About the Dutch language
04 Jul 2011
‘Scheveningen’, ‘kruiden’, ‘stofzuiger’, ‘geheugen’. Dutch pronunciation may be a bit of a challenge. ‘Sch’, the rolling ‘r’, ‘ui’ and ‘eu’, and the guttural ‘g’ may take some time to master, but also make the practice all the more fun.
Dutch is a West Germanic language, strongly related to German and with many resemblances to English. It is spoken by more than 22 million people around the globe.
Dutch language area
Dutch is an official language in the Netherlands, Belgium, Surinam, Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. In addition, it is very closely related to Afrikaans (spoken in South Africa) and in Indonesia some of the older inhabitants still speak Dutch. Take a look at the map of the Dutch language area.
Biggest dictionary
If you learn Dutch, be prepared to work on your vocabulary as the Dutch have published the biggest dictionary in the world. The making of the dictionary, which includes Dutch words from the period between 1500 and 1976, took almost 150 years. It has been published in various editions. All together there are 40 volumes with a total of 45,805 pages in which 400,000 words are discussed.
Some 1.7 million citations and about 50 million words are used to illustrate the meanings of these words. These are all world records.
Loanwords
Without even realizing it, you may already know some words in the Dutch dictionary. There are some 17,560 Dutch words that other languages have borrowed. Research has indicated that the words bak (bin), pen (pen), pomp (pump), kraan (crane/tap), and gas (gas), are among the words most borrowed by other languages. The Dutch word baas (boss), can be traced back in 57 languages spread over all continents and is therefore the most widely adopted Dutch word (Source: Dutch News).
More information
For more information on the Dutch language, visit the website of Taalunieversum (in Dutch).