- History of Dutch
Dutch is a
West Germanic language , that originated from theOld Frankish dialects.Among the words with which Dutch has enriched the English vocabulary are: "brandy, cole slaw, cookie, cruiser, dock, easel, freight, landscape, spook, stoop, and yacht". Dutch is noteworthy as the language of an outstanding literature, but it also became important as the tongue of an enterprising people, who, though comparatively few in number, made their mark on the
world community through trade and empire. Dutch is also among some of the earliest recorded languages ofEurope . Countries that have Dutch as an official language areAruba ,Belgium , theNetherlands , theDutch Antilles andSuriname .Before the Franks
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Pre-Roman Iron Age culture(s) associated with Proto-Germanic, ca500 BC -50 BC . The area south of Scandinavia is theJastorf culture .] Dutch is grouped within the Indo-European language group, which means it shares a common ancestor (which is estimated to be spoken around 5000 BC) with languages such as Greek, Iranian, Polish, Spanish and many others.There is no direct evidence of this ancestral
Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), because it was never written down. All PIE sounds and words are reconstructed using thecomparative method and the method ofinternal reconstruction . Theasterisk is used to mark reconstructed PIE words, such as *unicode|wódr̥ "water ", *unicode|ḱwṓn "dog ", or *unicode|tréyes "three (masculine)". Many of the words in the modern Indo-European languages seem to have derived from such "protowords" via regularsound change s (e.g.,Grimm's law ).Proto-Germanic is the common, but not direct, ancestor (
proto-language ) of Germanic languages such as Proto-Norse, Anglo-Frisian,Old High German ,Old Dutch and Gothic, and the contemporaryGermanic languages . There are no known documents in Proto-Germanic, which was unwritten, and virtually all our knowledge of this extinct language has been obtained by application of thecomparative method . There are a few surviving inscriptions in arunic script fromScandinavia dated to c.200 which many feel represent a stage of Proto-Norse immediately after the "Proto-Germanic" stage, if not exactly identical.Proto-Germanic is itself descended from the earlier mentioned Proto-Indo-European.
West Germanic From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic dialects were divided into three groups, West, East and North Germanic. Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, and they remained mutually intelligible to some degree throughout the Migration period, this means some individual dialects are difficult to classify. The Western group would have formed as a dialect of
Proto-Germanic in the lateJastorf culture (ca.1st century BC ).During the
Early Middle Ages , the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development ofMiddle English and relatedOld Frisian , theHigh German consonant shift , and the relatively conservative (in respect to common West Germanic) ancestors ofLow Saxon andOld Dutch .The Frankish language
The Frankish language, also Old Frankish was the language of the Franks. Classified as a West Germanic language, it was spoken in areas covering modern France, Germany, and the Low Countries in Merovingian times, preceding the 6th/7th century. The Franks first established themselves in the Netherlands and Flanders before they started to fight their way down south and east. The language had a significant impact on Old French. It evolved into
Old Low Franconian in the north and it was replaced by French in the south, Old Frankish is not directly attested and is reconstructed from loanwords in Old French, and from Old Dutch.Old Dutch Old Dutch, is the language ancestral to the Low Franconian languages, including Dutch itself. It was spoken between the 6th and 11th centuries, continuing the earlier Old Frankish language.
The present Dutch
standard language is derived fromOld Dutch dialects spoken in theLow Countries that were first recorded in theSalic law , a Frankish document written around 510. From this document originated the oldest sentence that has been indentified as Dutch: "Maltho thi afrio lito" as sentence used to free a serf. Other old segments of Dutch are "Visc flot aftar themo uuatare" ("A fish was swimming in the water") and "Gelobistu in got alamehtigan fadaer" ("Do you believe in God the almighty father"). The latter fragment was written around900 .Arguably the most famous text containing "Old Dutch" is:"
Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan, hinase hic enda tu, wat unbidan we nu" ("All birds have started making nests, except me and you, what are we waiting for"), dating around the year1100 , written by a Flemishmonk in aconvent in Rochester,England . For a long time this sentence was considered to be the earliest in Dutch, but some scholars now believe it to beOld English .The oldest known single word is "vadam" (modern Dutch "wad," English: mudflat), from the year
107 CE.Middle Dutch
Linguistically speaking, Middle Dutch is a collective name for closely related dialects which were spoken and written between about
1150 and1550 in the present-day Dutch-speaking region. There was at that time as yet no overarchingstandard language , but they were all highly mutually intelligible.In historic literature Diets and Middle Dutch ("Middelnederlands") are used interchangeably to describe the ancestor of Modern Dutch. Although almost from the beginning, several Middle Dutch variations emerged, the similarities between the different regional languages were much stronger than their differences, especially for written languages and various literary works of that time.
Within Middle Dutch we can distinguish five large groups:
#
Flemish , (sometimes subdivided into West andEast Flemish ), was spoken in the modern region of West andEast Flanders ;
#Brabantian was the language of the area covered by the modern Dutch province ofNorth Brabant and the Belgian provinces ofWalloon Brabant ,Flemish Brabant and Antwerp as well as theBrussels capital region;
#Hollandic was mainly used in the present provinces of North andSouth Holland and parts of Utrecht;
#Limburgish , spoken by the people in the district of modern Dutch and Belgian Limburg;
#Low Saxon , spoken in the area of the modern provinces ofGelderland ,Overijssel ,Drenthe and parts of Groningen.The last two of the Middle Dutch dialects mentioned above show features, respectively, of
Middle High German andMiddle Low German , since these two areas border directly onto the areas of Middle Low and High German, as can be seen from a historical map of the regions of that time.tandardization and Modern Dutch
A process of standardization started in the
Middle Ages , especially under the influence of the Burgundian Ducal Court in Dijon (Brussels after1477 ). The dialects of Flanders and Brabant were the most influential around this time. The process of standardization became much stronger in the 16th century, mainly based on the urbanBrabantic dialect ofAntwerp . In1585 Antwerp fell to the Spanish army: many fled to Holland, influencing the urban dialects of that province. In 1618 a further important step was made towards a unified language, when the first major Dutchbible translation was created that people from all over the United Provinces could understand. It used elements from various dialects, but the spoken form was mostly based on the urban dialects from the province ofHolland . A linguistic saying therefore is that "The Dutch language was born inFlanders , grew up in Brabant and reached maturity inHolland ."Linguistically speaking, Dutch has evolved little since the late
16th century ; differences in speech are considered to be negligible especially when comparing the older form with modern regional accents.Grammar has been somewhat simplified though, but a great deal of the grammar lost in comtemporary Dutch is preserved in many much-usedexpression s dating back to or before that time.
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