Dutch language
The Dutch language, also called Netherlandic or Dutch Nederlands, in Belgium called Flemish or Flemish Vlaams, is a language spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium. It is a West Germanic language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives German and English. Afrikaans is a separate but somewhat mutually intelligible daughter language.
History
Dutch is a West Germanic language spoken by over 22 million people as a native language, and over 5 million people as a second language. Most native speakers live in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, with smaller groups of speakers in parts of France, Germany and several former Dutch colonies. It is closely related to other West Germanic languages (e.g., English, West Frisian and German) and somewhat more remotely to the North Germanic languages.
Dutch is the parent language of several creole languages as well as of Afrikaans, one of the official languages of South Africa and the most widely understood in Namibia. Dutch and Afrikaans are to a very large extent mutually intelligible, although they have separate spelling standards and dictionaries and have separate language regulators. The Dutch Language Union coordinates actions of the Dutch, Flemish and Surinamese authorities in linguistic issues, language policy, language teaching and literature.
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 Germanic 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 Church) and Romance. An early form of this word appears Latinized in the Strasbourg Oaths (842 a.d.) as teudisca (lingua) to refer to the Rhenish Franconian portion of the oath and also underlies dialectal French thiois "Luxembourgish, Lorraine Franconian".
During the Renaissance in the 16th century, distinction began to be made by opposing duytsch (modern Duits) "German" and nederduytsch "Low German" with dietsch or nederlandsch "Dutch", a distinction that is echoed in English later the same century with the terms High Dutch "German" and Low Dutch "Dutch".
