What 5 countries speak Dutch?

There are around 23 million native speakers of Dutch worldwide. Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands, Belgium (Flanders) and Suriname. Dutch is also an official language of Aruba, Curaçao and St Maarten.

Which countries in the Americas speak Dutch?

Worldwide, Dutch is a national language in Suriname (South America), Aruba and the Dutch Antilles (Caribbean).

Is Dutch German or not?

The Dutch (Dutch: Nederlanders) are a Germanic people living in the Netherlands.

Is Dutch closer to English or German?

So dive right in and practice your Dutch with confidence. For the same reasons Dutch is the closest language to English, German is also a close language, and another one that many English speakers may find easier to learn. Dutch is commonly mentioned as the language nestled between English and German.

Do Dutch people speak German?

With Germany being a much larger country than the Netherlands and a direct neighbor, many Dutch people speak basic German due to the historic and economic ties between the two countries.

Countries Where Dutch Is The Official Language 🧡

What is the closest language to Dutch?

Its closest relative is the mutually intelligible daughter language Afrikaans. Other West Germanic languages related to Dutch are German, English and the Frisian languages and the un-standardised languages Low German and Yiddish.

Is Dutch very different from German?

The languages: Dutch and German

Dutch is very similar to German, especially with regards to vocabulary, but the grammar is very different. It could be argued that Dutch has developed further and has become more simplified. The difference between the two languages is very clear when you look at the four cases.

Is it difficult to learn Dutch?

At first, Dutch might seem like a very difficult language, but it's surprisingly easy for English- and German-speakers. Dutch has even been described as a combination of the English and German languages! This makes it one of the easiest languages to learn for speakers of either language.

Which came first German or Dutch?

To simplify a little bit, you can see it like this. German is the oldest form. Dutch emerged from it, and from Dutch came English.

Why is it so easy to learn Dutch?

Dutch is from the same family as English and German

English students frequently say to me that Dutch is the easiest language to learn. It makes sense because Dutch is part of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages, just like English.

Why do Germans call themselves Dutch?

The Old English cousin to Dutch, thiod or theod, simply meant “people or nation.” (This also helps explain why Germany is called Deutschland in German.) Over time, English-speaking people used the word Dutch to describe people from both the Netherlands and Germany, and now just the Netherlands today.

Are Dutch people tall?

A land of giants, the Netherlands is the loftiest nation on Earth: the average height of a Dutch man is 182.5cm; a Dutch woman 168.7cm. By comparison their American counterparts measure 177.1cm and 163.5cm respectively. It wasn't always this way.

Can a German speaker understand a Dutch speaker?

Dutch, German, English, Swedish and Danish are all Germanic languages but the degree of mutual intelligibility between these languages differs. Danish and Swedish are the most mutually comprehensible, but German and Dutch are also mutually intelligible.

Where do most Dutch live in America?

Today the majority of the Dutch Americans live in Michigan, California, Montana, Minnesota, Illinois, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Idaho, Utah, Iowa, Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

What black countries speak Dutch?

The language is generally used in South Africa and Namibia. It is also spoken in Zimbabwe and Botswana, but not extensively. Afrikaans developed from Hollandic (Hollands), a vernacular of the Dutch language, which is spoken is South Holland.

Is Afrikaans the same as Dutch?

Although Afrikaans is very similar to Dutch, it is clearly a separate language, differing from Standard Dutch in its sound system and its loss of case and gender distinctions. Afrikaans was adopted for use in schools in 1914 and in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1919.

What do Dutch people call their country?

The Netherlands consists of 12 provinces but many people use “Holland” when talking about the Netherlands. The two provinces of Noord- and Zuid-Holland together are Holland. The 12 provinces together are the Netherlands. Holland is often used when all of the Netherlands is meant.

Why are people from Holland called Dutch?

Because they are of Germanic descent. Dutch = Deutsch.

What do the Dutch call their language?

dutch people call their language "nederlands." they call german "duits." Dutch, Duits and Deutsch all come from the Old Germanic word theudisk, which means “the language of the people.”

What is the hardest language to learn?

Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.

Why are Dutch people so good at English?

Contributing factors for the high degree of English fluency are the similarity of the two languages, the country's small size, dependence on international trade, and the use of subtitles for foreign languages on television, rather than audio dubbing.

Who are the Dutch descended from?

Ethnically, about 79-80% of the total population is Dutch, which itself is a mixture of Germanic and Celtic lineages. One group of the Dutch, the Frisians, are both ethnically distinct and also often lumped into the Dutch ethnicity thanks to cultural and historic similarities.

Are there two types of Dutch?

By many native speakers of Dutch, both in Belgium and the Netherlands, Afrikaans and Frisian are often assumed to be very deviant dialects of Dutch. In fact, they are two different languages, Afrikaans having evolved mainly from Dutch.

Which is better to live Netherlands or Germany?

When it comes to the practicalities of living in one of these two countries, we have to say that Germany fares a little better. Compared to the Netherlands, the living costs in Germany are cheaper. Furthermore, it is easier to find reasonably priced and quality accommodation in Germany.