It was first recorded in 786, when the Bishop of Ostia writes to Pope Adrian I about a synod taking place in Corbridge, England, where the decisions are being written down "tam Latine quam theodisce" meaning "in Latin as well as common vernacular".
The term was used as opposed to Latin, the non-native language of writing and the Catholic Church. In this sense, it meant "the language of the common people". Theodiscus was its Latinised form and used as an adjective referring to the Germanic vernaculars of the Early Middle Ages. The stem of this word, *þeudō, meant "people" in Proto-Germanic, and *-iskaz was an adjective-forming suffix, of which -ish is the Modern English form. The word is derived from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz. Įnglish is the only language to use the adjective Dutch for the language of the Netherlands and Flanders or something else from the Netherlands. Sometimes Vlaams (" Flemish") is used as well to describe Standard Dutch in Flanders, whereas Hollands (" Hollandic") is occasionally used as a colloquial term for the standard language in the central and northwestern parts of the Netherlands. In both Belgium and the Netherlands, the native official name for Dutch is Nederlands (historically Nederlandsch before the Dutch orthography reforms). Main article: Terminology of the Low Countries Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and incorporates slightly more Romance loans than German but far fewer than English. Features shared with German include the survival of two to three grammatical genders-albeit with few grammatical consequences -as well as the use of modal particles, final-obstruent devoicing, and a similar word order. Dutch, like English, has not undergone the High German consonant shift, does not use Germanic umlaut as a grammatical marker, has largely abandoned the use of the subjunctive, and has levelled much of its morphology, including most of its case system.
ĭutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English and is colloquially said to be "roughly in between" them. The Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa have evolved into Afrikaans, a mutually intelligible daughter language which is spoken to some degree by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia. Historical linguistic minorities on the verge of extinction remain in parts of France and Germany, and in Indonesia, while up to half a million native speakers may reside in the United States, Canada and Australia combined.
Outside the Low Countries, it is the native language of the majority of the population of Suriname where it also holds an official status, as it does in Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, which are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and are located in the Caribbean. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives English and German. Dutch ( Nederlands ( listen)) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million people as a second language, constituting most of the population of the Netherlands (where it is the only official language countrywide) and about 60% of the population of Belgium (as one of three official languages).