Encyclopedia
Dutch is a
West Germanic language spoken by around 22 million people, mainly in the
Netherlands and
Belgium .
History
The dialects of the
West Germanic dialect continuum can be divided according to the region's historical tribes and according to the extent of their participation in the
High German consonant shift. The present Dutch standard language is almost completely based on
Low Franconian dialects spoken in the
Low Countries, the latter being derived from Old Frankish, the language of the Ancient
Franks. Dutch left the prehistoric phase in 476–496 when the
Salic Law was written, containing a great number of Old Dutch words, and even a few sentences.
A process of standardisation started in the
Middle ages, especially under the influence of the
Burgundian Ducal Court in Dijon . The dialects of Flanders and
Brabant were the most influential around this time. The process of standardization became much stronger at the start of the 16th century, mainly based on the urban dialect of
Antwerp. In 1585 Antwerp fell to the Spanish army: many fled to the Northern Netherlands, especially the province of Holland, where they influenced the urban dialects of that province. In 1637, a further important step was made towards a unified language, when the first major Dutch Bible translation was created that people from all over the
United Provinces could understand. It used elements from various, even
Low Saxon based dialects, but was almost completely based on the low Frankish urban dialects from
Holland.
An example of what may be an early Dutch writing, is "
Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan, hinase hic enda thu, wat unbidat ghe nu" or
..."wat unbidan we nu" , dating around the year 1100, written by a Flemish
monk in a
convent in
Rochester,
England. For decades considered to be the earliest recorded sentence in Dutch, some linguists, including Luc de Grauwe, are convinced it is in fact
Old English, or possibly a mix of OE and South West Flemish.
Etymology of the word "Dutch"
The word
Dutch comes from the proto-Germanic word
*þeudisko-z, and became
Duutsc in Middle Dutch, which later gave the two early modern Dutch forms,
Duits in the north and
Diets in the south.
Duits has taken on the meaning of "German" and
Diets meaning "Dutch" but no longer in general use , dropped for its Nazi-era overtones.
German Deutsch meaning "German" has the same origin.
The English word
Dutch has also changed with time. It was only around 1550, with growing cultural and economical contacts and the rise of an independent country, that the modern meaning arose, i.e., 'designating the people of the Netherlands or their language'. Prior to this, the meaning was more general and could refer to any Germanic-speaking area or the languages there . For example:
- William Caxton wrote in his Prologue to his Aeneids in 1490 that an old English text was more like to Dutche than English. In his notes, Professor W.F. Bolton makes clear that this word means German in general rather than Dutch.
- In four books containing the Chronography and History of the whole world, Vol. II contains "…the Dutch call Leibnitz," adding that Dutch is spoken in the parts of Hungary adjoining to Germany.
- To this day, descendants of German settlers in southeastern Pennsylvania are known as the "Pennsylvania Dutch", especially those who are members of the plain sects. .
Classification and related languages
Dutch is a
Germanic language, and within this family it is a
West Germanic language. Since it did not experience the
High German consonant shift , it is a Low Saxon-Low Franconian language, and it is most closely related to the
Low Saxon variety of the
West Germanic languages. There was in fact a dialect continuum which blurred any clear boundary between Dutch and Low Saxon, in some minute areas there are still tiny dialect continuums but they continue to go extinct.
Dutch is grammatically similar to German, for example in syntax and verb morphology.
Dutch has grammatical cases, but these are now mostly limited to pronouns and set phrases. Dutch has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter although masculine and feminine have merged to form the common gender , whilst the neuter remains distinct as before. The inflectional grammar of Dutch, for instance in adjective and noun endings, has been simplified over time.
| English | Frisian | Dutch | German | Remark |
|---|
eat
cat
town | ite
kat
tún | eten
kat
tuin | essen
Katze
Zaun | | apple
pipe
thorpe | appel
piip
terp | appel
pijp
dorp | Apfel
Pfeife
Dorf | |
think
through
thorn | tinke
troch
toarne | denken
door
doorn | denken
durch
Dorn | |
there
brother | dêr
broer | daar
broeder,broer | da
Bruder | |
yesterday
yarn
day | juster
jern
dei | gisteren
garen
dag | gestern
Garn
Tag | and thus at least a visual similarity to German; English and Frisian have shifted g to before palatal vowels |
church
make
| tsjerke
meitsje | kerk
maken | Kirche
machen | |
Note semantic shifts: 1. 'garden'; 2. 'fence'; 3. 'hill' 4. 'village'Even when written Dutch looks similar to German, however, the pronunciation may be markedly different. This is true especially of the diphthongs and of the letter
, which is pronounced as a velar continuant similar to the in Swiss German. The rhotic pronunciation of causes some English-speakers to believe Dutch sounds similar to a Northern English accent; this is the reason for Bill Bryson's famous remark that when one hears Dutch one feels one ought to be able to understand it. Dutch pronunciation is, however, difficult to master for Anglophones, many of its diphthongs and gutturals being the greatest obstacles. Germans seem to have an advantage with the Dutch grammar, but suffer the same difficulties as the English when dealing with pronunciation. Dutch is generally not on the curriculum of German schools, except in some border cities, such as Aachen and Oldenburg.
Geographic distribution
Dutch is spoken by practically all inhabitants of the Netherlands and Flanders, the northern half of Belgium where it is often referred to by the dialect name Vlaams . It is also spoken in the bilingual region of Brussels, together with French and other languages. In the northernmost part of France, the Dunkirk arrondissement in the Nord département, Dutch is still spoken as a minority language, also often referred to by the dialect name Vlaams. On the Caribbean islands of Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles, Dutch is used but less so than Papiamento and English . Dutch is spoken as a mother tongue by about 60% of the population in Suriname, most of them being bilingual with Sranan Tongo and other ethnic languages . There are also some speakers of Dutch in Indonesia and in countries with a lot of Dutch migrants, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. In South Africa and Namibia a language closely related to Dutch, called Afrikaans is spoken.
Official status
Dutch is an official language of the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, Aruba, and the Netherlands Antilles. The Dutch, Flemish and Surinamese governments coordinate their language activities in the Nederlandse Taalunie . Dutch was an official language in South Africa up until 1961, having fallen into disuse since Afrikaans became an official language in 1925. Of the inhabitants of New Zealand, 16,347 of them are sufficiently fluent in Dutch to carry on an everyday conversation. That amounts to 59% of the Dutch in New Zealand, but 95% of the Dutch are fluent in English., including the Dutch Van Dale dictionary .
See Flemish and Flanders for more details.
Dutch is not a German dialect
Dutch simply cannot be called a German dialect, on whatever level of analysis we choose to consider the matter. The Dutch standard language, by definition, cannot be a dialect of another standard language, in this case Standard German. The dialect group from which Dutch is largely derived, Low Franconian, belongs to the whole of continental West Germanic dialects. This whole is sometimes imprecisely indicated with the word "German", but it might as well be called "Dutch". Indeed the Low Franconian dialects and languages are morphologically closer to the original form of Western Germanic than the High German from which standard German is derived. No intrinsic quality of whole of the component dialects favours one standard over the other: both were rivals and historical contingency decided the range of their use. The state border does not reflect dialectal subdivisions. Only now that the dialect continuum of continental West Germanic has been broken by the 19th century introduction of mass education, the respective ranges have been fixed; in the 18th century standard Dutch was still used as the normal written standard in the Lower Rhine, the county of Bentheim and East Frisia, now all part of Germany.
Dutch is not the most closely-related language to English
Dutch does have a relatively close genetic relationship to the descendants of Middle English , since both belong to the West Germanic language family and both lack most or all of the High German consonant shift that characterizes the descendants of Middle High German .
Frisian, however, is even more closely related to the Middle-English descendants than Dutch. Languages and dialects sharing some features found in English and Frisian are referred to as Anglo-Frisian languages or, sometimes, Ingvaeonic languages.
Pennsylvania Dutch is not a form of Dutch
Pennsylvania Dutch, called Deitsch by its speakers, is not a form of Dutch. The word Dutch has historically been used for all speakers of continental West Germanic languages, including, the Dutch, Flemish, Austrians, Germans, and the German-speaking Swiss. It is cognate with the German autodesignation deutsch. The use of the name Dutch exclusively for the language of Belgium, or for the inhabitants of the Netherlands or some of its former colonies, is relatively recent. Pennsylvania Dutch is a West Central German variety.
See also
External links
- - The status of Dutch in France
Dictionaries
References
