One of the highlights of the last World Cup was the arrival of several thousand fans from the Orange Country of Tulips in Brazil. She is a European state, having two almost identical geographical names at once - Holland and the Netherlands. And the main language, in which both “orange” fans and football players who became bronze medalists of the championship, spoke in Brazil, is called Dutch or Dutch, as well as Flemish and even Afrikaans.
Orange tongue
Despite the presence of several options at once, officially the country, whose symbols are orange and a tulip, is called the Netherlands. And its main language is called, respectively, Dutch. As for the Dutch, this name originated by analogy with the name of the two provinces of the country - Northern and Southern Holland, and a pronunciation error is not considered even in the country itself. The Flemish language is more related to the Belgian region of Flanders, where many immigrants from neighboring Netherlands live. Having become Flemings in Belgium, they nevertheless managed to preserve the culture and traditions of their ancestors.
Attention to Germany
According to statisticians, the language spoken in the world by at least 23 million people, including 16.8 million in the Netherlands themselves, originated from the time when the Frankish tribes lived in Europe. It comes from the West Germanic language of the Indo-European group, which was once spoken by coastal francs. Old English is considered to be “relatives” of the Dutch (thanks to which almost every resident of the Netherlands knows modern English), Frisian and Low German.
In addition to the Netherlands themselves, it is also most common in Belgium. Where, however, there are a huge number of dialects (there are more than two and a half thousand of them). Flemish in this country is one of the two official languages; more than six million Belgians speak it. And in Flanders, he is completely the only official. Surely they did not have time to forget the Netherlands in the former overseas colonies - in Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies), Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. Small communities of the Dutch, who also retained their language, exist in the border regions of Germany, in the north of France (French Flanders), in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and some other countries.
According to official figures, 96% of the inhabitants of the "orange" country consider their native Dutch language. The remaining four percent consider themselves to be native speakers of West Frisian (this is the official language of the province of Friesland), Lower Saxon dialects of German, which are spoken mainly in the north-east of the country and northern Germany, and the Limburger dialect Nizhne-Frankish, widespread in the southeast of the Netherlands and in Germany. All these languages are recognized by the Dutch government as regional and are supported by it in accordance with the European Charter for the Languages of National Minorities.
