Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
It includes countries, which have Afrikaans and/or Dutch as (one of) their nationwide official language(s), as well as dependent territories with Afrikaans and/or Dutch as a co-official language. Worldwide, Afrikaans and Dutch as native or second language are spoken by approximately 46 million people.
Dutch speakers, or Batavophones, are globally concentrated in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname. 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.
Dutch-speaking immigrant communities can also be found in Australia and New Zealand. The 2011 Australian census showed 37,248 people speaking Dutch at home. [88] At the 2006 New Zealand census, 26,982 people, or 0.70 percent of the total population, reported to speak Dutch to sufficient fluency that they could hold an everyday conversation. [89]
By taking the total of all people with full Dutch ancestry, according to the current CBS definition (both parents born in the Netherlands), resulting in an estimated 16,000,000 Dutch people, [note 1] or by the sum of all people worldwide with both full and partial Dutch ancestry, which would result in a number around 33,000,000.
It is widely spoken on Saba and Sint Eustatius. On Saba and St. Eustatius, the majority of the education is in English only, with some bilingual English-Dutch schools. 90-93% of the Dutch people can also speak English as a foreign language. (see also: English language in the Netherlands)
Dutch is one of the official languages in all four of the constituent countries of the Kingdom, [5] however English and a Portuguese-based creole-language, called Papiamento, are the most spoken languages on the Dutch Caribbean. [6] The Dutch dialects in the Dutch Caribbean differ from island to island. World map of Dutch-speaking countries:
The term Hollanders is similarly also used to refer to Dutch people in general, particularly in a historical context, while Hollands is used either to refer to the Dutch language or as an adjective, hence the expression die Kaap is weer Hollands ("the Cape is Dutch again") to mean that things are back to normal. [109] [110]
The official language of the Netherlands is Dutch, spoken by almost all people in the Netherlands. Dutch is also spoken and official in Aruba, Brussels, Curaçao, Flanders, Sint Maarten and Suriname. It is a West Germanic, Low Franconian language that originated in the Early Middle Ages (c. 470) and was standardized in the 16th century.