Dutch language

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For other uses of "Dutch", see Dutch (disambiguation).
Nederlands, Vlaams
Pronunciation [ˈneːdərlɑnts]
Region Mainly Western Europe, today also in Africa, South America and the Caribbean.
Native speakers
22 million (2012)[1]
Total (L1 plus L2 speakers): 28 million (2012)[2][3]
Early forms
Latin (Dutch alphabet)
Dutch Braille
Signed Dutch (Nederlands met Gebaren)
Official status
Official language in
 Sint Maarten
European Union
Union of South American Nations
Regulated by Nederlandse Taalunie
(Dutch Language Union)
Language codes
ISO 639-1 nl
ISO 639-2 dut (B)
nld (T)
ISO 639-3 Variously:
nld – Dutch/Flemish
vls – West Flemish (Vlaams)
zea – Zealandic (Zeeuws)
Glottolog mode1257[4]
Linguasphere 52-ACB-a (varieties:
52-ACB-aa to -an)
Map Dutch World scris.png
Idioma neerlandés.PNG
Distribution of the Dutch language and its dialects in Western Europe

Dutch (About this sound Nederlands ) is a West Germanic language that is spoken in the European Union by about 23 million people as a first language—including most of the population of the Netherlands and about sixty percent of that of Belgium—and by another 5 million as a second language.[2][3][5][6]

Outside of the Low Countries, it is the native language of the majority of the population of Suriname, and also holds official status in the Caribbean island nations of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. Historical minorities remain in parts of France and Germany, and to a lesser extent, in Indonesia,[n 1] while up to half a million native speakers may reside in the United States, Canada and Australia combined.[n 2] The Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa have evolved into Afrikaans, a mutually intelligible daughter language[n 3] which is spoken to some degree by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia.[n 4]

Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English[n 5] and is said to be roughly in between them.[n 6] 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 the case system.[n 7] Features shared with German include the survival of three grammatical genders—albeit with few grammatical consequences[n 8]—and the use of modal particles,[7] final-obstruent devoicing, and V2 with subject–object–verb word order.[n 9] Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and incorporates more Romance loans than German but fewer than English.[n 10]



The language has been known under a variety of names. In Middle Dutch, dietsc (in the South) and diutsc, duutsc (in the North) were used to refer variably to Dutch, Low German, and German. This word is derived from diet "people" and was used to translate Latin (lingua) vulgaris "popular language" to set apart the Germanic vernacular from Latin (the language of writing and the Catholic Church) and Romance.[9] An early form of this word appears Latinized in the Oaths of Strasbourg (842) as teudisca (lingua) to refer to the Rhenish Franconian portion of the oath, underlies dialectal French thiois "Luxembourgish language", "Lorraine Franconian", and has survived in Italian as tedesco, "German".

During the Renaissance in the 16th century, duytsch (modern Duits) "German" and nederduytsch "Low German" began to be differentiated from dietsch or nederlandsch "Dutch",[10] a distinction that is echoed in English later the same century with the terms High Dutch "German" and Low Dutch "Dutch". However, owing to Dutch commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries, the English term came to refer exclusively to the Dutch. In modern Dutch, Duits has narrowed in meaning to refer to "German". Diets went out of common use because of its Nazi associations[11] and now somewhat romantically refers to older forms of Dutch,[12] whereas Vlaams is sometimes used for the language as a whole when referring to the varieties spoken in Belgium.[13]

Nederlands, the official Dutch word for "Dutch", did not become firmly established until the 19th century. The repeated use of neder- or "low" to refer to the language is a reference to the Netherlands' downriver location at the mouth of the Rhine (harking back to Latin nomenclature, e.g. Germania Inferior vs. Germania Superior) and its position at the lowest dip of the North European Plain.[14][15][16]


Dutch belongs to its own West Germanic sub-group, West Low Franconian, paired with its sister language Limburgish, or East Low Franconian, both of which stand out as combining characteristics of Low German and High German.[17] Dutch is at one end of a dialect continuum known as the Rhenish fan where German gradually turns into Dutch. Dutch is also at one end of a dialect continuum with Low German, but these dialects however are gradually becoming extinct.

All three languages have shifted earlier /θ/ > /d/, show final-obstruent devoicing (Du brood "bread" [broːt]), and have experienced lengthening of short vowels in stressed open syllables, which has led to contrastive vowel length that is used as a morphological marker. Dutch contrasts with Low German and High German in its retention of the clusters /sp/ and /st/, while shifting /sk/ to /sx/. It did not develop i-mutation as a morphological marker, although some eastern dialects did. In earlier periods, Low Franconian of either sort differed from Low German by maintaining a three-way plural verb conjugation (Old Dutch -un, -it, -untMiddle Dutch -en, -t, -en).


With Low German, Dutch shares:

  • Lack of the second consonant shift

With German (but not with Low German), Dutch shares:

  • The reflexive pronoun zich (Germ sich). This was originally borrowed from Limburgian, which is why in most dialects (Flemish, Brabantine) the usual reflexive is hem/haar or z'n eigen, just like in the rest of West Germanic.
  • Final-obstruent devoicing

Geographic distribution[edit]

Country Speakers Year
Netherlands[n 11] 15,700,000[18] 2012
Belgium 5,660,000[18] 2012
Suriname 200,000[18] 1997
Caribbean Netherlands 20,900[18] N/A
Curaçao 11,400[18] 2011
Aruba 5,290[18] N/A
Sint Maarten 2,000[18] 2011
Total worldwide 21,944,690[18] N/A

Dutch is an official language of the Netherlands proper, Belgium, Suriname and the Dutch Antilles: Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. Dutch is also an official language of several international organisations, such as the European Union, Union of South American Nations [19] and the Caribbean Community.


In Europe, Dutch is the majority language in the Netherlands (96%) and Belgium (59%) as well as a minority language in Germany and northern France's French Flanders. Though Belgium as a whole is multilingual, the two regions into which the country is divided (Flanders, francophone Wallonia, bilingual Brussels and small 'facility' zones) are largely monolingual. The Netherlands and Belgium produce the vast majority of music, films, books and other media written or spoken in Dutch.[20] Dutch is a monocentric language, with all speakers using the same standard form (authorized by the Dutch Language Union) based on a Dutch orthography employing the Latin alphabet when writing. In stark contrast to its written uniformity, Dutch lacks a 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.[21][22]

Outside of the Netherlands and Belgium, the dialect around the German town of Kleve (South Guelderish) both historically and genetically belongs to the Dutch language. In Northeastern France, the area around Calais was historically Dutch-speaking (West Flemish) of which an estimated 20,000 daily speakers. The cities of Dunkirk, Gravelines and Bourbourg only became predominantly French-speaking by the end of the 19th century. In the countryside, until World War I, many elementary schools continued to teach in Dutch, and the Catholic Church continued to preach and teach the catechism in Flemish in many parishes.[23]

During the second half of the 19th century Dutch was banned from all levels of education by both Prussia and France and lost most of its functions as a cultural language. In both Germany and France the Dutch standard language is largely absent and speakers of these Dutch dialects will use German or French in everyday speech. Dutch is not afforded legal status in France or Germany, either by the central or regional public authorities and knowledge of the language is declining among younger generations.[24]

Asia and Australasia[edit]

Despite the Dutch presence in Indonesia for almost 350 years, as the Asian bulk of the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch language has no official status there[25] and the small minority that can speak the language fluently are either educated members of the oldest generation, or employed in the legal profession,[26] as some legal codes are still only available in Dutch.[27] Many universities include Dutch as a source language, mainly for law and history students (roughly 35,000 of them nationally).[28][29]

Unlike other European nations, the Dutch chose not to follow a policy of language expansion amongst the indigenous peoples of their colonies.[30] In the last quarter of the 19th century, however, a local elite gained proficiency in Dutch so as to meet the needs of expanding bureaucracy and business.[31] Nevertheless, the Dutch government remained reluctant to teach Dutch on a large scale for fear of destabilising the colony. Dutch, the language of power, was supposed to remain in the hands of the leading elite.[31]

After independence, Dutch was dropped as an official language and replaced by Malay. Yet the Indonesian language inherited many words from Dutch: words for everyday life as well as scientific and technological terms.[32] One scholar argues that 20% of Indonesian words can be traced back to Dutch words,[33] many of which are transliterated to reflect phonetic pronunciation e.g. kantoor (Dutch for "office") in Indonesian is kantor, while bus ("bus") becomes bis. In addition, many Indonesian words are calques on Dutch, for example, rumah sakit (Indonesian for "hospital") is calqued on the Dutch ziekenhuis (literally "house of the sick"), kebun binatang ("zoo") on dierentuin (literally "animal garden"), undang-undang dasar ("constitution") from grondwet (literally "ground law"). These account for some of the differences in vocabulary between Indonesian and Malay.


After the declaration of independence of Indonesia, Western New Guinea, the 'wild east' of the Dutch East Indies, remained a Dutch colony until 1962, known as Netherlands New Guinea.[34] Despite prolonged Dutch presence, the Dutch language is not spoken by many Papuans, the colony having been ceded to Indonesia in 1963.

Immigrant communities can be found in Australia and New Zealand. The 2006 Australian census showed 36,179 people speaking Dutch at home.[35] At the 2006 New Zealand Census, 26,982 people, or 0.70 percent of the total population, reported to speak Dutch to sufficient fluency that they could hold an everyday conversation.[36]


The location of Suriname in South America
The location of the Dutch Caribbean in the southern Caribbean

In contrast to the colonies in the East Indies, from the second half of the 19th century onwards, the Netherlands envisaged expansion of Dutch in its colonies in the West Indies. Until 1863, when slavery was abolished in the West Indies, slaves were forbidden to speak Dutch. However, as most of the people in the Colony of Surinam (now Suriname) worked on Dutch plantations, this reinforced the use of Dutch as a means for direct communication.[31][37]

In Suriname today, Dutch is the sole official language,[38] and over 60 percent of the population speaks it as a mother tongue.[5] A further twenty-four percent of the population speaks Dutch as a second language.[39] Suriname gained its independence from the Netherlands in 1975 and has been an associate member of the Dutch Language Union since 2004.[40] The lingua franca of Suriname, however, is Sranan Tongo,[41] spoken natively by about a fifth of the population.[20][42]

In Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, all parts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Dutch is the official language but spoken as a first language by only 7% to 8% of the population,[43] although most native-born people on the islands can speak the language since the education system is in Dutch at some or all levels.



According to the 2000 United States census, 150,396 people spoke Dutch at home,[46] while according to the 2006 Canadian census, this number reaches 160,000 Dutch speakers.[47] In Canada, Dutch is the fourth most spoken language by farmers, after English, French and German,[48] and the fifth most spoken non-official language overall (by 0.6% of Canadians).[49]


Main article: Afrikaans

The largest legacy of the Dutch language lies in South Africa, which attracted large numbers of Dutch, Flemish and other northwest European farmer (in Dutch, boer) settlers, all of whom were quickly assimilated.[50] The long isolation from the rest of the Dutch-speaking world made the Dutch as spoken in Southern Africa evolve into what is now Afrikaans.[51] In 1876, the first Afrikaans newspaper called Die Afrikaanse Patriot was published in the Cape Colony.[52]

European Dutch remained the literary language[51] until the start of the 1920s, when under pressure of Afrikaner nationalism the local "African" Dutch was preferred over the written, European-based standard.[50] In 1925, section 137 of the 1909 constitution of the Union of South Africa was amended by Act 8 of 1925, stating "the word Dutch in article 137 [...] is hereby declared to include Afrikaans".[53][54] The constitution of 1983 only listed English and Afrikaans as official languages. It is estimated that between 90% to 95% of Afrikaans vocabulary is ultimately of Dutch origin.[55][56]


It is the third language of South Africa in terms of native speakers (~13.5%),[59] of whom 53 percent are Coloureds and 42.4 percent Whites.[60] In 1996, 40 percent of South Africans reported to know Afrikaans at least at a very basic level of communication.[61] It is the lingua franca in Namibia,[50][62][63] where it is spoken natively in 11 percent of households.[64] In total, Afrikaans is the first language in South Africa alone of about 6.8 million people[59] and is estimated to be a second language for at least 10 million people worldwide,[65] compared to over 23 million[5] and 5 million respectively, for Dutch.[2]

Dutch colonial presence elsewhere on the black continent, notably Dutch Gold Coast, was too ephemerous not to be wiped out by prevailing colonizing European successors. Belgian colonial presence in Congo and Rwanda-Urundi (Burundi and Rwanda, held under League of Nations mandate and later UN trust) left little (Flemish) Dutch legacy, as French was the main colonial language.


Main article: History of Dutch

Dutch, like other Germanic languages, is conventionally divided into three development phases: Old, Middle and Modern Dutch. The transition between these languages was very gradual and one of the few moments linguists can detect somewhat of a revolution is when the Dutch standard language emerged and quickly established itself. The development of the Dutch language is illustrated by the following sentence in Old, Middle and Modern Dutch:

Old Dutch: "Irlôsin sol an frithe sêla mîna fan thên thia ginâcont mi, wanda under managon he was mit mi"
Middle Dutch: "Erlossen sal [hi] in vrede siele mine van dien die genaken mi, want onder menegen hi was met mi"
Modern Dutch: "Verlossen zal hij in vrede ziel mijn van degenen die [te] na komen mij, want onder menigen hij was met mij" (using same word order)
Modern Dutch: "Hij zal mijn ziel in vrede verlossen van degenen die mij te na komen, want onder menigen was hij met mij" (using default word order) (see Psalm 55:19)
English:"He will deliver my soul in peace from those who attack me, because, amongst many, he was with me" (see Psalm 55:18)



Within the Indo-European language tree, Dutch is grouped within the Germanic languages, which means it shares a common ancestor with languages such as English, German, and Scandinavian languages. All Germanic languages are united by subjection to the sound shifts of Grimm's law and Verner's law which originated Proto-Germanic and define the basic differentiating features from other Indo-European languages. This assumed to have originated in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe.[66]

  North Sea Germanic, or Ingvaeonic
  Weser-Rhine Germanic, or Istvaeonic
  Elbe Germanic, or Irminonic

The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic.[67] They remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration Period. Dutch is together with English and German part of the West Germanic group, that is characterized by a number of phonological and morphological innovations not found in North and East Germanic.[68] The West Germanic varieties of the time are generally split into three dialect groups: Ingvaeonic (North Sea Germanic), Istvaeonic (Weser-Rhine Germanic) and Irminonic (Elbe Germanic). It appears that the Frankish tribes fit primarily into the Istvaeonic dialect group, with certain Ingvaeonic influences towards the northwest, still seen in modern Dutch.

Old Frankish[edit]

Main article: Old Frankish

A Frankish identity emerged and so did their Frankish or Franconian language. The language itself is poorly attested. A notable exception is the Bergakker inscription, found near the Dutch city of Tiel, which may represent a primary record of 5th-century Frankish. Although some placenames recorded in Roman texts could arguably be considered as the oldest "Dutch" single words, like vadam (modern Dutch: wad, English: "mudflat"), the Bergakker inscription yields the oldest evidence of Dutch morphology, but there is no consensus on the interpretation of the rest of the text.[69]

The Franks emerged in the southern Netherlands (Salian Franks) and central Germany (Riparian Franks), and later descended into Gaul where they gave their name to it: France. Although they ruled the Gallo-Romans for nearly 300 years, their language, Old Frankish, went extinct in most of France and also in all of Germany in around the 7th century. It was replaced in France by Old French (a Romance language, with a considerable Old Frankish influence), and in Germany with mostly Alemannic. But the Old Franconian language did not die out completely. Around the same time as it begins to decline in France and Germany it remained in the Low Countries, and evolved into what we know call Old Low Franconian, also known as Old Dutch. in fact, Old Frankish could mostly be reconstructed from Old Dutch and Frankish loanwords in Old French.

Old Dutch[edit]

Main article: Old Dutch
Area in which Old Dutch was spoken

Old Low Franconian or Old Dutch is regarded as the primary stage in the development of a separate Dutch language. The "Low" in Old Low Franconian refers to the Frankish spoken in the Low Countries where it was not influenced by the High German consonant shift, as opposed to Central and high Franconian in Germany. The later would as a consequence evolve with Allemanic into Old High German. At more or less the same time the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law led to the development of the direct ancestors of Low German (including Low Saxon which is also partly spoken in the east of the Netherlands), Frisian and English (Anglo-Saxon). Hardly influenced by these two shifts, Old Dutch remained close to the original language of the Franks, the people that would rule Europe for centuries. The language however, did experienced developments on its own, like final-obstruent devoicing in a very early stage. In fact, by judging from the find at Bergakker, it would seem that the language already experienced this characteristic during the Old Frankish period.

Attestations of Old Dutch sentences are extremely rare. The oldest one first recorded has been found in the Salic law. From this Frankish document written around 510 the oldest sentence has been identified as Dutch: Maltho thi afrio lito (I say to you, I free you, serf) used to free a serf. Another old fragment of Dutch is Visc flot aftar themo uuatare (A fish was swimming in the water). The oldest conserved larger Dutch text is the Utrecht baptismal vow (776-800) starting with Forsachistu diobolae [...] ec forsacho diabolae (Do you forsake the devil? [...] I forsake the devil). Probably the most famous sentence Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan, hinase hic enda tu, wat unbidan we nu (All birds have started making nests, except me and you, what are we waiting for), is dated around the year 1100, written by a Flemish monk in a convent in Rochester, England.

The Utrecht baptismal vow Forsachistu diobolae...

Middle Dutch[edit]

Main article: Middle Dutch

Old Dutch naturally evolved into Middle Dutch. The year 1150 is often cited as the time of the discontinuity, but it actually marks a time of profuse Dutch writing and during this period a rich Medieval Dutch literature developed. The most notable difference between Old and Middle Dutch is in a feature of speech known as vowel reduction. Round vowels in word-final syllables are rather frequent in Old Dutch, in Middle Dutch, such are leveled to a schwa. There was at that time no overarching standard language; Middle Dutch is rather a collective name for a number of closely related dialects whose ancestor was Old Dutch. But they were all mutually intelligible. In fact, since Dutch is a rather conservative language, the various literary works of that time today are often very readable for modern-day speakers.

The Middle Dutch dialect areas were affected by political boundaries. The sphere of political influence of a certain ruler often also created a sphere of linguistic influence, with the language within the area becoming more homogenous. Following the contemporary political divisions they are in order of importance:

  • Flemish with the County of Flanders at its centre. It had been influential during the earlier Middle Ages (the "Flemish expansion") but lost prestige to the neighbouring Brabantian in the 13th century.
  • Brabantian, spoken primarily in the Duchy of Brabant and adjacent parts. It was an influential dialect during most of the Middle Ages, during the so-called "Brabantian expansion" in which the influence of Brabant was extended outwards into other areas.
  • Limburgish, spoken by the people in the modern-day provinces of Dutch and Belgian Limburg, and adjacent lands in Germany. It was over time tied to different political areas and is therefor the most divergent of the dialects. It was even partly influenced by the High German consonant shift and is the most distant to the later developed standard language.
  • Hollandic, which had the County of Holland as its heartland. It was less influential during most of the Middle Ages but became more so in the 16th century during the "Hollandic expansion", in the time the Eighty Years' War took place in the Southern Netherlands.

Since it has Old Saxon and not Low Franconian (Old Dutch) as ancestor, Dutch Low Saxon is strictly speaking not an Middle Dutch dialect. It was spoken in the Oversticht territories of the Bishopric of Utrecht and adjacent parts of the Duchy of Guelders. It did play a modest part in the formation of the standard Dutch language in later periods.

Modern Dutch[edit]

Main article: Dutch Language



Main article: Dutch dialects



First dichotomy[edit]

Low Saxon in the Netherlands

In the east there is a Dutch Low Saxon dialect area: in the provinces of Groningen (Gronings), Drenthe and Overijssel Low Saxon is spoken, and in parts of the province of Gelderland as well. The IJssel river roughly forms the linguistic watershed here. This group, though not being Low Franconian and being close to neighbouring Low German, is regarded as Dutch, because of the superordination of the Dutch standard language in this area ever since the seventeenth century; in other words, this group is Dutch synchronically but not diachronically.

Extension across the borders[edit]

Holland and the Randstad[edit]


Dutch dialects and their peripheries to the West (French Flemish) and to the East (Meuse-Rhenish)


Minority languages[edit]




The West Flemish (Vlaemsch) dialect is listed as a minority language in France, however only a very small and aging minority of the French-Flemish population still speaks and understands West Flemish.

Belgium didn't choose to list any dialect as a minority language, because of the already complicated language situation that appears in the country.

Recent use[edit]



In Flanders, there are four main dialect groups: Brabantian, including the dialects of Antwerp and Brussels, West Flemish, including French Flemish, East Flemish and Limburgish.

The different dialects show many sound shifts in different vowels (even shifting between diphthongs and monophthongs), and in some cases consonants also shift pronunciation. For example, an oddity of West Flemings (and to a lesser extent, East Flemings) is that, the voiced velar fricative (written as "g" in Dutch) shifts to a voiced glottal fricative (written as "h" in Dutch), while the letter "h" in West Flemish becomes mute (just like in French). As a result, when West Flemish try to talk Standard Dutch, they're often unable to pronounce the g-sound, and pronounce it similar to the h-sound. This leaves f.e. no difference between "held" (hero) and "geld" (money). Or in some cases, they are aware of the problem, and hyper-correct the "h" into a voiced velar fricative or g-sound, again leaving no difference.

Next to sound shifts, there are ample examples of suffix differences. Often simple suffix shifts (like switching between -the, -ske, -ke, -je, ...), sometimes the suffixes even depend on quite specific grammar rules for a certain dialect. Again taking West Flemish as an example. In that language, the words "ja" (yes) and "nee" (no) are also conjugated to the (often implicit) subject of the sentence. These separate grammar rules are a lot more difficult to imitate correctly than simple sound shifts, making it easy to recognise people who didn't grow up in a certain region, even decades after they moved.

Dialects are most often spoken in rural areas, however, a lot of cities have a distinct city dialect. For example, the city of Ghent has very distinct "g", "e" and "r" sounds, differing a lot from the surrounding villages. The Brussels dialect combines Brabantian with words adopted from Walloon and French.


Sister and daughter languages[edit]

Many native speakers of Dutch, both in Belgium and the Netherlands, assume that Afrikaans and West Frisian are dialects of Dutch but are considered separate and distinct from Dutch: a daughter language and a sister language, respectively. Afrikaans evolved mainly from 17th century Dutch dialects, but had influences from various other languages in South Africa. However, it is still largely mutually intelligible with Dutch. (West) Frisian evolved from the same West Germanic branch as Old English and is less akin to Dutch.


Main article: Dutch phonology





  Bilabial Labio-
Alveolar Post-
Nasal m n ŋ
Plosive p b t d k ɡ (ʔ)
Fricative f v s z ʃ ʒ x ɣ ɦ
Trill r
Approximant ʋ l j


  • The lateral /l/ is slightly velarized postvocalically in most dialects, particularly in the north.[72]




Short/lax vowels
Central Back
Close ɪ ʏ
Mid ɛ ə ɔ
Open ɑ
Long/tense vowels
Close i ~ y ~ u ~
Close-mid øː
Open-mid (ɛː) (œː) (ɔː)


  • The long close-mid vowels /eː øː oː/ are realised as slightly closing diphthongs [eɪ øʏ oʊ] in many northern dialects.


Short/lax diphthongs
Mid ɛi œy (ɔi)
Open ɑu (ɑi)
Long/tense diphthongs
Close iu yu ui
Mid eːu oːi
Open aːi






Polder Dutch[edit]

A notable change in pronunciation has been occurring in younger generations in the provinces of Utrecht, North and South Holland, which has been dubbed "Polder Dutch" by Jan Stroop.[73] These speakers pronounce ij/ei, ou/au, and ui, which used be pronounced as /ɛi/, /ʌu/, and /œy/, increasingly lowered, as [ai], [au], and [ay] respectively. Instead, /eː/, /oː/, and /øː/ are pronounced as diphthongs now, as [ɛi], [ɔu], and [œy] respectively, which makes this change an instance of a chain shift.



Among Belgian and Surinamese Dutch speakers and speakers from other regions in the Netherlands, this vowel shift is not taking place.


Main article: Dutch grammar
See also: DT-Manie


Standard Dutch uses three genders to differentiate between natural gender and three when discerning grammatical gender. But for most non-Belgian speakers, the masculine and feminine genders have merged to form the common gender (de), while the neuter (het) remains distinct as before. This gender system is similar to those of most Continental Scandinavian languages. As in English, but to a lesser degree, the inflectional grammar of the language (e.g., adjective and noun endings) has simplified over time.

Verbs and tenses[edit]

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

Weak verbs are the most numerous verbs, constituting about 60% of all verbs. In weak verbs, the past tense and past participle are formed with a dental suffix:

  • Weak verbs with past in -de
  • Weak verbs with past in -te

Strong verbs are the second most numerous verb group. Here the past tense is formed by changing the vowel of the stem. This pattern is not uniform and Dutch distinguishes between 7 classes of strong verbs, of which 5 have an internal variant allowing for 12 different patterns of strong verb conjugation.

Verb class Verb Present Past Perfect
1 kijken (to watch) kijk keek gekeken
2a bieden (to offer) bied bood geboden
2b stuiven (to gush) stuif stoof gestoven
3a klimmen (to climb) klim klom geklommen
3b zenden (to send) zend zond gezonden
4 breken (to break) breek brak gebroken
5a geven (to give) geef gaf gegeven
5b zitten (to sit) zit zat gezeten
6a dragen (to carry) draag droeg gedragen
6b heffen (to lift) hef hief geheven
7a roepen (to call) roep riep geroepen
7b vangen (to catch) vang ving gevangen

Mixed verbs are verbs which have a weak past tense (-de or -te), but strong past participle (-en) or a strong past tense (vowel change), but weak past participle.

In Dutch the irregular verbs are the least numerous, but most used verb forms.

Genders and cases[edit]

Modern Dutch has mostly lost its case system.[75] However, certain idioms and expressions continue to include now archaic case declensions. The article has just two forms, de and het, more complex than English, which has only "the". The use of the older inflected form den in the dative or accusative as well as use of 'der' in the dative are restricted to numerous set phrases, surnames and toponyms.

Masculine singular Feminine singular Neuter singular Plural (any gender)
Nominative de de het de
Genitive van de / des van de / der van het / des van de / der
Dative (aan / voor) de (aan / voor) de (aan / voor) het (aan / voor) de
Accusative de de het de

In modern Dutch, the genitive articles 'des' and 'der' are commonly used in idioms. Other usage is typically considered archaic, poetic or stylistic. In most circumstances, the preposition 'van' is instead used, followed by the normal definitive article 'de' or 'het'. For the idiomatic use of the articles in the genitive, see for example:









Masculine singular or feminine singular Neuter singular Plural (any gender)
(with definite article
or pronoun)
de mooie fiets (the beautiful bicycle) het mooie huis (the beautiful house) de mooie fietsen (the beautiful bicycles)
de mooie huizen (the beautiful houses)
(with indefinite article or
no article and no pronoun)
een mooie fiets (a beautiful bicycle)
koude soep (cold soup)
een mooi huis (a beautiful house)
koud water (cold water)
mooie fietsen (beautiful bicycles)
mooie huizen (beautiful houses)



Word order[edit]



Main clause: "Ik kan mijn pen niet vinden "

Subclause: "omdat het veel te donker is "
The verb or verbs always go in the final position.




boom (tree) – boompje
ring (ring) – ringetje
koning (king) – koninkje
tien (ten) – tientje (a ten-euro note)



In Belgian Dutch, diminutives are frequently formed with -ke(n), being similar to German -chen, but only occur rarely in writing, instead giving preference to the diminutives using -je.


Dutch language street sign in the Netherlands




Vocabulary, spelling and writing system[edit]

Main articles: Dutch orthography and Dutch Braille
Dutch uses the digraph IJ as a single letter. Shown is a bus road marking.
A comparison of letter frequency between Dutch, English and German

Dutch vocabulary is predominantly Germanic in origin. The main foreign influence on Dutch has been (northern) French, though at the beginning of the 20th century German became the main contributor of new loan words and after World War Two English has become the main contributor of new loanwords. The main Dutch dictionary is the Van Dale groot woordenboek der Nederlandse taal containing some 268,826 headwords.[78] In the field of linguistics, the 45,000-page Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal is also readily used. This scholarly endeavor took 147 years to complete and contains all recorded Dutch words from the Early Middle Ages onward, making it the largest dictionary in the world in print with over 430,000 entries.[79]


Dutch is written using the Latin script. Dutch uses one additional character beyond the standard alphabet, the digraph IJ. It has a relatively high proportion of doubled letters, both vowels and consonants, due to the formation of compound words and also to the spelling devices for distinguishing the many vowel sounds in the Dutch language. An example of five consecutive doubled letters is the word voorraaddoos (food storage container). The diaeresis (Dutch: trema) is used to mark vowels that are pronounced separately when involving a pre- or suffix. Whereas a hyphen is used when this problem occurs in compound words. For example; "beïnvloed" (influenced), but zee-eend (sea duck). Generally, other diacritical marks only occur in loanwords, though the acute accent can also be used for emphasis or to differentiate between two forms. Its most common use is to differentiate between the indefinite article 'een' (a, an) and the numeral 'één' (one).

Dutch as a foreign language[edit]

As a foreign language, Dutch is mainly taught in primary and secondary schools in areas adjacent to the Netherlands and Flanders. In French-speaking Belgium, over 300,000 pupils are enrolled in Dutch courses, followed by over 23,000 in the German states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, and about 7,000 in the French region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais (of which 4,550 are in primary school).[80] Dutch is the obligatory medium of instruction in schools in Suriname, even for non-native speakers.[81] Dutch is taught in various educational centres in Indonesia, the most important of which is the Erasmus Language Centre (ETC) in Jakarta. Each year, some 1,500 to 2,000 students take Dutch courses there.[82] In total, several thousand Indonesians study Dutch as a foreign language.[83]

At an academic level, Dutch is taught in about 175 universities in 40 countries. About 15,000 students worldwide study Dutch at university.[29] The largest number of faculties of neerlandistiek can be found in Germany (30 universities), followed by France and the United States (20 each). Five universities in the United Kingdom offer the study of Dutch.[80][84] Owing to centuries of Dutch rule in Indonesia, many old documents are written in Dutch. Many universities therefore include Dutch as a source language, mainly for law and history students.[28] In Indonesia this involves about 35,000 students.[29] In South Africa, the number is difficult to estimate, since the academic study of Afrikaans inevitably includes the study of Dutch.[29] Elsewhere in the world, the number of people learning Dutch is relatively small.

Popular misconceptions[edit]

The language of Flanders[edit]

Main article: Flemish (linguistics)


The actual differences between the spoken standard language of Dutch and Belgian speakers are comparable to the differences between American and British English or the German spoken in Germany and Austria.[citation needed] In other words, most differences are rather a matter of accent than of grammar. Some of these differences are recognized by the Taalunie and major dictionaries as being interchangeably valid, although some dictionaries and grammars may mark them as being more prevalent in one region or the other.


Dutch and German as sister languages[edit]



Low Dietsch[edit]


Dutch and English as sister languages[edit]



Pennsylvania Dutch[edit]



Confusion between "Dutch", "Duits", and "Deutsch"[edit]

The resemblance of the English word "Dutch" (referring to the Dutch language of the Netherlands and Flanders) with the Dutch word Duits and German word Deutsch (meaning the German language of Germany, Austria and Switzerland) is not accidental, since both derive from the Germanic word þiudiskaz ("Theodiscus", meaning "of the people, popular, vulgar, vernacular"; that is, as opposed to Latin).

Until roughly the 16th century, speakers of all the varieties of West Germanic languages from the mouth of the Rhine to the Alps had been accustomed to refer to their native speech as the vernacular. This was Dietsch or Duitsch in Middle Dutch and what would eventually stabilize as Deutsch further south.

English speakers took the word Duitsch from their nearest Germanic-speaking neighbours in the Low Countries, and, having anglicized it as Dutch,[87] used it to refer to those neighbours and to the language they spoke. Meanwhile, however, especially after their secession from the Holy Roman Empire (i.e., Germany) in 1648, the Dutch began increasingly to refer to their own language as Nederlandsch (from which became the modern name of their language, Nederlands) in distinction from the people and speech of the Empire itself – Duitsch (now shortened to Duits) – with the result that 'Dutch' and Deutsch now refer to two different languages. About that time (as in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels), the English called the current Dutch language "Low Dutch" and the current German language "High Dutch", but eventually "German" won out over "High Dutch" due to the German-speaking territories being known as "Germany",[88] which was named after Germania.

See also[edit]


  6. ^ Dutch is traditionally described as morphologically between English and German, but syntactically closer to German; see Clyne 2003, p. 133. Dutch has been positioned to be between English and German; see Putnam 2011, p. 108, Bussmann 2002, p. 83, Müller 1995, p. 121, Onysko & Michel 2010, p. 210. Typologically, Dutch takes a midway position between English and German, with a similar word order to that of German, grammatical gender, and a largely Germanic vocabulary. It is morphologically close to English, and the case system and subjunctive have largely fallen out of use; see Swan & Smith 2001, p. 6.
  11. ^ There are 15,700,000 native speakers in the Netherlands.[citation needed]


  1. ^ Dutch/Flemish at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    West Flemish (Vlaams) at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Zealandic (Zeeuws) at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  3. ^ a b "Dutch — University of Leicester". .le.ac.uk. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  4. ^ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Modern Dutch". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. 
  5. ^ a b c "Het Nederlandse taalgebied" (in Dutch). Nederlandse Taalunie. 2005. Retrieved 2008-11-04. 
  7. ^ "A Guide to Dutch - 10 facts about the Dutch language". BBC. 
  12. ^ Price, Encyc. Langs. of Europe, 129.
  15. ^ "Hermes in uitbreiding". Users.pandora.be. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  18. ^ a b c d e f g h "Dutch". Ethnologue. 1999-02-19. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  19. ^ [1] Archived December 6, 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  20. ^ a b "Hoe trots zijn wij op het Nederlands?". Taalunieversum.org. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  21. ^ M. van der Wal, Geschiedenis van het Nederlands, 1992. ISBN 90-274-1839-X
  22. ^ B. van den Berg, Morfologische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten, 2008. ISBN 9053567747
  23. ^ "Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development" (PDF). Multilingual-matters.net. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  24. ^ "Flemish in France". Uoc.edu. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  25. ^ Baker (1998), p.202.
  26. ^ Ammon (2005), p.2017.
  27. ^ Booij (1995), p.2
  28. ^ a b "Taalunie | Beleidsorganisatie voor het Nederlands". Taalunieversum.org. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  29. ^ a b c d "Hoeveel studenten studeren er jaarlijks Nederlands aan universiteiten buiten het taalgebied?" (in Dutch). Nederlandse Taalunie. 2012. 
  31. ^ a b c "Internet Archive Wayback Machine" (PDF). Web.archive.org. 2013-10-01. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  32. ^ Sneddon (2003), p.162.
  33. ^ Hendrik M. Maier (Feb 8, 2005). "A Hidden Language – Dutch in Indonesia". Institute of European Studies,. Berkeley: University of California. 
  34. ^ "Indonesia: Fight over the Papuans". TIME. 1961-12-29. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  35. ^ "Census Home". Censusdata.abs.gov.au. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  37. ^ [2] Archived August 28, 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  40. ^ "About us". Taalunieversum.org. 2010-01-26. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  44. ^ "Jersey Dutch". Bartleby.com. Retrieved 2012-08-19. 
  46. ^ "Dutch". Mla.org. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  51. ^ a b Standaard Afrikaans (PDF). Abel Coetzee (Afrikaner Pers). 1948. Retrieved 2014-09-17. 
  52. ^ Abel Jacobus Coetzee (1940). Die verhaalskat van Ons Klyntji (1896-1905) (in Afrikaans). Johannesburg: Voortrekkerpers. OCLC 63430958. 
  53. ^ "South Africa: Legislation: 1910-2015". Archontology.org. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  54. ^ [3] Archived August 16, 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  59. ^ a b Key results of the 2011 census, Statistics South Africa
  60. ^ Primary tables: 1996 and 2001 compared, Statistics South Africa
  61. ^ [4][dead link]
  64. ^ [5] Archived December 6, 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  67. ^ Hawkins, John A. (1987). "Germanic languages". In Bernard Comrie. The World's Major Languages. Oxford University Press. pp. 68–76. ISBN 0-19-520521-9. 
  69. ^ Willemyns, Roland (2013). Dutch: Biography of a Language. Oxford University Press. pp. 40–41. ISBN 978-0-19-932366-1. 
  70. ^ "Dutch & Other Languages". Ccjk.com. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  72. ^ Verhoeven (2005:245)
  75. ^ "Grammatical Cases in Dutch". Zeer Goed Dutch. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  77. ^ "SOS - Signalering Onjuist Spatiegebruik". Spatiegebruik.nl. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  78. ^ "Home | Van Dale" (in Dutch). Vandale.nl. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  80. ^ a b "Nederlands studeren wereldwijd". Taalunieversum.org. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  81. ^ "Documentaire". Taalunieversum. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  82. ^ "Dutch worldwide". Taalunieversum. 2012-12-20. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
  83. ^ "Taalunie | Beleidsorganisatie voor het Nederlands". Taalunieversum.org. Retrieved 2015-08-12. 
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  87. ^ "Online Etymology Dictionary". Etymonline.com. Retrieved 2015-08-11. 


External links[edit]