Dutch language
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 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 (or 60% of the population of Belgium).[2][3] In South America, it is the native language of the majority of the population of Suriname, and spoken as a second 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.[5] Dutch Caribbean municipalities (St. Eustatius, Saba and Bonaire) have Dutch as one of the official languages too.[6] Up to half a million native speakers reside in the United States, Canada and Australia combined,[a] and historical linguistic minorities on the verge of extinction remain in parts of France and[7] Germany.[b]
Dutch
Dutch was one of the official languages of South Africa, until 1925, when it was replaced by Afrikaans, a separate but mutually intelligible daughter language[8] or - depending the used definition - sister language[9] of Dutch.[c] It is spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia,[d] evolving from Cape Dutch dialects. Dutch was used in Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) by a limited educated elite of around 2% of the total population, including over 1million indigenous Indonesians,[10] until it was banned in 1957.[11] About a fifth of the Indonesian language can be traced to Dutch including many loan words,[12] and Indonesia's Civil Code has not been officially translated and the original Dutch language version remains the authoritative version.[13]
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 include the survival of two to three grammatical genders – albeit with few grammatical consequences[h] – as well as the use of modal particles,[14] final-obstruent devoicing, and a similar word order.[i] Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic; it incorporates slightly more Romance loans than German but far fewer than English.[j]
Dutch belongs to its own West Germanic sub-group, the Low Franconian languages, paired with its sister language Limburgish or East Low Franconian. Its closest relative is the mutually intelligible daughter language Afrikaans. Other West Germanic languages related to Dutch are German, English and the un-standardised languages Low German and Yiddish.
Dutch stands out in combining some Ingvaeonic characteristics (occurring consistently in English and Frisian and reduced in intensity from west to east over the continental West Germanic plane) with dominant Istvaeonic characteristics, some of which are also incorporated in German. Unlike German, Dutch (apart from Limburgish) has not been influenced at all by the south to north movement of the High German consonant shift and had some changes of its own.[k] The cumulation of these changes resulted over time in separate, but related standard languages with various degrees of similarities and differences between them. For a comparison between the West Germanic languages, see the sections Morphology, Grammar and Vocabulary.
Vocabulary[edit]
Dutch vocabulary is predominantly Germanic in origin, with loanwords accounting for 20%.[134] The main foreign influence on Dutch vocabulary since the 12th century and culminating in the French period has been French and (northern) Oïl languages, accounting for an estimated 6.8% of all words, or more than a third of all loanwords. Latin, which was spoken in the southern Low Countries for centuries and then played a major role as the language of science and religion, follows with 6.1%. High German and Low German were influential until the mid-20th century and account for 2.7%, but they are mostly unrecognisable since many have been "Dutchified": German Fremdling → Dutch vreemdeling. Dutch has borrowed words from English since the mid-19th century, as a consequence of the increasing power and influence of Britain and the United States. English loanwords are about 1.5%, but continue to increase.[135] Many English loanwords become less visible over time as they are either gradually replaced by calques (skyscraper became Dutch wolkenkrabber) or neologisms (bucket list became loodjeslijst). Conversely, Dutch contributed many loanwords to English, accounting for 1.3% of its lexicon.[136]
The main Dutch dictionary is the Van Dale groot woordenboek der Nederlandse taal, which contains some 268,826 headwords.[137] In the field of linguistics, the 45,000-page Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal is also widely used. That scholarly endeavour took 147 years to complete and contains all recorded Dutch words from the Early Middle Ages onward.