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Flemish people also emigrated at the end of the fifteenth century, when Flemish traders conducted intensive trade with Spain and Portugal, and from there moved to colonies in America and Africa. [28] The newly discovered Azores were populated by 2,000 Flemish people from 1460 onwards, making these volcanic islands known as the "Flemish Islands".
Flemish (Vlaams ⓘ) [2] [3] [4] is a Low Franconian dialect cluster of the Dutch language. It is sometimes referred to as Flemish Dutch ( Vlaams-Nederlands ), Belgian Dutch ( Belgisch-Nederlands [ˈbɛlɣis ˈneːdərlɑnts] ⓘ ), or Southern Dutch ( Zuid-Nederlands ).
The Dutch language used in Belgium can also be referred to as Flemish Dutch or Belgian Dutch (Dutch: Vlaams Nederlands, Belgisch Nederlands).Dutch is the mother tongue of about 60% of the population in Belgium, spoken by approximately 6.5 million out of a population of 11 million people.
Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect.
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.
Over 3.4 billion people (42% of the global population) speak an Indo-European language as a first language—by far the most of any language family. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue , of which 313 belong to the Indo-Iranian branch.
Today, it is only used by older or traditionally educated people. Dutch was until 1983 an official language in South Africa but evolved into and was replaced by Afrikaans, a partially mutually intelligible [20] daughter language of Dutch. Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia.
West Flemish is spoken by about a million people in the Belgian province of West Flanders, and a further 50,000 in the neighbouring Dutch coastal district of Zeelandic Flanders (200,000 if including the closely related dialects of Zeelandic) and 10-20,000 in the northern part of the French department of Nord. [1]