Dutch accents can vary a bit depending upon what part of the Netherlands someone is from. People often find that it sounds something like a German accent, but there are some distinct differences that are covered here in the download!
Hollandic. As we said before, there are a number of Dutch-speaking countries. But the most prominent Dutch dialects are naturally found in the Netherlands. Hollandic or Hollandish was originally influenced by a West Frisian sub-dialect as well as some Brabantian languages.
Dutch dialects are remarkably diverse and are found within Europe mainly in the Netherlands and northern Belgium. The Dutch province of Friesland is bilingual. The West Frisian language, distinct from Dutch, is spoken here along with standard Dutch and the Stadsfries dialect.
In the southern province of Noord-Brabant, the Dutch spoken by its residents (called Brabanders) is quite similar to “standard” Dutch. As Noord-Brabant borders Belgium, it is not surprising that the dialect is rather similar to the Flemish (Belgian) accent.
The bad news is that Dutch has hundreds of dialects, with the official number being somewhere between 250 and 400.
Like Frisian and English, Dutch is another West Germanic language that developed from Proto-Germanic. Because of this, Dutch possesses many words and phrases similar to English and has a similar grammatical structure.
So dive right in and practice your Dutch with confidence. For the same reasons Dutch is the closest language to English, German is also a close language, and another one that many English speakers may find easier to learn. Dutch is commonly mentioned as the language nestled between English and German.
Its closest relative is the mutually intelligible daughter language Afrikaans. Other West Germanic languages related to Dutch are German, English and the Frisian languages and the un-standardised languages Low German and Yiddish.
Dunglish (portmanteau of Dutch and English; in Dutch steenkolenengels, literally: "coal-English", or shortened to nengels) is a popular term for an English spoken with a mixture of Dutch.
Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands, Belgium (Flanders) and Suriname. Dutch is also an official language of Aruba, Curaçao and St Maarten.
They speak Dutch in the Netherlands
Most of the people who speak Dutch (about 17 million) live in the Netherlands. The Dutch language is a West Germanic language that is spoken by around 23 million people as a first language, and about 5 million people as their second language.
Although they are both West Germanic languages, German or Deutsch and Dutch are not the same language. It's true they have a high degree of lexical similarity but different influences throughout history made them sound quite different.
dutch is the 56th most commonly spoken native language in the world. Dutch has 22 million native speakers, and about 28 million speakers once you add in people who speak it as a second language.
Most widely spoken languages in Amsterdam, Netherlands
Amsterdam official language: Dutch (and its dialects) clearly, as when we looked at what language is spoken in the Netherlands, the official language of Amsterdam is Dutch, which in its original version would be 'nederlands'.
It's also the official language of several countries, including Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Both Dutch and German have their challenges, but Dutch is generally considered easier to learn than German. However, your decision should ultimately be based on your goals and interests.
At first, Dutch might seem like a very difficult language, but it's surprisingly easy for English- and German-speakers. Dutch has even been described as a combination of the English and German languages! This makes it one of the easiest languages to learn for speakers of either language.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Since English words are prominently located within the Dutch language, it can be easy for people proficient in English to read Dutch. However, speaking Dutch can be more difficult due to the different Dutch pronunciations. Some of the most difficult sounds include the 'r', the hard 'g', the sch and the ij sounds.
1. English (1,452 million speakers) According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers. Like Latin or Greek at the time, English has become the world's common language.
English gets the bulk of its vocabulary from French and other Romance languages, it is true. But the most common words are all Germanic, and English phonology is Germanic. English is closely related to Dutch, and even more closely to Frisian. If you want to get a feel for how English sounds, listen to Dutch or Frisian.
The easiest languages for English speakers to learn are: Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and French. The US State Department lists these languages as Category I languages. This means they are similar to English culturally and/or linguistically.
The Dutch didn't regard themselves as Germans any more since the 15th century, but they officially remained a part of Germany until 1648.