DUTCH
Even though you may not need to communicate in Dutch at present, you might in the future. Why not start now?
Learning a language is a long-term process. By the time that opportunity rolls along, you will be speaking Dutch well, and a quick brush-up course for business Dutch will be all you need to ready yourself for your next career step.
WHERE IS IT SPOKEN?
NETHERLANDS
Belgium (Flanders)
Suriname.
Aruba,
Curaçao
St Maarten.
NUMBER OF SPEAKERS
23 MILLION
LANGUAGE FAMILY
INDO-EUROPEAN
THREE FUN FACTS ABOUT DUTCH
1. Afrikaans and dutch are (barely) mutually intelligible.
Afrikaans, one of the national languages of South Africa, is descended from the Dutch spoken by Dutch settlers. The two languages are still mutually intelligible, but just barely. Dutch speakers have an easier time understanding Afrikaans than the other way around.
2. Over 150,000 americans speak dutch at home.
In fact, Dutch is one of the top 15 languages in 3 states: Delaware, Indiana and Ohio.
However, the percentage of Dutch speakers in America used to be much higher. In New York, alongside the Hudson River, Dutch settlers and their descendants spoke Dutch for generations. In fact, Martin Van Buren, the eighth President, spoke Dutch as a child, as his first language. Van Buren was the only US president to speak English as a second language.
3. Dutch people call their language "nederlands." they call german "duits."
Dutch, Duits and Deutsch all come from the Old Germanic word theudisk, which means “the language of the people.”
