Dutch
Language · official in 7 countries and territories
The English name Dutch goes back to Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz, 'of the people', a word once used for the Germanic vernaculars as against Latin. Dutch, Nederlands to its speakers, is a West Germanic language with one written standard for all its speakers, and it is official in 7 countries and territories on record in Europe, South America and the Caribbean.
The language on record
- Own name
- Nederlands
- ISO 639-1
- NL
- ISO 639-3
- NLD
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- West Germanic
- Official in
- 7 countries
Where Dutch is official
The Netherlands and Belgium in Europe, Suriname in South America, and four Caribbean islands: Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten and Bonaire. On the islands Dutch is official but little spoken at home.
Official beside Dutch
About Dutch
How Antwerp and Holland shaped the standard
Standardisation began in the Middle Ages around the Burgundian court, and at first the dialects of Flanders and Brabant carried the most weight. In the early 16th century it rested mainly on the city speech of Antwerp. When Antwerp fell to the Spanish army in 1585, many of its people fled north to the new Dutch Republic, and their speech mixed with the urban dialects of Holland. The Statenvertaling of 1637, the first major Bible translation into Dutch, was written to be understood across the republic and drew mainly on those Holland dialects.
The south went another way. Under Spanish, Austrian and French rule, standardisation stopped. Government and law used French, and increasingly so did education, although more than half of the Belgian population spoke Dutch. In the 19th century the Flemish Movement took up the rights of Dutch speakers, and Flanders adopted the standard that had grown up in the Netherlands. The Language Union Treaty of 1980 binds the two countries to a joint language policy, including one spelling.
Why Dutch spelling is shared but speech varies
Written Dutch has one standard, set by the Dutch Language Union and recorded in the Green Booklet. Spoken Dutch has no single prestige accent and falls into 28 main dialects and at least 600 varieties. Hollandic dominates national broadcasting in the Netherlands and Brabantian in Flanders. In the Netherlands the language is official by administrative law; the constitution does not name it.
Where Dutch went overseas
South Africa kept Dutch as an official language until 1925, when Afrikaans, which grew out of Cape Dutch dialects, replaced it. In the Caribbean, enslaved people were forbidden to speak Dutch until slavery ended in 1863, which is why creoles based on other European languages, Papiamento and Sranan Tongo, took hold there. Suriname, independent since 1975, has Dutch as its sole official language and the required medium of its schools, and has been an associate member of the Dutch Language Union since 2004. Indonesia's Civil Code has never been officially translated, and its colonial Dutch text remains the authoritative version.
Common questions
Questions about Dutch
Why is the language of the Netherlands called Dutch in English?
The word comes from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz, 'of the people'. In the Middle Ages its descendants, dietsc and duutsc, named the Germanic dialects of the Low Countries, and English kept the word for the language of the Netherlands and Flanders. Speakers themselves say Nederlands.
How different is Flemish from Dutch?
Flemish, Vlaams, is sometimes used for Standard Dutch as spoken in Flanders. Belgium writes the same standard as the Netherlands, and the differences lie mainly in pronunciation.
When did South Africa drop Dutch?
In 1925, when Afrikaans replaced it as an official language.