Dutch language

Dutch
Nederlands
Pronunciation[ˈneːdərlɑnts]
Native to
Ethnicity
Native speakers
25 million (2021)[1]
Total (L1 plus L2 speakers): 30 million (2021)[2][3]
Early forms
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
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.
A Dutch speaker

Dutch (endonym: Nederlands [ˈneːdərlɑnts] ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language[4] and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives English and German. Afrikaans is a separate but mutually intelligible sister language of modern Dutch, and a daughter language[a] of an earlier form of Dutch. It is spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia,[b] evolving from the Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa. The dialects used in Belgium (including Flemish) and in Suriname, meanwhile, are all guided by the Dutch Language Union.

In Europe, most of the population of the Netherlands (as one of the official languages, although not legally enshrined in the constitution)[c] and about 60% of the population of Belgium (as one of three official languages) speak Dutch.[2][3][8][9] Outside the Low Countries, Dutch is the native language of the majority of the population of the South American country of Suriname, a former Dutch colony, where it also holds an official status, as it does in the Caribbean island countries of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, which are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Up to half a million native speakers reside in the United States, Canada and Australia combined,[d] and historical linguistic minorities on the verge of extinction remain in parts of France,[10] Germany and Indonesia.[e]

Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English[f] and is colloquially said to be "roughly in between" them.[g] 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.[h] Features shared with German include the survival of two to three grammatical genders – albeit with few grammatical consequences[i] – as well as the use of modal particles,[11] final-obstruent devoicing, and a similar word order.[j] Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic; it incorporates slightly more Romance loans than German but far fewer than English.[k]

  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. ^ Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties (January 11, 2016). "Welke erkende talen heeft Nederland? - Rijksoverheid.nl". www.rijksoverheid.nl (in Dutch). Retrieved September 12, 2023.[permanent dead link]
  6. ^ DBNL. "Grondwet 'De officiële taal van Nederland is het Nederlands' De taalartikelen in de grondwetten van de EU-landen Els Ruijsendaal Dick Wortel , Neerlandia/Nederlands van Nu. Jaargang 111". DBNL (in Dutch). Retrieved September 12, 2023.
  7. ^ a b c "Nederlandse taal in de Grondwet" [Dutch language in the Constitution]. denederlandsegrondwet.nl (in Dutch). Montesquieu Instituut. 2018. Retrieved March 21, 2023.
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference taalgebied was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ "Netherlandic language". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on February 1, 2014. Retrieved June 11, 2014.
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ "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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