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Speaker 1:          00:00          Hello everyone, welcome to the Lange Focus Channel and my name is Paul. Today's topic is the Dutch language Dutch as 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 has also spoken by around 60 percent of the population of Belgium, mostly in the northern region of Flanders. That's around six point $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 has also spoken in the South American nation of Suriname where it has around 350,000 native speakers as well as around $250,000.

Speaker 1:          00:48          Second language speakers. It is also an official language on the island of Aruba, along with the language poppy, a mental, but few of the hundred thousand people that are actually used Dutch even though they all learn it in school. It has also spoken in Jira, so 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 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 Africans out for now and I'll speak about it in a different video in the future. Dutch as a member of the West dramatic branch of the dramatic language family, which also includes Afrikaans, Friesian, English and German among others.

Speaker 1:          01:35          Dutch is one of the languages that is most closely related to English. Actually, Phrygian is more closely related to English, then Dutches, 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 dramatic language is developed from Provo Germanic, which was spoken around 500 bce in northern continental Europe and also in Scandinavia by the second century ce. It had begun diverging into distinct northern western and eastern dialects. The Western dialect is the ancestor of Dutch and have all of the West Germanic languages. Variation developed in the western dialects, but all of its varieties remained intelligible until around the eighth century CE. But by then a series of sound changes had begun to take place that made old high German, the ancestor of modern German, much more distinct from the other western manic languages.

Speaker 1:          02:29          For more information on German that it's history, check out my video on German, right to hear old Dutch. Also known as old low Franconian remained unaffected by the changes that affected old high German, also unaffected. We're old Saxon Bolt, Friesian and old English, but those languages underwent a different series of sound changes, but again, Dutch was mostly unaffected by these changes to middle Dutch, old Dutch developed into Middle Dutch, which was spoken and written between 1150 and 1500 cd. It was a rich literary periods 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 14, 77 at the end of the Middle Dutch period. The dialects of flenders and Brad bond were most influential at that time.

Speaker 1:          03:19          Then in the 16th century, the move to standardization became stronger with the end top dialect being the most influential in the year. 16, 37, the first major Dutch Bible translation known as starts in and had been published. It hasn't 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.

Speaker 1:          04:09          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 flenders 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 dramatic 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 friction in the northern province of friesland, low saxon and the northeast, and there are various dialects of low saxon and lindbergh ish or east low franconia in the se lo 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.

Speaker 1:          05:00          The dutch low saxon dialects are closely related to the low german dialects across the border. This is also true for linda borgess, which is related to franconia and dialects 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? Dutchess, not mutually intelligible with english, but you will often notice cognitive 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 of this year, this means, what is your name? Man amish to duke. This means my name is luke to beach, drunk beach.

Speaker 1:          05:45          This one means the bear drank beer. I think I must have gotten that one from duolingo. This neat fit. This means it is not far these news. This means that is good news now at all dutch sentences were so similar to english than the two languages could probably be quite intelligible with each other, but most sentences are not that similar to english, but you will see a lot of cognitive vocabulary, grammar, similar to german, dutch as a language that places verbs at the end of the sentence, after the first initial group. So it's 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 him belief. This means I am writing a letter word by word. This is like I write a letter just like english with the bourbon second position.

Speaker 1:          06:33          Here's the sentence with two verbs. He can fuel you have of liquors cave, and this means I want to give you some goodies word by word. It's I want you indirect object. Some goodies give in the 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 three 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 announced gender agrees with articles as well as the forms of adjectives, plural. There are two types of neural endings in dutch, one is n, and the other is yes, 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 douche dude and votes bulletin and you have words like just little doodles, the labels, a few neuter nouns have a plural form.

Speaker 1:          07:40          Irwin, for example, cases dutch used to have now in cases similar to german, there were four cases, nominative, genitive, dative and accusative. These were part of standard written dutch until the 19 forties, but they were dropped because nobody used them in speech anymore.

Speaker 1:          08:00          There are several different articles in dutch. There is an indefinite article and and there are definite articles for singular and plural nouns for singular masculine, the for singular feminine, the for singular neuter head and the definite article for plural, for all genders. The an interesting thing is there is a negative article came. 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 an english, the verb can be used in combination with different auxiliary verbs to express different meanings, and there are participle forms that can be used to show a passive or continuous action. For example, here's a sentence using the simple past had about this means he built a house. So we start with the infinitive bowen, and this is the verb stem, and this is the past tense form boda.

Speaker 1:          08:55          Now here's a perfect sentence. Often, often boats, this means he has built a house, so we start with the infinitive heaven and here's the verb stem, and here's the past tense, and the second verb is a past participle. This is formed by adding the prefix and the suffix. The 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. This means something like shell or will he had more than this sentence means I will do it tomorrow. You can also use this verb meaning to go plus the infinitive. This is similar to using going to an english, for example, headscarf and eighth, and then this means it's going to rain and you can also use the present tense for the future xy coleman per slot.

Speaker 1:          09:47          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 ge, but in other cases, ch represents the ship sound. Now, 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 skol.

Speaker 1:          10:38          The 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 of extreme examples. Myhrvold persona, the kite store, nice. This one means multiple personality disorder and that is 35 characters long through it, but adding reading some hayden plum. This one means preparation activities for our children's carnival procession and this is 53 characters long and dutch also has a lot of colorful idioms, for example, mocked up the guts. This means make the cat wires. This means that someone is saying something so outlandish or unbelievable that even the cat won't believe it. Another example of houston, but indicator, this means he has a beard in his throat. This idiom describes a situation when a boy reaches puberty and his voice starts to change. How hard is dutch to learn for english speakers?

Speaker 1:          11:28          A lot of dutch will seem strangely familiar and of course that will help, but there are some issues and 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'll 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.

Speaker 1:          12:00          The question of the day. For native speakers of dutch, how well can you understand the speakers have 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 did 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. Be sure to follow lang, focus on twitter, on facebook and on instagram, and thanks again to all of my patrion supporters for your wonderful contributions every month. Thank you for watching and have a nice day.