Dutch dialect

The original Netherlands within the current Netherlands.

Strictly speaking, Dutch is the dialect of Dutch spoken in the North Holland and South Holland regions of the Netherlands, although it is commonly and metonymically called Dutch into the Dutch language itself. Despite this ambiguity, in Spanish it is correct to use the word Dutch to refer to the Dutch language, as stated in the Dictionary of the Royal Academy, and in practice Dutch is used more frequently than Dutch. However, the RAE supports this type of use to a certain extent.

Use of the term Netherlands

Due to the turbulent history of the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as the Dutch language, the names that other peoples have chosen to refer to it vary more than for other languages.

In Spanish Dutch is usually used in academic and official texts, while Dutch is the name most commonly given to it in informal conversations, and on the other hand, Flemish is used to refer to the language of Flanders (Belgium). All three terms usually refer to the same language, although the terms "Dutch" and "flamenco" they are also used to specify the dialect.

Historical considerations

Old map of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1825-1830.

The Dutch language was originally spoken in the area at the mouth of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse rivers that roughly covered what is now the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, northern France, and a small part of western Germany.

The Eighty Years' War (1568-1648) led to the division of the Seventeen Provinces into the United Provinces to the north and the Southern Netherlands to the south. This political separation between the Dutch-speaking provinces caused the language to undergo an evolution with some singularities in each area.

In the north, the hegemony of the province of Holland since the Renaissance has caused many languages, including Spanish, to call the language spoken by the Dutch Dutch, without enter into consideration if that language was spoken beyond the territory of the Netherlands.

After the fall of the First French Empire, the territories of the northern and southern Netherlands were unified into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and later Belgium and Luxembourg became independent, the resulting country then taking the name of the Netherlands.

In Spanish, as in other languages, this process did not affect the speakers, who kept the name Dutch for the language of the Netherlands. In these languages it is also customary to call the country Holland instead of The Netherlands.

In the Netherlands they are used to this situation and generally do not find it offensive when a Dutchman from a region other than the Netherlands is called Dutch, unlike for example a Scotsman be called English, although as a matter of courtesy it is preferable to use Dutch whenever you don't know what region someone comes from.

Dialect distribution map

A quick classification that is usually done is to reduce their dialects to two, Dutch in the north and Flemish in the south, this being the classification that is included in the dictionary of the RAE. In a more detailed classification we would have eight main variants that would actually be more local dialect groups.

The maps show the distribution of Dutch dialects, ignoring some peculiarities that occur in some cities.

Low Saxon Dutch, Zeelandic and Limburgish are also shown as dialects, although it is debatable whether this is a dialect or a separate language, since in West Germanic languages it is very problematic to establish a clear border between dialect and language.

The "Dutch," strictly speaking, would be the dialect spoken in the western part of the Netherlands marked with numbers 3 to 8..

Suriname. Netherlands Antilles.

Features of Dutch

Map of countries with Dutch language.

Dutch belongs to the Germanic family of Indo-European. It is the mother tongue of some twenty-three million (23,000,000) people in the world.

It has a syllabic structure that allows for quite complex consonant clusters, notable for its use of velar fricatives and the tendency to form long compound names.

Spelling

Its spelling allows the correspondence between how a word is written and how it is read to be immediate. Dutch distinguishes between short and long vowels, hence sometimes doubled vowels or consonants appear as in paard (horse), knoflook (garlic), kapper (barber) or koffie (coffee) to mark vowel length.

Grammar

Dutch has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter, however, given the few grammatical differences between masculine and feminine, in practice they seem to be reduced to just two: common and neuter, often classifying words according to the accompanying article in words with 'het' and words with 'de'.

The adjective, when modifying a noun, must always precede it. In this case, an -e ending is usually added to the adjective: De kat in de boom is zwart (The cat in the tree is black); De zwarte kat zit in de boom (The black cat is in the tree).

Sentence structure in Dutch is basically SOV, that is, the subject begins the sentence and the verbs finish it, but with the caveat that the main verb (the one that agrees with the subject) comes before the second position, which means that in simple sentences with a single verb the structure is similar to SVO Spanish: Ik heb een mooie hond (I have a nice dog). In more complex sentences or with subordinates, only one verb remains in the second position, passing the others to the end of the sentence: Ik wil morgen een boek gaan kopen (I want to go buy a book tomorrow).

Regulation

The body that regulates the language is the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union), created in 1986 with the aim of setting the common language standard for the Netherlands and Belgium. Later in 2004 Suriname joined. The Nederlandse Taalunie is an international institution similar to what in Spanish is the Association of Spanish Language Academies.

The official standard is known as Standaardnederlands (Standard Dutch), although it is also called Algemeen Nederlands or by the initials AN (Dutch general).

Neighboring languages

Dutch shares many features with German, but with a less complicated morphology caused by deflection. The Dutch consonantal system, on the other hand, has more in common with the Anglo-Frisian and Scandinavian languages. If we consider the non-standard varieties of these languages, we would have a dialect complex between the different dialects of Dutch, German and Frisian.

Dutch is closely linked to Afrikaans, a Germanic language, a creole of Dutch, spoken mainly in South Africa and Namibia.