Introduction

The language known to us as Dutch is spoken natively by some 16,000,000 people in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and by about 6,000,000 in Flanders, the northern half of the recently federalized Kingdom of Belgium. One occasionally sees “Dutch” and “Flemish” referred to as though they were two separate languages, but in reality there is a single standard language spoken by these 22 million people. There are some differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and occasionally style, but they are no more important than those between the British and the American varieties of English – even less if we count the fact that there are no differences in grammar and spelling customs.