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Dutch phonology is similar to that of other West Germanic languages, especially Afrikaans and West Frisian. Standard Dutch has two main de facto pronunciation standards: Northern and Belgian. Northern Standard Dutch is the most prestigious accent in the Netherlands. It is associated with high status, education and wealth.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Dutch on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Dutch in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
In Northern Dutch, /ɣ/ appears immediately before voiced consonants and sometimes also between vowels, but not in the word-initial position. In the latter case, the sound is not voiced and differs from /x/ in length (/ɣ/ is longer) and in that it is produced a little bit further front (mediovelar, rather than postvelar) and lacks any trilling, so that vlaggen /ˈvlɑɣən/ 'flags' has a ...
If you want to see frequencies of alveolar trill vs. alveolar tap in Dutch, you can look at 'The sociophonetics and phonology of Dutch r' (if you can find it) and then for example starting at page 87 for Antwerp: 14% voiced alveolar trill in word onset vs. 65.7 % voiced alveolar tap (+ some other varieties), intervocally 5.7 % trill vs. 68.6 % ...
Unlike Dutch, vraag in Afrikaans, pronounced [ˈfrɑːχ], is only used as a noun meaning "question", with vrae, pronounced [ˈfrɑːə], being the plural form. The word for "day" in both languages is dag, but whereas the plural in Dutch is dagen ([daːɣə(n)]), in Afrikaans it is dae ([dɑːə]).
When I look at Middle Dutch phonology, it is rather the reverse: long /i:/ has become short (except in Brabant) because the duration contrast was no longer needed as there was a difference in quality. (edit: what specifically happened in Middle Dutch was apparently this: "monophthongisation of opening diphthongs: /iə/ > /iː/, /uə/ > /uː/.
An example is Dutch, where the rule is that initial and final syllables (word boundaries) take secondary stress, then every alternate syllable before and after the primary stress, as long as two stressed syllables are not adjacent and stress does not fall on /ə/ (there are, however, some exceptions to this rule). See Dutch phonology § Stress.
There are two main theories regarding the origination of the uvular trill in European languages. According to one theory, the uvular trill originated in Standard French around the 17th century and spread to the standard varieties of German, Danish, Portuguese, and some of those of Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish.