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  • Hello everyone. Welcome to the LangFocus channel and my name is Paul.

  • Today's topic is the Dutch language.

  • Dutch is a language that's spoken mainly in Europe but also in a few other places around the world.

  • It has 23 million native speakers and around 28 million speakers in total, including second language speakers.

  • It is most widely spoken in the Netherlands where it has around 16 million native speakers.

  • It is also spoken by around 60% of the population of Belgium, mostly in the northern region of Flanders.

  • That's around 6.5 million people

  • It's also spoken by a small number of people across the border in French Flanders, which lies adjacent to Belgium.

  • But only around 20,000 people there still speak it on a regular basis.

  • It is also spoken in the South American nation of Surinam where it has around 350,000 native speakers as well as around 250,000 second language speakers

  • it is also an official language on the island of Aruba, along with the language papiamento.

  • But few of the 100,000 people there actually use Dutch, even though they all learn it in school.

  • It is also spoken in Curacao where it is spoken by around 15,000 people as a native language

  • and by many of the other 140,000 people as a second language.

  • It is also an official language in Sint Maarten along with English.

  • A couple of thousand people there speak Dutch but English is actually much more common.

  • There is also Afrikaans, a language spoken in South Africa and Namibia

  • which is a daughter language of Dutch and is mutually intelligible to some extent

  • But i'll leave Afrikaans out for now and I'll speak about it in a different video in the future.

  • Dutch is a member of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic language family,

  • which also includes Afrikaans, Frisian, English and German, among others.

  • Dutch is one of the languages that is most closely related to English.

  • Actually, Frisian is more closely related to English than Dutch is but Dutch is a close second.

  • And a lot of people say that Dutch is quite similar to German too.

  • In fact, some people say that Dutch lies somewhere between English and German.

  • Now that's not a very precise statement but I think there is some truth to it.

  • The history of Dutch

  • All Germanic languages developed from Proto-Germanic which was spoken around 500 BCE

  • in northern continental Europe and also in Scandinavia.

  • By the 2nd century CE, it had begun diverging into distinct northern, western and eastern dialects.

  • The Western dialect is the ancestor of Dutch and of all of the West Germanic languages.

  • Variation developed in the Western dialect but all of its varieties remained intelligible until around the 8th c. CE.

  • But, by then, a series of sound changes have begun to take place that made Old High German,

  • the ancestor of modern German, much more distinct from the other West Germanic languages.

  • For more information on German and its history, check out my video on German right here

  • Old Dutch, also known as Old Low Franconian, remained unaffected by the changes that affected Old High German.

  • Also unaffected were : Old Saxon, Old Frisian an Old English

  • But those languages underwent a different series of sound changes.

  • But again Dutch was mostly unaffected by these changes too.

  • Middle Dutch

  • Old Dutch developed into Middle Dutch, which was spoken and written between 1150 and 1500 CE.

  • It was a rich literary period.

  • And literature from this time period is often quite readable for speakers of Modern Dutch, because Dutch is quite a conservative language.

  • Middle Dutch developed into Modern Dutch by the middle of the 16th century.

  • The process of the standardization of Dutch began in the year 1477 at the end of the Middle Dutch period.

  • The dialects of Flanders and Brabant were most influential at that time.

  • Then, in the 16th century, the move to standardization became stronger with the Antwerp dialect being the most influential.

  • In the year 1637, the first major Dutch Bible translation known as "Statenvertaling" had been published. ("Statenvertaling" means "translation of the States")

  • It had been translated in such a way that people from all over the country could read and understand it.

  • This Bible was read by nearly everyone and it helped greatly in the standardization of Dutch.

  • The southern Netherlands, now Belgium and Luxembourg were separate and under Spanish, Austrian and then French rule.

  • More than half of the people in Belgium spoke a dialect of Dutch but French was most widely used in public life in schools, etc...

  • So Dutch remained unstandardized there until the 19th century,

  • when the Flemish movement started standing up for the rights of Dutch-speakers.

  • They adopted the same standard language used in the Netherlands.

  • Nowadays in both the Netherlands and in Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, the situation is similar.

  • There are a number of spoken varieties of Dutch as well as a standard language.

  • So the difference lies mainly in pronunciation of standard Dutch and in the local dialects used.

  • The dialects of Flanders tend to be more conservative and use more older Dutch vocabulary.

  • Regional languages.

  • There are Dutch dialects but there are also different regional languages,

  • that are West Germanic languages and closely related to Dutch,

  • but not as closely related as the dialects that are considered part of Dutch.

  • Regional languages in the Netherlands include: - Frisian, in the northern province of Friesland

  • - Low Saxon in the northeast and there are various dialects of Low Saxon

  • - and Limburgish or East Low Franconian in the southeast.

  • Low Saxon spreads across the border with Germany and forms part of a dialect continuum between Dutch and German.

  • If you've seen my German video, you know that the dialects in northern Germany are referred to as Low German and can be considered a separate language.

  • The Dutch Low Saxon dialects are closely related to the Low German dialects across the border.

  • This is also true for Limburgish which is related to Franconian dialect spoken across the border in Germany.

  • It should be noted that Dutch dialects and regional languages are in decline with standard Dutch becoming more widespread.

  • And with some people speaking a kind of combination of standard Dutch with some dialectal features.

  • So what is Dutch like?

  • Dutch is not mutually intelligible with English but you will often notice cognate vocabulary.

  • and at the most basic level, you will notice similar grammar,

  • if you disregard the details and just look at the most basic sentences.

  • Occasionally there are sentences in Dutch that might be strangely familiar to English speakers. For example:

  • This means: "What is pour name?"

  • This means: "My name is Luke"

  • This means: "The bear drank beer"

  • (The guy must have gotten that one in Duolingo)

  • This means: "It is not far"

  • This means: "That is good news"

  • Now, if all Dutch sentences were so similar to English, then the two languages could probably be quite intelligible with each other.

  • but most Dutch sentences are not that similar to English. But you will see a lot of cognate vocabulary.

  • Grammar

  • Similar to German, Dutch is a language that places verbs at the end of the sentence, after the first initial verb.

  • So its underlying structure is basically SOV, but the first verb is in second position after the subject.

  • So, if there's only one verb in the sentence, then it's basically like SVO.

  • Here's a sentence with one verb.

  • This means "I am writing a letter".

  • Word by word, this is like : " I - write - a - letter "

  • Just like English, with the verb in second position.

  • Here's a sentence with two verbs:

  • This means: "I want to give you some goodies".

  • Word by word, that is "I - want - you (indirect object) - some - goodies - give".

  • In this sentence, the first verb is in second position

  • but the next verb comes at the end of the sentence.

  • Nouns

  • Gender

  • When it comes to gender, Dutch traditionally has 3 genders: masculine, feminine and neuter

  • But, in modern spoken Dutch, the distinction between masculine and feminine gender has almost become irrelevant, because they don't look or sound different.

  • It used to determine which pronoun would be used to refer to those nouns, whether it's "he" or "she",

  • but people generally just use "he" these days.

  • So now the two genders are basically: common gender and neuter.

  • The noun's gender agrees with articles as well as the forms of adjectives

  • PLURAL

  • There are two types of plural endings in Dutch

  • One is "-en" and the other is "-s"

  • There are some - well, not rules but - patterns for when to use each one but there are a lot of exceptions.

  • So you have words like :

  • Deur - DeurEN = "Door(s)"

  • Boot - BOTEN = "Boat(s)"

  • and you have words like:

  • Sleutel - SleutelS = "Key(s)"

  • Lepel - LepelS = "spoon(s)"

  • A few neuter nouns have a plural form "-eren". For example:

  • Kind - KindEREN = "child - children"

  • Cases

  • Dutch used to have noun cases similar to German.

  • There were four cases: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative.

  • These were part of standard written Dutch until the 1940s but they were dropped because nobody use them in speech anymore.

  • There are several different articles in Dutch.

  • There is an indefinite article : "een"

  • And there are definite articles for singular and for plural nouns.

  • For singular masculine: "de"

  • For singular feminine: "de"

  • For singular neuter : "het"

  • And the definite article for plural for all genders : "de"

  • An interesting thing is there is a negative article: "geen"

  • This is the same for all genders and for both singular and plural.

  • Verbs

  • There are two verb tenses in Dutch : past and present, or non past.

  • But saying there are two tenses is kind of misleading, because, similar to in English, the verb can be used

  • in combination with different auxiliary verbs to express different meanings.

  • And there are participial forms that can be used to show passive or continuous actions

  • For example:

  • Here's a sentence using the simple past:

  • This means "He built a house"

  • So we start with the infinitive "bouwen"

  • And this is the verb stem "bouw" and this is the past tense form : "bouwde"

  • Now here's a present perfect sentence: "Hij heeft een huis gebouwd"

  • This means: "he has built a house"

  • so we start with the infinitive "hebben"

  • and here's the verb stem : "heb" and here's the past tense "heeft"

  • and the second verb is a past participle

  • This is formed by adding the prefix "ge-" and the suffix "-d"

  • Notice again that the second verb is at the end of the sentence, even though the first verb is in second position after the subject.

  • There are three different ways to express the future tense:

  • One of them is to use this auxiliary verb "zullen" This means something like "shall" or "will".

  • The sentence means "I will do it tomorrow".

  • You can also use this verb meaning "to go" ("gaan") plus the infinitive

  • This is similar to using "going to" in English.

  • For example:

  • This means "It's going to rain"

  • And you can also use the present tense for the future.

  • This means "They won't come until later"

  • Literally "They come only later"

  • So the verb system in Dutch is rather similar to the one used in English.

  • The main difference being that any verb after the first one comes at the end.

  • Pronunciation

  • One of the hardest parts of learning Dutch might be the pronunciation

  • because there are some sounds that can be a challenge for learners.

  • And native speakers of dutch seem quite conscious of the challenges we face.

  • That was kind of an indirect way of saying: "they think our pronunciation sucks"

  • Some of the sounds that require special effort are the Dutch G sound. For example:

  • and the sound which "CH" often represents. For example:

  • Notice that this is the same sound as the one represented by G.

  • But in other cases, CH represents the "ch" sound

  • and sometimes those sounds come at the beginning of a word which is a little bit of a challenge

  • but sometimes, they come right after the letter S like in the word for "school"

  • This sound combination is quite common in Dutch.

  • There are a lot of long words in Dutch. Some of them can be over 30 characters long.

  • Here are a couple extreme examples:

  • This one means "multiple personality disorder" and that is 35 characters long.

  • This one means: "preparation activities for a children's carnival procession" and this is 53 characters long.

  • And Dutch has also has a lot of colorful idioms. For example:

  • This means "make the cat wise"

  • This means that someone is saying something so outlandish or unbelievable that even the cat won't believe it.

  • Another example:

  • This means "he has a beard and his throat".

  • This idiom describes the situation when a boy reaches puberty and his voice starts to change.

  • How hard is Dutch to learn?

  • For English speakers, a lot of Dutch will seem strangely familiar.

  • And of course that will help.

  • But there are some issues in learning the pronunciation as well as the finer details of grammar.

  • But maybe the hardest thing about learning Dutch is that Dutch speakers usually speak English very well.

  • So it will be hard to practice.

  • When you try to speak Dutch with people, they will probably answer you in English.

  • But you can solve that problem by taking some lessons or doing a language exchange

  • and practicing on your own until you reach a fairly good level and have a fairly good base

  • Then, after that, you can speak to people in Dutch without totally pissing them off.

  • 00:12:10,980 --> 00:12:13,200 The question of the day for native speakers of Dutch:

  • How well can you understand the speakers of regional languages that are related to Dutch?

  • Languages like Frisian or Low Saxon.

  • And for people who have studied Dutch: What was your experience with trying to learn and practice Dutch?

  • How do people respond to you? Did they answer you in English?

  • What was the best way for you to learn and practice Dutch?

  • Leave your answers and your comments down below.

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  • Thank you for watching and have a nice day.

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