Dutch language

• 1. Introduction

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  Dutch, known to its speakers as Nederlands, is spoken by roughly 25 million people as a first language and another 5 million as a second. That makes it the third most spoken Germanic language on earth, after German and English. Yet for a language of that reach, it occupies a peculiar position: often described as sitting "roughly in between" its two famous cousins, Dutch shares enough features with each to feel familiar to both camps but remains unmistakably its own thing.

  Here is what makes that position genuinely strange. Dutch has not undergone the High German consonant shift that separates German from its northern relatives, yet it has also kept two or three grammatical genders where English shed the whole system. It is close enough to Afrikaans, the language that grew from it in southern Africa, that the two remain largely mutually intelligible. And it has scattered its descendants across Indonesia, Suriname, the Caribbean, and parts of North and South America, in each case leaving behind a different legacy.

  What drove a relatively small language to such extraordinary reach? And why, in so many of those places, did Dutch eventually yield to something else? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Name with Deep Roots

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  The word Dutch has a history that stretches well past any kingdom called the Netherlands. Its stem in Proto-Germanic meant simply "people," and its Latinised form Theodiscus was recorded as early as 786, when the Bishop of Ostia wrote to Pope Adrian I about a synod in Corbridge, England, where decisions were being written down "tam Latine quam theodisce" -- in Latin as well as common vernacular. That phrase marks the earliest known written use of the concept. The word meant the language of ordinary people, as opposed to the Latin of the Church and the literate elite.

  Over the following centuries the term narrowed. In the Low Countries it came to refer specifically to the cluster of Germanic dialects spoken there, and by the Early Middle Ages it was rendered as dietsc or duutsc depending on region. The modern Dutch endonym Nederlands is older than many people realise: it is first attested in 1482, and it started at the Burgundian court in the 15th century. The word means "low," a reference to the downriver lowlands at the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta near the North Sea. The Romans had already called the region Germania Inferior.

  For a while in the 16th century, a rival name competed: Nederduytsch, literally "Low Dutch," a deliberate calque of that Roman label designed to give the language more prestige by tying it to antiquity. But the effort failed. By the close of the 18th century, Nederlands had won, and Hoogduytsch -- "High German" -- had settled into its role as the Dutch word for the language of the neighboring German states.

• 3. From Franks to Flemings

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  Old Dutch emerged from a set of Franconian dialects spoken by the Salian Franks in the 5th century. Those dialects developed across fifteen centuries into Modern Dutch, but the path was neither straight nor peaceful. The Frankish language that fed into it is itself barely attested: the closest thing to a primary record is the Bergakker inscription, found near the Dutch city of Tiel, which may represent 5th-century Frankish writing, though scholars cannot agree on how to read most of it.

  The oldest Dutch sentence confirmed by linguists appears in the Salic law, a Frankish legal document written around 510: Maltho thi afrio lito, meaning "I say to you, I free you, serf." That sentence was spoken to release an enslaved person and happens to be the earliest surviving record of the Dutch morphological system. The most famous Old Dutch sentence is something else entirely: Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan, hinase hic enda tu, wat unbidan we nu -- "All birds have started making nests, except me and you, what are we waiting for." Written around the year 1100 by a Flemish monk in a convent in Rochester, England, it is romantic rather than legal, which is perhaps why it is so often, and incorrectly, cited as the oldest Dutch sentence.

  The transition from Old to Middle Dutch is usually placed at around 1150, but that date is a convention rather than a true turning point. What changed more visibly was the political landscape. Flemish dialects dominated in the early medieval period, then Brabantian rose during what historians call the Brabantian expansion. Hollandic, the dialect of the County of Holland, was less influential for most of the Middle Ages but surged during the 16th century, partly because the 1585 fall of Antwerp to the Spanish army pushed large numbers of educated speakers north into the Dutch Republic.

• 4. The Bible and the Standard

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  In 1637 a translation reshaped the language. The Statenvertaling, the first major Bible translation into Dutch, was created so that people from all corners of the new republic could understand a single text. It drew on multiple dialect traditions, including Dutch Low Saxon, but was grounded predominantly in the urban dialects of the province of Holland as they had developed after the 16th century. A vernacular Bible tends to fix a language in ways that no grammar book can, and the Statenvertaling served precisely that function.

  The southern Netherlands followed a different course. Under successive Spanish, Austrian, and French rule, the standardisation of Dutch stalled. The state, the law, and increasingly education all operated in French, even as more than half of the Belgian population went on speaking Dutch. The Flemish Movement of the 19th century fought back, pushing for recognition of Dutch-speaking rights. But dialect variation was a disadvantage when facing a standardised French, and in the end Flemish Belgium aligned itself with the standard that had already developed in the Netherlands.

  The formal legal settlement came in 1980, when the Netherlands and Belgium concluded the Language Union Treaty, committing both countries to a shared language policy and a common spelling system. Written Dutch today is monocentric: all speakers across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname use the same standard form, authorised by the Dutch Language Union and codified in the so-called Green Booklet. Pronunciation is another matter. Belgium and the Netherlands differ in ways comparable to the differences between standard British and standard American English.

• 5. Afrikaans and the African Legacy

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  The largest single legacy of Dutch outside Europe took root in southern Africa. Dutch, Flemish, and other northwest European settlers arrived in the Cape Colony, and their isolation from the rest of the Dutch-speaking world gradually shaped their speech into something new. By 1876, the first Afrikaans newspaper, Die Afrikaanse Patriot, was published in the Cape Colony. European Dutch remained the literary standard for that region until the start of the 1920s, when Afrikaner nationalism tipped the balance toward the local variety.

  The formal break came in 1925, when section 137 of the 1909 constitution of the Union of South Africa was amended by Act 8 of 1925, declaring that "the word Dutch in article 137... is hereby declared to include Afrikaans." Dutch was, in effect, legislated out of existence as a distinct official language in South Africa. Between 90 and 95 percent of Afrikaans vocabulary is ultimately of Dutch origin. Grammatically, however, Afrikaans has simplified considerably. The word vogel becomes voël and regen becomes reën, changes that follow a clearly patterned logic.

  The two languages remain largely mutually intelligible, though the relationship is asymmetric: it is easier for a Dutch speaker to understand written Afrikaans than the reverse. Afrikaans is today the third largest language in South Africa by native speakers, at about 13.5 percent of the population, and is the lingua franca in Namibia. It is also the first language of roughly 7.1 million people in South Africa alone, with an estimated 10 million more speaking it as a second language. A related figure: Afrikaans also evolved from 17th-century Cape Dutch dialects, and Sojourner Truth, born in New York's Hudson Valley, was a native Dutch speaker -- one of the last traces of a time when Dutch was the dominant language along that river.

• 6. Indonesia and the Limits of Colonial Reach

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  Dutch was present in what is now Indonesia for almost 350 years. Yet despite that extraordinary span, the language never penetrated widely. The Dutch chose not to pursue large-scale language expansion among indigenous peoples, keeping Dutch as the tool of a governing elite. In the last quarter of the 19th century, a local elite did gain proficiency, but the Dutch government remained reluctant to extend that further, fearing it might destabilise the colony. Dutch was to remain a language of power, and a narrow one.

  By the time Indonesia declared independence, Dutch had reached only about 2 percent of the total population, including over 1 million indigenous Indonesians. The language was banned in 1957, though the ban was subsequently lifted. What persisted is more diffuse but still measurable: roughly a fifth of Indonesian vocabulary can be traced to Dutch. Words entered everyday life in both direct loans and calques. The Indonesian word for "hospital," rumah sakit, is a calque of the Dutch ziekenhuis, literally "sickhouse." The word for "zoo," kebun binatang, mirrors dierentuin, literally "animal garden."

  One legal artifact remains load-bearing in a quite literal sense: Indonesia's Civil Code has never been officially translated, and the original Dutch-language version dating from colonial times remains the authoritative text. Each year, some 1,500 to 2,000 students take Dutch courses at the Erasmus Language Centre in Jakarta, and roughly 35,000 university students across Indonesia study Dutch as a source language, primarily for law and history.

• 7. Dialects Dying and Surviving

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  Research by Geert Driessen has tracked what is happening to dialects within the Netherlands, and the numbers are striking. In 1995-27 percent of Dutch adults spoke a dialect or regional language on a regular basis. By 2011, that figure had fallen to 11 percent. Among children of primary school age, the drop was from 12 percent in 1995 to four percent in 2011. The standard language is absorbing the variation that once made travelling across the Low Countries a linguistic adventure.

  Not all dialects are declining at the same rate. Limburgish holds on most stubbornly: in 2011-54 percent of adults and 31 percent of children in the region still used it. West Frisian occupies a middle position, with 44 percent of adults and 22 percent of children retaining it. Dutch Low Saxon has fared worst among the officially recognised regional languages, with just 15 percent of adults and 1 percent of children still speaking it.

  One dialect shift, however, is moving in the opposite direction: spreading rather than contracting. Researchers have dubbed it Polder Dutch. Identified by Jan Stroop, it emerged in the 1970s, pioneered by older, well-educated women from the upper middle classes in the Dutch provinces of Utrecht, North Holland, and South Holland. These speakers lowered certain diphthongs that had been frozen in their current form since standardisation in the 16th century, when educated opinion had declared the lowered forms ugly and substandard. Stroop theorises that the change is phonetically natural, comparable in type to the English Great Vowel Shift and the German diphthongisation of high vowels. The women leading it, he argues, were newly affluent and independent enough to let a suppressed natural development finally run its course.