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What is the official language of the Netherlands?

Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands and Suriname, and one of the official languages ​​of Belgium. Users are mainly distributed in the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, Suriname, the Caribbean Netherlands Antilles and other places.

Spoken Dutch has many variations, from standard to local dialects. Standard language is used in public, official conversations, documents and university lectures, and spoken language is used at home and in conversations with friends and fellow countrymen. The regional dialects bounded by Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam are closer to Standard Dutch than the dialects of other dialect areas.

History

The development of Dutch can be divided into three periods: Old Dutch, Middle Dutch, and Modern Dutch.

Old Dutch is characterized by the absence of weakening of the vowels a, o, i, u.

Middle Dutch, Standard Dutch was not yet formed in the Middle Ages, but due to commercial prosperity and other historical reasons, the Dutch provincial dialect gradually became the common language. The language used is called Diets (Diets, which means folk language). English called Dutch as Dutch, which is derived from this.

In modern Dutch, when the southern part of the Netherlands was occupied by Spain, many people from Flanders and Brabant moved to the north, which promoted the prosperity of the north and the rise of big cities. The printing industry in the south moved north along with it, and literature developed greatly, forming Standard Dutch. Its vowels undergo a process of diphthongization: they become ui, as bruun becomes bruin (brown); i becomes ij, as rike becomes rijk (rich).

Evolution

Dutch is a collection of five dialect groups: Midwest dialects (including those spoken in the provinces of South and North Holland, Utrecht, most of Gelderland and the islands of Zeeland), Northeastern dialects (Groningen, Drenthe, Upper Essel and eastern Gelderland), south-central dialects (North Borabant and the surrounding Limburg region, Antwerp, Borabant and East Flanders in Belgium) , the southwestern dialect (West Flanders) and the southeastern dialect (most of the Limburg region of the Netherlands and the region of the same name in Belgium).

The northeastern dialect is often referred to as the Saxon dialect, the southeastern dialect is known as the Eastern Low Francophone, and the other three groups are referred to as the Western Low Francophone. The language of the Dutch province of Frisian is usually listed as a separate language: Frisian.

Afrikaan, one of the official languages ​​of South Africa, is a variant of Dutch, with a considerable number of loanwords and grammars from Malay and Bantu languages ​​scattered among them. The Dutch word for boer (farmer). Dutch has more post-glossal sounds than German, Russian, etc. In addition to ch’s post-gloss, even g is also post-glossy.

Status quo

Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. The total number of speakers of Dutch in the world is around 22 million (2006).

Dutch is between German and English. The letters in Dutch are the same as those in English, but the three letters Q, X, and Y are not used in Dutch. They only appear when the sentence contains foreign language loanwords.

Influences

Because the Dutch have long been a seafaring people, Dutch has left traces in many languages ​​of the world. Many Dutch sailing words are used in other languages. In Indonesian, Dutch idioms and sentence patterns can also be clearly seen.

English words of Dutch origin are: deck (deck), yacht (yacht), easel (easel), freight (shipping cargo), furlough (vacation), brandy (brandy), cookie (home-cooked cookie) , cruller (pancake), waffle (waffle), maelstrom (big whirlpool), issinglass (isinglass) and Santa Claus (Santa Claus).

Many place names in New York City, such as Brooklyn, Flushing, Harlem, Staten Island, and Browery, remind people of the Netherland’s old land.