ABSTRACT
Dutch is an official language in the Netherlands, Belgium, Surinam and the former Dutch Antilles (including Aruba). It is spoken as a first language by some 20 million people in Europe. The language has been and is known under a variety of names. In the Middle Ages it was called Diets(ch) or Duits(ch) (from which its English name derives), in the Renaissance period this was further specified as Nederduits(ch) (lit.) ‘Nether Dutch’, to distinguish it from its eastern neighbours (High and Low) German, which, in the course of time, monopolized the name Duits. The official modern name Nederlands (‘Netherlands’) is fairly recent, and did not succeed in ousting popular designations like Hollands and Vlaams ‘Flemish’; the latter names are largely restricted to the language as spoken in the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively. Although the geographical distribution of Dutch is rather limited, there is a wide variety of regional dialects, the mutual intelligibility of which is often low. The diversity may be traced back to at least two sets of factors, one intra-, one extralinguistic in nature.
