Dutch language (Nederlands): overview, distribution, history and characteristics

Dutch as official and mother tongue

Currently, about 21 million people speak a variant of Dutch. In Europe, Dutch is the official language of Belgium and the Netherlands. In addition, about 80,000 inhabitants of the French department of Nord speak a Dutch dialect.

The Netherlands and Belgium created the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie) on 9 September 1980. This is intended to ensure that a common spelling and grammar continues to exist and that the language is maintained. Of course, there are regional peculiarities between the Dutch and Belgian variants of the standard language.

Netherlands

In the Netherlands, about seventeen million people speak Dutch as a first or second language.

The Basic Law of the Netherlands does not contain any provisions on the use of languages in the Netherlands and the text does not mention Dutch. In 1815, King William I did make Dutch the only official language of the entire realm by decree. In 1829 this decree was withdrawn and a year later Dutch became the official language for the provinces of North Brabant, Gelderland, Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Overijssel, Groningen and Drenthe, while French was admitted as the official language for the provinces of Limburg, East and West Flanders and Antwerp and the administrative districts of Leuven and Brussels. After the Belgian Revolution, Dutch also became the official language in the Dutch part of the province of Limburg. It was not until 1995 that the status of Dutch as an official language was legally confirmed by an amendment to the General Administrative Law:

Belgium

In Belgium, more than half of the population (over five million) is Dutch-speaking.

Language legislation regulates the use of the three official national languages, Dutch, French and German, in Belgian public life. While Article 30 of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Belgium provides for the free use of languages by private individuals, the public services of the State must observe a number of rules concerning the use of languages within the services as well as between the different services and towards the citizen. In particular, language laws are addressed to legislators, administrations, the courts, the armed forces and education staff in Belgium.

Belgian language legislation is one of the consequences of the Flemish-Walloon conflict that has arisen since the beginnings of the Flemish Movement in the mid-19th century between the Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north of Belgium and the French-speaking Walloons in the south. The aim of these laws was a gradual equality of the Dutch and French languages.

Suriname

Dutch is the official language of the Republic of Suriname. Suriname has about 400,000 Dutch-speaking inhabitants and about 100,000 Surinamese speak Dutch as a second language. The Dutch spoken in Suriname can be considered a distinct variety of Dutch, as it has been influenced in vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar by the other languages spoken in Suriname, especially Sranan Tongo.

Since 12 December 2003, Suriname has also been a member of the Nederlandse Taalunie, created in 1980 by the Netherlands and Belgium.

West Indies

In the special Caribbean municipalities of the Netherlands Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba and the autonomous countries of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, Dutch is the official language. However, only a minority of the inhabitants speak Dutch as their mother tongue. On Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, Dutch is considered the lingua franca for business and formal purposes, while on Saba, Sint Eustasius and Sint Maarten, Dutch is primarily a language of instruction and a second language for the population.

Dutch as a former official language

South Africa and South West Africa

Between 1910 and 1983, Dutch was one of the official languages of the Union of South Africa and the Republic of South Africa, and from 1915 also of South West Africa (now Namibia), where South African law applied. In 1961, it was established by law that the terms "Dutch" and "Afrikaans" were to be considered synonyms for the purposes of the South African Constitution. Since 1994, Afrikaans has been one of the eleven official languages of South Africa, and since independence in 1990, English has been the only official language of Namibia.

Dutch India

In sharp contrast to the language policy in Suriname and the Caribbean, there was no attempt by the colonial government to establish Dutch as a cultural language in what is now Indonesia: the lower echelons of Dutch colonial officials spoke Malay to local rulers and the general population. Dutch was strongly identified with the European elite and Indo-Europeans (descendants of Dutch and local women) and was not taught in colonial schools to the upper echelons of the local population until the late 19th century. For example, Achmed Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia and a former student at one of these state schools, spoke fluent Dutch. In 1949, Dutch did not become an official language of the new Republic of Indonesia, but remained the official language in West Papua until 1963.

Dutch language areas without legal status

Outside Belgium and the Netherlands, there are neighbouring areas where Dutch dialects are traditionally spoken as a mother tongue, although the dialects are not covered by the standard Dutch language.

Germany

The original dialects of the German Lower Rhine, the western Ruhr area, as well as parts of the Bergisches Land are, from a linguistic typological point of view, Low Franconian or Dutch. In particular, the Kleverland dialects spoken in Germany are considered Dutch dialects and were overridden by the standard Dutch language until the 19th century.

In the course of the 19th century, however, the Prussian government adopted a rigid, active language policy, the aim of which was the complete displacement of Dutch and the establishment of German as the sole standard and written language. Nevertheless, Dutch continued to be spoken and taught secretly in churches in the Klev area until the last decades of the 19th century, so that by 1900 there were still 80,361 Dutch-speaking inhabitants of the German Empire. According to sociolinguistic criteria, however, the Lower Rhenish dialects, which were covered by the standard German language, can no longer be counted as part of Dutch today. Nevertheless, when the pronunciation distances of the German dialects are considered, the Lower Rhine dialect area forms geographically and numerically the smallest of the five clusters within Germany.

France

The Nord department in northern France is home to around 80,000-120,000 people who grew up speaking the West Flemish variety of Dutch (known as "Westhoek Flemish").

Dutch as a migrant language

United States

Dutch is one of America's earliest colonial languages and was spoken in the Hudson Valley, the former territory of the Nieuw Nederland colony, from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Thus, the United States Constitution of 1787 was translated into Dutch the very next year so that it could be read and ratified by the Dutch-speaking voters of New York State, one-third of the population at the time. New York also has many street names of Dutch origin, such as Wallstreet and Broadstreet, but certain neighborhoods were also named after Dutch cities, such as Harlem (Haarlem), Brooklyn (Breukelen) and Flushing (Vlissingen) in the New York borough of Manhattan.

Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States and, with Andrew Jackson, the founder of the modern Democrats, spoke Dutch as his native language, making him the only U.S. president to date for whom English was a second language.

Although about 1.6% of Americans are of Dutch descent, about 4,500,000 people, the Dutch language is spoken by only about 150,000 people, mostly emigrants from the 1950s and 1960s and their direct descendants.

Canada

In Canada, Dutch is spoken by about 160,000 people who are first or second generation residents there. These are mainly people (about 128,000) who emigrated to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s. They live mainly in urban areas, such as Toronto, Ottawa or Vancouver.

Dutch as a legal language

In Indonesia's legal system, knowledge of Dutch is considered indispensable in the legal field, as the Indonesian legal code is mainly based on Roman-Dutch law. Such customary law is translated into Indonesian, but the many legal commentaries according to which judges have to make a decision have usually not been translated.

Dutch as a foreign language

Language certification

• Certificaat Nederlands als Vreemde Taal (CNaVT) - Certificate Dutch as a Foreign Language
• Nederlands als tweede taal (NT2) - Dutch as a foreign language state examination

Countries with Dutch lessons

Belgium (Wallonia)

In Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, Dutch is an optional subject in secondary school. In bilingual Brussels, Dutch is a compulsory foreign language for all pupils. Overall, about 15% of Belgians with French as their mother tongue speak Dutch as a second language.

Germany

Dutch as a foreign language is taught in Germany almost exclusively at schools in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony. Because of the geographical distance to the language area, it is rarely offered in the rest of Germany (individual schools in Bremen and Berlin). It became established as a subject at schools in the course of the 1960s. In North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony, Dutch was taught as a compulsory or elective subject at various lower secondary schools in the 2018/2019 school year. In total, around 33,000 pupils learned Dutch.

Dutch language media

Approximately 21,000 Dutch-language books are published each year. Approximately 60 Dutch feature films are released in Dutch and Belgian cinemas each year. The Dutch-language films The Attack, Antonia's World and Karakter won an Oscar in the best foreign language film category, and eight others were nominated.

Dialects

In the area of use of the Dutch cultural language, the spoken dialects can be divided into the traditional main dialect groups of Lower Franconian, Lower Saxon and Ripuarian.

The dialect divisions of Dutch from the early 19th century were primarily based on the assumed subdivision of the population into Frisian, Saxon, and Frankish ancestral tribes. Therefore, Dutch, which at that time included Frisian, was divided into three "pure language groups" (Frisian, Frisian, Saxon) and three "mixed groups" (Friso-Saxon, Franco-Saxon and Friso-Franconian). Later in the 19th century, under great influence of the German linguist Georg Wenker and his Wenker sets, there was a long period in which isoglosses, preferably collections of isoglosses, dominated the division of dialects at the regional level. In the 1960s, there were attempts to divide dialects also on a sociolinguistic basis, with dialect speakers being asked with which dialect or dialect they most identified their own dialect. Since the 21st century, the focus has been on the analysis of large amounts of data in the field of grammar, phonology and idiom through computer models, such as the so-called Feature Frequency Method.

Definition by relationship

According to the criterion of relationship, Dutch is equated with Low Franconian and two main groups and various subgroups can be indicated:

• West Low Franconian (South, West and Central Dutch)

·         Dutch

·         Zealand

·         West Flemish and French West Flemish

·         East Flemish

·         Brabant

·         North Limburg and Kleverland

• South Low Franconian (Southeast Dutch)

·         East Limburg

Definition by roofing

According to the canopy criterion, those dialects are Dutch which are related to Dutch and which are spoken where Dutch - and no more closely related language - is the cultural language. According to this definition, the dialects of Lower Saxony (such as Gronings and Twents) in the northeast of the Netherlands also belong to the Dutch dialects, as well as the Ripuarian varieties spoken in a small area around Kerkrade, in the extreme southeast of the Netherlands. The restriction "no more closely related language" in this criterion is necessary to keep the Frisian and Dutch dialects apart, as both Standard Dutch and Standard Frisian are considered cultural languages in the province of Friesland.

In practice, this definition is in line with the sociolinguistic view common in the Netherlands and Belgium, where all language varieties within the linguistic area of the Dutch standard language are considered as "Dutch dialects".

Creole languages based on Dutch

Alive

• Afrikaans (South Africa and Namibia)

Extinct or moribund

• Berbice-Dutch (Guyana)
• Skepi (Guyana)
• Negro Dutch (Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico)
• Petjo, (Indonesia)
• Javindo, (Indonesia)
• Ceylon Dutch (Sri Lanka)
• Mohawk Dutch (United States)
• Jersey Dutch (United States)
• Albany Dutch (United States)