ABSTRACT
Modern Standard Dutch is the oficial language of the Netherlands and one of the of official language of Belgium. In the two countries together, the number of speakers is approximately 24 million. The official Dutch name of the language is Nederlands. It is sometimes Hollands, after the most influential provinces Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland, and the variety of Dutch that is spoken in Belgium is often, incorrectly, referred to as Flemish (Vlaams). Frisian (Dutch Fries) is a separate language spoken in the north-east of the Netherlands and is in some respects closer to English than to Dutch. Afrikaans, the language of part of the white and mixed-race population of the Republic of South Africa, is derived from Dutch dialects but is now regarded as a separate language. Dutch is also the official language of administration in Surinam (formerly Dutch Guyana) and the Caribbean islands Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten but it is not widely spoken there. Some Dutch is still spoken in Indonesia. Dutch-based creole languages have never had many speakers, and the language known as Negerhollands (‘Negro Dutch’) on the Virgin Islands has become virtually extinct. Both Sranan, the English-based creole spoken by a large number of inhabitants of Surinam, and Papiamentu, a Spanish- and Portuguese-based creole spoken in the Antilles, have been influenced by Dutch, and Sranan increasingly so. Afrikaans also shows definite features of creolisation.
