11.4. Dutch
Dutch is the language of the inhabitants of the Netherlands, the northern half of Belgium, the northern part of Nord Department in France, and the Netherlands overseas territories.
For almost four centuries, the Netherlands has exerted an influence over world affairs far beyond proportion to its size, population or natural resources. The country learned long ago how to transform national handicaps into international asserts. Canals and waterways reclaimed cities like Amsterdam from the sea. Also, by the late 1600-s the country had evolved into Northern Europe’s most advanced distribution network for waterborne cargo. By the 1700-s Amsterdam had emerged as Europe’s leading financial centre. Although today the Netherlands ranks 121st in size among the world’s nations, it boasts the 13th largest economy in the world. The Dutch are among the best trained workers in Europe. Besides, nearly three-quarters of the population speak a second language. English - language education in Holland is emphasized in undergraduate programmes at most Dutch universities. The growing demand for an Anglo-American curriculum is provided by English instruction from pre-kindergarten to grade 12.
The nightmare of Dutch-language defenders is that a large elitist group of Dutchmen speaking international English with a limited vocabulary may consign Dutch to second-class status, a kind of “hick” dialect for an underclass.
Only 25 million people use Dutch or a form of it as their mother tongue: the Dutch themselves (14 million), Belgium’s Flemings (6 million); the rest are South Africa’s Afrikaaners, a dwindling number of people in former Dutch colonies and natives of Flanders in northern France.
In the National language movement the Belgian Flemings are the advance guard of the save-Dutch campaign. They are furious to find that the Dutch have put their wallets before independence. Unfortunately, cultural identity enjoys a lower priority than fruitful participation in world commerce.
Dutch is a laughing stock among the neighbouring nations. “Double Dutch” for an Englishman means nonsense. “Dutch courage” makes you do crazy things. French speakers from Belgium consider Dutch a throat-clearing exercise that fails to achieve its objective. Neighbouring Germans would complain even more if Dutch were not so closely related to their own tongue. In fact, some of the Dutch words look familiar (man, hand, warm), but most don’t. Vowels seem to pile up, forming up words of considerable length, cf. afvalwaterzuiveringsinstalatie is one word which denotes a waste-water-purification plant.
The problem is also with the term Dutch. The name Dutch is derived from the word Dietsch, meaning the vernacular, as distinguished from Latin.
The Dutch themselves may call their language Hollands. This name reflects the key position of North and South Holland in the evolution of the standard language.
The Flemings normally call their language Vlaams (Flemish).
But in linguistic works, both the Dutch and Flemings refer to their language as Nederlands. In this case, Dutch and Flemish are distinguished in the terms Noordnederlands and Zuidnederlands.
The Flemish form for Dutch is Diets. Its corresponding northern form is duits. The word is believed to continue Old Franconian *theudisk (tribal), pertaining to the people from *theod (tribe or people). In other words, originally Dutch denoted the Germanic race or the German peoples generally (OHG diutusc < diot, OE theod, Goth. thiuda “people”). The word first occurs in the latinised form theodiscus, late in the 8th century.
Dutch is now spoken in the former territories of the Frisians, the Saxons, and the Franks. The Frisians were settled along the North Sea coast as far south as Dunkirk. The Saxons in their westward migrations invaded some of the Frisian territory and might have crossed the sea on their way to the British Isles from the coastal region of Belgium and Zeeland. The Salian Franks were settled south of the Saxons. They expanded to the Low Countries until they were given permission by the Roman administration to inhabit an area on the present Belgian-Dutch frontier.
Immediately after (4c AD) the Franks pushed the Saxons to the north. The fortified line from Maastricht to Boulogne prevented further expansion of the Franks on the Roman territory. However, with the final recall of the garrisons from the fortified like to Rome in 402, the Franks at last were able to cross the line, thus resuming their movements east and south-east. The Gaulish population welcomed the Franks, as they helped to break the law of the Romans. The deeper the Franks moved into Gaul, the scarcer became the populated areas. In the areas of thicker settlement Franconian speech prevailed. Under Frankish influence Roman Gaul was divided into two linguistic regions, Langue d’Oc in the south and Langue d’Oïl in the north.
The history of Dutch may be divided into three periods: Old Dutch, Middle Dutch and Modern Dutch.
Very little is known about Old Dutch which was spoken in the Low Countries to about the last quarter of the 12th century. The earliest manuscript (from the 10th century) is a fragmentary translation of the Psalter. It consists of some 25 psalms. The language of this document is termed Old Low Franconian, a Low German dialect close to Old Saxon. The translation shares some common features with Old Saxon: for example, it shows no traces of the High German consonant shift. On the other land, the language of the document has notable peculiarities, first and foremost in the plural endings of the verbs: like in Old High German, Old Low Franconian had different plural endings, whereas Old Saxon gave a single plural ending in a verb paradigm.
It has been proved that Saxon did no play a decisive part in the evolution of Dutch. The basis of Dutch is only Franconian.
The second period, Middle Dutch, extends from 1100 to 1550. The literary records began about 1170. They become most abundant after 1250.
The language underwent changes in sounds and inflections during these four centuries. Middle Dutch was not a uniform language, dialect speaking prevailed. Without written standard, each writer used his own dialect.
As early as the 13th century the poet Jacob van Maerlant (1235-1300) made an attempt at establishing a literary Dutch. His moralizing work dealt with natural history, government, and the Bible.
The third period, Modern Dutch, extends from 1550 to the present day. Bruges and Ghent, later Brussels and Antwerp, were the main centers. Modern Dutch has a marked southern bias. The dialects of Flanders, Brabant, and Holland represent the West-Lower-Frankish branch of the Germanic languages. Through the Holland and West-Flemish dialects Ingvaeonian features survived.
At the beginning of the modern period the long leading position of Flanders and Brabant ended. In 1581 the northern provinces declared independence. In 1585 Antwerp fell, and the southern provinces passed into Spanish hands. More and more refugees were forced to flee to the north, where in 1588 the Dutch Republic was proclaimed. The freed northern provinces attained a high degree of general prosperity. By 1650 the Dutch Republic had become the leading colonial power and the main center of finance and trade. The focal points (Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leyden, the Hague) were all in the province of Holland. Now the province of Holland became the basis for written Dutch.