Dutch language
Dutch is spoken in Netherlands, Belgium, Flanders, Brussels
Capital Region,
Walloon municipalities with facilities, Lowgerman area, Suriname, Aruba,
Netherlands Antilles, France (French Flanders), Germany (Low Rhine
Country), Colonial (also native) language and Afrikaans: South Africa,
Namibia, Indonesia.
Total speakers: Native: 31 million: 23 million speakers of Dutch
as first language, plus 4 million with Dutch as second language, and 7
million speakers of Afrikaans as first language, plus 10 million with
Afrikaans as second language.
Dutch is a West Germanic language spoken by around 24 million
people, mainly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname, but also by
smaller groups of speakers in parts of France, Germany and several
former Dutch colonies. It is closely related to other West Germanic
languages (e.g., English, West Frisian and German) and somewhat more
remotely to the North Germanic languages. Dutch is a descendant of Old
Frankish and is the parent language of Afrikaans, one of the official
languages of South Africa and the most widely understood in Namibia.
Dutch and Afrikaans are to a large extent mutually intelligible,
although they have separate spelling standards and dictionaries and have
separate language regulators. Standard Dutch (Standaardnederlands) is
the standard language of the major Dutch-speaking areas and is regulated
by the Nederlandse Taalunie ("Dutch Language Union"). Dutch is also an
official language of the European Union and the Union of South American
Nations.
Dutch grammar also shares many traits with German, but has a less complicated morphology caused by deflexion, which puts it closer to English. Dutch has officially three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, however, according to some interpretations these are reduced to only two, common and neuter, which is similar to the gender systems of most Continental Scandinavian languages.
The consonant system of Dutch did not undergo the High German consonant shift and has more in common with English and the Scandinavian languages. Like most Germanic languages it has a syllable structure that allows fairly complex consonant clusters. Dutch is often noted for the prominent use of velar fricatives (ch and g, pronounced at the back of the mouth), often picked up on as a source of amusement or even satire.
Dutch vocabulary is predominantly Germanic in origin, considerably more so than English. This is to a large part due to the heavy influence of Norman French on English, and to Dutch patterns of word formation, such as the tendency to form long and sometimes very complicated compound nouns, being more similar to those of German and the Scandinavian languages.
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