01
Origins
Low Franconian continues the speech of the Salian Franks and their neighbours in the delta of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt. It sits between two areas of change. To the south, the High German consonant shift stopped short of it (Dutch maken, water, pond). To the north and west, it shared only a few of the North Sea features that shaped English and Frisian. Dutch keeps the nasal in ons 'us', gans 'goose' and mond 'mouth', though a few words such as vijf 'five' show the coastal change.
The oldest connected text is the Wachtendonck Psalms, a 10th-century psalm translation that survives only in later copies. The best-known early line, Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan… ('All birds have begun their nests…'), was written in the late 11th century by a Flemish monk in an English monastery.
02
Middle Dutch to Modern Dutch
In the Middle Ages the cities of Flanders and Brabant set the literary tone. After the Spanish reconquest of the south in the late 16th century, many of their writers and merchants moved north, and Holland became the centre. The Middle Dutch long vowels spelled ij and ui became diphthongs in this period (wijn 'wine', huis 'house'), a change that parallels the High German one but happened independently. The Statenbijbel of 1637, the official Dutch Bible translation, became a model for the written standard.
03
Dutch Overseas
Dutch trading empires carried the language to the Cape, the Caribbean, North America and the Indonesian archipelago. In Indonesia Dutch never became a mass language, but it left hundreds of everyday words in Indonesian: kantor 'office' (kantoor), handuk 'towel' (handdoek), kulkas 'refrigerator' (koelkast), wortel 'carrot'.
At the Cape, the Dutch of settlers from 1652 developed among a multilingual population of Khoekhoe, enslaved people from Asia and Africa, and European immigrants. The result was Afrikaans, which replaced Dutch as an official language of South Africa in 1925. How it formed, as ordinary Dutch change or through creolisation, is one of the classic debates in contact linguistics.
In its own words
Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan
- Hebban
- olla
- vogala
- nestas
- hagunnan
Sources (1)
Where it’s spoken
- Netherlands
- Belgium
- South Africa
- Namibia
- Suriname
Turning points
- Split
Franks of the lower Rhine
The Frankish dialects of the delta develop apart from those upriver, which take part in the High German shift. The line between them, later the Benrath and Uerdingen isoglosses, becomes the border between Dutch and German dialects.
Sources (1)
- WritingContested
Old Dutch in writing
The Wachtendonck Psalms (10th century) and the Hebban olla vogala line (late 11th century) are the earliest Dutch texts in Latin letters. Whether the famous line is purely Old West Flemish or partly Old English has been debated.
Sources (1)
- Sound law
Dutch diphthongisation
Long iː and yː become ɛi and œy in Holland and Brabant: wijn 'wine', huis 'house'. The change parallels New High German diphthongisation but happened independently.
Compare with other vowel shifts across families →
Sources (1)
- SplitContested
Cape Dutch becomes Afrikaans
At the Dutch East India Company's Cape settlement, Dutch is used by a mixed population and loses most verb inflection and grammatical gender. By the 19th century it is a separate language, Afrikaans. How much of that change comes from contact is contested.
Sources (2)
- Contact
Dutch loanwords in Indonesian
Colonial administration, schooling and trade in the Dutch East Indies bring hundreds of Dutch words into Malay and later Indonesian, especially for offices, technology and household items: kantor (kantoor), handuk (handdoek), kulkas (koelkast).
Sources (1)
Contested classifications
- Minority position
Afrikaans as a creole or semi-creole
Evidence for
Afrikaans lost almost all verb inflection for person and number, grammatical gender, and the simple past tense. It also has double negation (nie … nie). It formed in a strongly multilingual colonial society, where many speakers learned Dutch as a second language, including Khoekhoe speakers and enslaved people who spoke Malay and Portuguese creole.
Evidence against
Nearly all of its vocabulary and most of its grammar continue 17th-century Hollandic Dutch, and several of the 'creole' simplifications have parallels in Dutch dialects. There is no evidence of an earlier pidgin stage. Most specialists describe Afrikaans as Dutch that was restructured by contact, but not as a creole.
Sources (3)