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Flemish people or Flemings (Dutch: Vlamingen [ˈvlaːmɪŋə(n)] ⓘ) are a Germanic ethnic group native to Flanders, Belgium, who speak Flemish Dutch. Flemish people make up the majority of Belgians , at about 60%.
The term Flemish itself has become ambiguous. Nowadays, it is used in at least five ways, depending on the context. These include: An indication of Dutch written and spoken in Flanders including the Dutch standard language as well as the non-standardized dialects, including intermediate forms between vernacular dialects and the standard.
Despite its name, Brabantian is the dominant contributor to the Flemish Dutch tussentaal. The combined region, culture, and people of Dutch-speaking Belgium have come to be known as "Flemish". [9] Flemish is also used to refer to one of the historical languages spoken in the former County of Flanders. [10]
Worldwide, Afrikaans and Dutch as native or second language are spoken by approximately 46 million people. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, [1] [2] [3] particularly in written form.
Dutch is also spoken in minority areas through Europe and in many immigrant communities in all over the world. Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch, but is regarded as a separate language and will not be analyzed in this article.
Almost all of the inhabitants of the Capital region speak French as either their primary language (50%) or as a lingua franca (45%). [4] [5] Many Flemish people also speak French as a second language. Belgian French is in most respects identical to the French of France, but differs in some points of vocabulary, pronunciation, and semantics.
For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [4] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
Rank Name Native speakers Total speakers 1 Russian: 106,000,000 [1]: 160,000,000 [1]: 2 German: 97,000,000 [2]: 170,000,000 [3]: 3 French: 81,000,000 [4]: 210,000,000 ...