Dutch language

Dutch ( 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.

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, while up to half a million native speakers may reside in the United States, Canada and Australia combined. The Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa have evolved into Afrikaans, a mutually intelligible daughter language which is spoken to some degree by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia.

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

Dutch

Dutch usually refers to:

Dutch may also refer to:

People

Sports

Other uses

Dutch people

The Dutch (Dutch:  Nederlanders ), occasionally referred to as Netherlanders, a term that is cognate to the Dutch word for Dutch people, "Nederlanders" are a Germanicethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Curaçao, Argentina, Brazil, Canada,Australia,South Africa,New Zealand, and the United States.

In the Middle Ages, the Low Countries were situated around the border of France and the Holy Roman Empire, forming a part of their respective peripheries, and the various territories of which they consisted had de facto become virtually autonomous by the 13th century. Under the Habsburgs, the Netherlands were organised into a single administrative unit, and in the 16th and 17th centuries the Northern Netherlands gained independence from Spain as the Dutch Republic. The high degree of urbanization characteristic of Dutch society was attained at a relatively early date. During the Republic the first series of large scale Dutch migrations outside of Europe took place.