Short answers, pulled from the story.
About 25 million people speak Dutch as a first language, with an additional 5 million speaking it as a second language. That makes Dutch the third most spoken Germanic language globally, after German and English.
Afrikaans is a daughter language that evolved from 17th-century Cape Dutch dialects in southern Africa. Between 90 and 95 percent of Afrikaans vocabulary is ultimately of Dutch origin, and the two languages remain largely mutually intelligible, though it is easier for Dutch speakers to understand written Afrikaans than the reverse.
Dutch was an official language of the Union of South Africa under the 1909 constitution. In 1925, Act 8 of 1925 amended section 137 of that constitution to declare that the word Dutch included Afrikaans, effectively replacing Dutch as a distinct official language.
The oldest confirmed Dutch sentence appears in the Salic law, a Frankish document written around 510: Maltho thi afrio lito, meaning "I say to you, I free you, serf." The most famous Old Dutch sentence, Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan ("All birds have started making nests, except me and you, what are we waiting for"), was written around the year 1100 by a Flemish monk in Rochester, England.
Dutch ruled what is now Indonesia for almost 350 years as the Dutch East Indies. Roughly a fifth of Indonesian vocabulary can be traced to Dutch, including both direct loanwords and calques such as rumah sakit ("hospital"), which mirrors the Dutch ziekenhuis (literally "sickhouse"). Indonesia's Civil Code has never been officially translated and the original Dutch text remains the authoritative version.
Polder Dutch is a pronunciation shift identified by researcher Jan Stroop in which certain diphthongs are lowered from their standard forms. It emerged in the 1970s in the Dutch provinces of Utrecht, North Holland, and South Holland, and was pioneered by older, well-educated women from the upper middle classes. Stroop argues the change is a phonetically natural development that had been artificially suppressed since the standardisation of Dutch pronunciation in the 16th century.