutche than English. In his notes, Professor W.F. Bolton makes clear that this word means German in general rather than Dutch.

• in four books containing the Chronography and History of the whole world, Vol. II (London, 1677: 154) contains "...the Dutch call Leibnitz," adding that Dutch is spoken in the parts of Hungary adjoining to Germany.

• To this day, descendants of German settlers in southeastern Pennsylvania are known as the "Pennsylvania Dutch", especially those who are members of the plain sects. (Those who are not members of the plain sects often identify themselves as being Pennsylvania German).

Classification and related languages

Dutch is a Germanic language, and within this family it is a West Germanic language. Since it did not experience the High German consonant shift (apart from þ→d), it is a Low Germanic language, and it is most closely related to the Low German dialects of German. There was in fact a dialect continuum which blurred any clear boundary between Dutch and Low German, in some minute areas there are still tiny dialect continuums but they continue to go extinct. The Low Franconian rural dialects of the Lower Rhine area in Germany are much closer related to Dutch than to standard German. Dividing the West Germanic languages into low and high in this way, however, obscures the fact that modern Dutch is more closely related to modern standard (high) German than to modern English.

Dutch is grammatically similar to German, for example in syntax and verb morphology. (For a comparison of verb morphology in English, Dutch and German, see Germanic weak verb and West Germanic strong verb.) Compare, for example:

De kleinste kameleon is maar (slechts) 2 cm groot, de grootste kan wel 80 cm worden. (Dutch)

Das kleinste Chamäleon ist nur 2 cm groß, das größte kann auch 80 cm erreichen. (German)

Some less common phrasings and word choices have closer cognates in German:

Der kleinste Chamäleon ist nur (schlechthin) 2 cm groß, der größte kann gut 80 cm werden. (less common German)

(Which translates as "The smallest chameleon is only 2 cm big, the biggest can well reach 80 cm.")

Further examples for the close vicinity of Dutch and German:

Op de berg staat een klein huisje (Dutch)

Auf dem Berg steht ein kleines Häuschen (German)

(in English: "There's a small house on the mountain". Literally: "On the mountain stands a small house")

In de stad leven veel mensen (Dutch)

In der Stadt wohnen viele Menschen (German)

(in English: "A lot of people live in the town". Literally: "In the city live many people.")

Dutch speakers are generally able to read German to a considerable degree, and German speakers (who can read English) can generally read Dutch to some extent. The colloquial forms, on the other hand, can be very similar and can be understood by the speaker of a dialect belonging to the other language, depending on location. In some places, forms of German and Dutch are spoken almost interchangeably.

Dutch still has grammatical cases, but these are now limited mostly to pronouns and set phrases. Technically, Dutch still has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Apart from in more formal language, the old masculine and feminine have fallen together to form the common gender (de), whilst the neuter (het) remains distinct as before. The inflectional grammar of Dutch, for instance in adjective and noun endings, has been greatly simplified in a manner more akin to English than German.

Native Dutch vocabulary (as opposed to loan words) is of common West Germanic stock, and in terms of sound shifts it can be imagined as occupying a position somewhere between English and German.

Note semantic shifts: 1. 'garden'; 2. 'fence'; 3. 'village'

Even when written Dutch looks similar to German, however, the pronunciation may be markedly different. This is true especially of the diphthongs and of the letter <g>, which is pronounced as a velar continuant similar to the <ch> in Swiss German. The rhotic pronunciation of <r> causes some English-speakers to believe Dutch sounds similar to a Northern English accent; this is the reason for Bill Bryson's famous remark that when one hears Dutch one feels one ought to be able to understand it. Dutch pronunciation is, however, difficult to master for Anglophones, many of its diphthongs and gutturals being the greatest obstacles. Germans seem to have an advantage with the Dutch grammar, but suffer the same difficulties as the English when dealing with pronunciation. An exception on this all are the North Germans, who can read or understand Dutch after a relatively short period of acclimatisation, speaking however remaining a challenge. Dutch is generally not on the curriculum of German schools, except in some border cities, such as Aachen and Oldenburg.

Geographic distribution

Dutch is spoken by practically all inhabitants of the Netherlands and Flanders, the northern half of Belgium. It is also spoken in the bilingual region of Brussels, together with French and other languages. In the northernmost part of France, the Dunkirk arrondissement in the Nord département, Dutch is still spoken as a minority language, often referred to by the dialect name Vlaams (Flemish). On the Caribbean islands of Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles, Dutch is used but less so than Papiamento (Aruba, Curaçao, Bonaire) and English (Sint Maarten, Sint Eustatius, Saba). Dutch is spoken as a mother tongue by about 60% of the population in Suriname, most of them being bilingual with Sranan Tongo and other ethnic languages (2005, Nederlandse Taalunie: [2], in Dutch). There are also some speakers of Dutch in Indonesia and in countries with a lot of Dutch migrants, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. In South Africa and Namibia a language related to Dutch called Afrikaans is spoken.

Official status

Dutch is an official language of the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, Aruba, and the Netherlands Antilles. The Dutch, Flemish and Surinamese governments coordinate their language activities in the Nederlandse Taalunie ('Dutch Language Union'). Dutch was an official language in South Africa up until 1961, having fallen into disuse since Afrikaans became an official language in 1925. Of the inhabitants of New Zealand, 0.7% say their home language is Dutch (see article on New Zealand). The number of people coming from the Netherlands, though, is considerably higher but from the second generation on most people changed their language in favour of English.

Standaardnederlands or Algemeen Nederlands ('Common Dutch', abbreviated to AN) is the standard language as taught in schools and used by authorities in the Netherlands, Flanders, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. The Dutch Language Union defines what is AN and what is not, for example in terms of orthography. Algemeen Nederlands replaced the older name Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands ('Common Civilized Dutch', abbreviated to ABN) when it was no longer considered politically correct, because it implied that people who didn't speak ABN were not civilized.

Dialects

In Flanders, there are roughly four dialect groups: West Flemish, East Flemish, Brabantian and Limburgish. They have all incorporated French loanwords in everyday language. An example is fourchette in various forms (originally a French word meaning fork), instead of vork. Brussels, especially, is heavily influenced by French because roughly 85% of the inhabitants of Brussels speak French. The Limburgish in Belgium is closely related to Dutch Limburgish. An oddity of West Flemings (and to a lesser extent, East Flemings) is that, when they speak AN, their pronunciation of the "soft g" sound (the voiced velar fricative) is almost identical to that of the "h" sound (the voiced glottal fricative), thus, the words held (hero) and geld (money) sound nearly the same. When they speak their local dialect, however, their "g" is almost the "h" of the Algemeen Nederlands, and they do not pronounce the "h". Some Flemish dialects are so distinct that they might be considered as separate language variants, although the strong significance of language in Belgian politics would prevent the government from doing so. West Flemish in particular has sometimes been considered as such. Dialect borders of these dialects do not correspond to present political boundaries, but reflect older, medieval divisions. The Brabantian dialect group, for instance, also extends to much of the south of the Netherlands, and so does Limburgish. West-Flemish is also spoken in part of the Dutch province of Zeeland, and even in a small part near Dunkirk, France, bordering on Belgium.

The Netherlands also have different dialect regions. In the east there is an extensive Low German dialect area: the provinces of Groningen (Gronings), Drenthe and Overijssel are almost exclusively Low Saxon. Zuid-Gelders is a dialect also spoken in the German land of North Rhine-Westphalia. Brabantian (Noord-Brabant) fades into the dialects spoken in the adjoining provinces of Belgium. Same thing applies to Limburgish (Limburg (Netherlands)), but this variant also has the status of official Minority Language in the Netherlands (but not in Belgium). It receives protection by chapter 2 of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Limburgish is Low Franconian, as is Dutch, but is so much more distant (it has been influenced by the Rhinelandic dialects like the Cologne dialect: Kölsch Platt, and has had a very different development since the late Middle Ages) that it is less and less classified as being Dutch.

Zealandic of most of Zeeland is a transitional regional language between West Flemish and Hollandic, with the exception of the eastern part of Zealandic Flanders where East Flemish is spoken. In Holland proper, Hollandic is spoken, though the original forms of this dialect, heavily influenced by a Frisian substratum, are now relatively rare; the urban dialects of the Randstad, which are Hollandic dialects, do not diverge from standard Dutch very much, but there is a clear difference between the city dialects of Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam or Utrecht.

In some rural Hollandic areas more authentic Hollandic dialects are still being used, especially north of Amsterdam. Limburgish and Low German have been elevated by the Netherlands (and by Germany) to the legal status of streektaal (regional language) according to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which causes some native speakers to consider them separate languages. Some dialects are unintelligible to some speakers of Hollandic.

Dutch dialects are not spoken as often as they used to be. Nowadays in The Netherlands only older people speak these dialects in the smaller villages, with the exception of the Low Saxon and Limburgish streektalen, which are actively promoted by some provinces and still in common use. Most towns and cities stick to standard Dutch - although many cities have their own city dialect, which continues to prosper. In Belgium dialects are very much alive however; many senior citizens there are unable to speak standard Dutch. In both the Netherlands and Belgium, many larger cities also have several distinct smaller dialects.

By many native speakers of Dutch, both in Belgium and the Netherlands, Afrikaans and Frisian are often assumed to be very deviant dialects of Dutch. In fact, they are two different languages, Afrikaans having evolved mainly from Dutch. There is no dialect continuum between the Frisian and adjoining Low Saxon. A Frisian standard language has been developed.

Until the early 20th century, variants of Dutch were still spoken by some descendants of Dutch colonies in the United States. New Jersey in particular had an active Dutch community with a highly divergent dialect that was spoken as recently as the 1950s. See Jersey Dutch for more on this dialect.

Accents

In addition to the many dialects of the Dutch language many provinces and larger cities have their own accents, which sometimes are also called dialects. Ethnic minority communities tend to have varying accents: for example many people from the Dutch Antilles or Suriname speak with a "Surinaams" accent, and the Dutch-Moroccan and Dutch-Turkish youth have also developed their own accents, which in some cases are enhanced by a debased Dutch slang with Arabic or Turkish words thrown in, which serves in making their speech nearly unintelligible to some older speakers of standard Dutch.

Derived languages

The language Afrikaans is derived from Dutch. Its one of the 11 languages of South Africa and is the mother tongue of about 15% of its population and spoken or understood by very many more. Afrikaans originates from modern Dutch (1500 - present).

Before Great Britain took over South Africa from the Netherlands in 1814, the Afrikaans language (which wasn't called or considered Afrikaans at that time) was exposed to a steady stream of Dutch language influence, and the two languages were therefore almost identical. The differentiation and major changes from Dutch started when the Dutch settlers moved deep inland (Trek Boers). In addition, when Great Britain seized South Africa, the Dutch language spoken in South Africa was practically cut off from other Dutch-speaking areas, allowing the language to differentiate and evolve further. In 1922 the Afrikaans language was recognized as one of South Africa's official languages, alongside Dutch and English. Dutch was formally derecognised in South Africa only in 1984 (since 1961 it had merited only a mention in the legislation). By that time however it had no longer been in everyday official use for a long time.

The distinction of Afrikaans from the Dutch language was perhaps briefly in danger just after the Second World War when a great number of Dutch immigrants chose South Africa as their new homeland. However, the Afrikaans language survived the new influx of Dutch language which presented the danger of turning Afrikaans into a mixed language. Practically all of the Dutch immigrants and their descendants now speak Afrikaans instead of Dutch, be it (in the case of the Dutch-born parents) with a slight accent. A great deal of mutual intelligibility still exists.

Someone who is able to speak Dutch usually can read and understand Afrikaans (being native to a Hollandic, Zealandic, Flemish or Brabantic dialect helps a lot though). There are also Dutch-based creole languages.

Popular misconceptions about Dutch

The varieties of Dutch spoken in Belgium are called Flemish

Dutch is the language of government, education, and, to varying extents, daily life in Flanders, the Northern part of Belgium. The Belgian varieties of Dutch, the Flemish dialects, are colloquially referred to as a group as "Flemish", but "Flemish" and Dutch are the same language. The word Flemish is also used to refer to other aspects of Flanders. The use of the word Flemish (Vlaams) to describe the language of government and education in Flanders, despite its lack of correctness, is fairly common even in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Flemish (Vlaams in Dutch) is the collective term often used for the Dutch dialects spoken in Belgium. It can also be used as an adjective to describe things related to Flanders other than its official language. It is sometimes used to describe standard Dutch as spoken by Belgians, but that usage is considered by many Belgians to be incorrect.

There is no officially recognized language called Flemish, and for government and education purposes, both the Dutch and Belgian governments adhere to the standard Dutch (Algemeen Nederlands) defined by the Taalunie (Language union).

The actual differences between the spoken language of Dutch and Belgian speakers, are comparable to, although larger than, the differences between American and British English. Most of these differences are recognized by the Taalunie and major dictionaries as being interchangeably valid, although certain dictionaries and grammars may mark them as being more prevalent in one region or the other.

Dutch is a German dialect

Dutch simply cannot be called a German dialect, on whatever level of analysis we choose to consider the matter. The Dutch standard language can, by definition, not be a dialect of another standard language, in this case Standard German. The dialect group from which Dutch is largely derived, Low Franconian, belongs to the whole of continental West Germanic dialects. This whole is sometimes imprecisely indicated with the word "German", but it might as well be called "Dutch". Indeed the Low Franconian dialects and languages are morphologically closer to the original form of Western Germanic than the High German from which standard German is derived. No intrinsic quality of whole of the component dialects favours one standard over the other: both were rivals and historical contingency decided the range of their use. The state border does not reflect dialectal subdivisions. Only now that the dialect continuum of continental West Germanic has been broken by the 19th century introduction of mass education, the respective ranges have been fixed; in the 18th century standard Dutch was still used as the normal written standard in the Lower Rhine, the county of Bentheim and East Frisia, now all part of Germany.

Dutch is the most closely-related language to English

Dutch does have a relatively close genetic relationship to the descendants of Middle English (such as Modern English and Scots), since both belong to the West Germanic language family and both lack most or all of the High German consonant shift that characterizes the descendants of Middle High German (such as Modern German and Yiddish).

Frisian, however, is even more closely related to the Middle-English descendants than Dutch, sharing a common reconstructed ancestor language referred to as Anglo-Frisian or, sometimes, Ingvaeonic.

Pennsylvania Dutch as a form of Dutch

Pennsylvania Dutch, called Deitsch by its speakers, is not a form of Dutch. The word Dutch has historically been used for all speakers of continental West Germanic languages, including, the Dutch, Flemish, Austrians, Germans, and the germanophone Swiss. The use of Dutch exclusively for the language of Belgium, or for the inhabitants of the Netherlands or some of its former colonies, is relatively recent. The Pennsylvania Dutch language itself is closely related to High German especially its Franconian dialects spoken in the southwest of Germany.

Writing system

Dutch is written using the Latin alphabet, see Dutch alphabet. One of the clues to recognise that a piece of text is written in Dutch, is the occurrence of many doubled letters. This happens both to vowels and consonants. One cause is the many compound words where the same letter ends one part and begins the next part. Another cause is formed by spelling devices used to distinguish the many more vowel sounds in the Dutch language, than there are vowel letters in the Latin alphabet (see Dutch orthography). A prime example is the word voorraaddoos (supply box).

The diaeresis is used to mark vowels that are pronounced separately, which can also be called trema. In the most recent spelling reform, a hyphen has replaced the trema in compound words (i.e. if the vowels originate from separate words, not from prefixes or suffixes), e.g. zeeëend (seaduck) is now spelled zee-eend.

The acute accent (accent aigu) occurs mainly on loanwords like café, but can also be used for emphasis or to differentiate between two forms. Its most common use is to differentiate between the indefinite article 'een' (a, an) and the numeral 'één' (one). The grave accent (accent grave) is used to clarify pronunciation ('hè' (what?, what the ...?), 'bèta') and in loanwords ('caissière' (cashier), 'après-ski'). In the recent spelling reform, the accent grave was dropped as stress sign on short vowels in favour of the accent aigu (e.g. 'wèl' was changed to 'wél'). Other diacritical marks such as the circumflex only occur on a few words, most of them loanwords from French.

The most important dictionary of the modern Dutch language is the Van Dale groot woordenboek der Nederlandse taal[3], more commonly referred to as the Dikke van Dale ("dik" is Dutch for "fat" or "thick"), or as linguists nicknamed it: De Vandaal (the vandal). However, it is dwarfed by the "Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal", a scholarly endeavour that took 147 years from initial idea to first edition, resulting in over 45,000 pages.

The semi-official spelling is given by the Woordenlijst Nederlandse taal, more commonly known as "het groene boekje" (i.e. "the green booklet", because of its colour.)

Dutch as a foreign language

The number of non native speakers of Dutch who voluntarily learn the language is small. This is partly because Dutch is not geographically widespread and because in its home countries The Netherlands and Belgium most of the population is proficient in other European languages. In The Netherlands German is spoken with a high level of proficiency (especially in the regions bordering Germany) and the language is part of the core curriculum in schools for 2-5 years. In Belgium, German is less widely spoken, and not always required, but it still spoken by a considerable number of people.

French is also taught for 3-6 years in the Netherlands, but it is not as widely spoken. In Flanders (Belgium) French is required from age 10 to 18 and is very widely spoken, not so strange when one considers that the southern half of Belgium, Wallonia, is Francophone. But on the other hand, Walloons are far less proficient in Dutch.

In both Flanders and The Netherlands, English is taught in schools from a young age - occasionally from age 11 or 12, but typically until the completion of secondary education. Most universities in the two countries, recognising the importance of the English language in the modern world, continue to teach the language to those students who need to improve their skills. As a result English is spoken throughout The Netherlands and Belgium with members of the younger generation sometimes being fluent or near fluent speakers. The majority of the population of both countries speak some English, some in an advanced form of Globish.

Some non native residents of The Netherlands or Belgium have never learnt to speak Dutch - perhaps put off by its guttural sound or by a perception of its difficulties. Moreover, and especially in Belgium, the difference between the standard language and the language people speak (their local dialect or, more often, a version of the standard language heavily influenced by it) can be very important and cause difficulties. There is also the problem that because the native Dutch speakers themselves are often so linguistically proficient they will try and help a struggling Dutch learner by addressing them in their own language!

The Dutch often make fun of their own language — for example Tom Meyer, a radio commentator, used to say on air that "Dutch isn't a language; it's a disease of the throat." Pronunciation can be a challenge as many of the Dutch vowel sounds are difficult for non native speakers. Diphthongs such as the "ui" sound in such words as "huis" (house) and "muis" (mouse), the "eu" in sleutel (key), and the "ij" sound in words like "fijn" (fine) or "wijn" (wine) present difficulties and even though some of these words are superficially like their English equivalents the correct sound is very different.

Its cohesiveness sometimes also produces words that might baffle speakers of other languages due to the high amount of consecutive consonants, such as the word "angstschreeuw" (help·info) (scream in fear), which has grand total of eight in a row (ngstschr). (Is has to be noted though that the impression a written word makes is something different from the "same" word in spoken form - e.g. "angstschreeuw" from this point of view features only the 6 consonants ng-s-t-s-ch-r which may be further reduced in actual everyday pronouncation - e.g. "ch" and "r" will usually blend into one sound.)

Native speakers of German usually have the biggest advantage of all people when learning Dutch from a grammar and vocabulary point of view but almost always struggle with the pronunciation. However those residents or visitors who do learn some Dutch will be rewarded, not only by the extra fillip this gives to their understanding of Dutch history and culture, but also because it will enable them to converse with people in areas away from the big cities where other languages are less commonly spoken and experience other Dutch culture.

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