Dutch

Where it’s spoken

Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands and one of three official languages of Belgium, where it is spoken in Flanders and Brussels (often called Flemish, though the standard written form is essentially identical to Dutch in the Netherlands). Dutch is also official in Suriname and on the Caribbean Dutch islands (Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten). Afrikaans, spoken in South Africa, descends from 17th-century Dutch.

What it sounds like

Dutch has front rounded vowels (ü, eu) and the famously hard “g/ch” sound — a velar fricative pronounced more forcefully than German’s. The “ij” diphthong is iconic. Words like Scheveningen are used as historical shibboleths.

How it’s written

Dutch uses the Latin alphabet with the digraph “ij” sometimes treated as a single letter (capitalized as “IJ”). Spelling follows a complex system of doubling vowels in open syllables and consonants in closed syllables to mark vowel length.

History

Old Low Franconian, the direct ancestor of Dutch, was the language of the medieval Low Countries. Standardization began with the 1637 Statenvertaling Bible, and the modern orthography was last reformed in 2005.