40 Facts About Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language.

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 holds an official status, as it does in the Caribbean island countries of Aruba, Curacao and Sint Maarten, which are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Dutch language is one of the closest relatives of both German and English and is colloquially said to be "roughly in between" them.

Dutch language vocabulary is mostly Germanic; it incorporates slightly more Romance loans than German but far fewer than English.

Old Dutch language can be discerned more or less around the same time as Old English, Old High German, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon.

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The early form of Dutch language was a set of Franconian dialects spoken by the Salian Franks in the 5th century.

The division into Old, Middle and Modern Dutch language is mostly conventional, since the transition between them was very gradual.

The development of the Dutch language is illustrated by the following sentence in Old, Middle and Modern Dutch:.

Dutch language is part of the West Germanic group, which includes English, Scots, Frisian, Low German and High German.

Hardly influenced by either development, Old Dutch probably remained relatively close to the original language of the Franks.

However, the Dutch language did experience developments of its own, such as very early final-obstruent devoicing.

The year 1150 is often cited as the time of the discontinuity, but it actually marks a time of profuse Dutch language writing; during this period a rich Medieval Dutch language literature developed.

The most notable difference between Old and Middle Dutch language is in a feature of speech known as vowel reduction.

Since standardisation is a lengthy process, Dutch-speaking Belgium associated itself with the standard language that had already developed in the Netherlands over the centuries.

Dutch language stands out in combining some Ingvaeonic characteristics with dominant Istvaeonic characteristics, some of which are incorporated in German.

Unlike German, Dutch language 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.

Dutch dialects are primarily the dialects that are both related with the Dutch language and are spoken in the same language area as the Dutch standard language.

Also, some Dutch dialects are more remote from the Dutch standard language than some varieties of a regional language are.

The urban dialects of the Randstad, which are Hollandic dialects, do not diverge from standard Dutch language very much, but there is a clear difference between the city dialects of Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht.

At an academic level, Dutch language is taught in about 175 universities in 40 countries.

In Europe, Dutch is the majority language in the Netherlands and Belgium as well as a minority language in Germany and northern France's French Flanders.

Dutch is a monocentric language, at least what concerns its written form, with all speakers using the same standard form based on a Dutch orthography defined in the so-called "Green Booklet" authoritative dictionary and employing the Latin alphabet when writing; however, pronunciation varies between dialects.

Indeed, in stark contrast to its written uniformity, Dutch language lacks a unique prestige dialect and has a large dialectal continuum consisting of 28 main dialects, which can themselves be further divided into at least 600 distinguishable varieties.

Unlike other European nations, the Dutch chose not to follow a policy of language expansion amongst the indigenous peoples of their colonies.

Nevertheless, the Dutch language government remained reluctant to teach Dutch language on a large scale for fear of destabilising the colony.

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Yet the Indonesian language inherited many words from Dutch: words for everyday life as well as scientific and technological terms.

Dutch language-speaking immigrant communities can be found in Australia and New Zealand.

Dutch language is the obligatory medium of instruction in schools in Suriname, even for non-native speakers.

Pennsylvania Dutch language is not a member of the set of Dutch language dialects and is less misleadingly called Pennsylvania German.

European Dutch remained the literary language until the start of the 1920s, when under pressure of Afrikaner nationalism the local "African" Dutch was preferred over the written, European-based standard.

Dutch language is grammatically similar to German, such as in syntax and verb morphology .

Standard Dutch language uses three genders across natural and grammatical genders but for most non-Belgian speakers, masculine and feminine have merged to form the common gender .

When grouped according to their conjugational class, Dutch language has four main verb types: weak verbs, strong verbs, irregular verbs and mixed verbs.

Dutch language has many 'half strong verbs': these have a weak past tense and a strong participle or a strong past tense and a weak participle.

Dutch language has a range of fixed expressions that make use of the genitive articles, which can be abbreviated using apostrophes.

Unlike English, where newer compounds or combinations of longer nouns are often written in open form with separating spaces, Dutch either uses the closed form without spaces or inserts a hyphen .

Notwithstanding official spelling rules, some Dutch language-speaking people, like some Scandinavians and German speakers, nowadays tend to write the parts of a compound separately, a practice sometimes dubbed de Engelse ziekte .

Dutch language 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.

Conversely, Dutch language contributed many loanwords to English, accounting for 1.

Dutch language uses one additional character beyond the standard alphabet, the digraph IJ.