Dutch Subtitling Services

Dutch is a West Germanic language that is spoken in the European Union by about 23 million people as a first language—including most of the population of the Netherlands and about sixty percent of that of Belgium—and by another 5 million as a second language. Outside of the Low Countries, it is spoken natively by the majority of the population of Suriname, and also holds official status in the Caribbean island nations of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. Historical minorities remain in parts of France and Germany, and to a lesser extent, in Indonesia, while up to half a million native speakers may reside in the United States, Canada and Australia combined. The Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa have evolved into Afrikaans, a mutually intelligible daughter language which is spoken to some degree by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia. Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English and is said to be roughly in between them. Dutch has—like English—not undergone the High German consonant shift, does not use Germanic umlaut as a grammatical marker, has largely abandoned the use of the subjunctive, and has levelled much of its morphology, including the case system. Features shared with German include the survival of three grammatical genders—albeit with few grammatical consequences—and the use of modal particles, final-obstruent devoicing, and V2 with subject–object–verb word order. Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and incorporates more Romance loans than German but fewer than English. While “Dutch” generally refers to the language as a whole, Belgian varieties are sometimes collectively referred to as “Flemish”. In both Belgium and the Netherlands, the native official name for Dutch is Nederlands, and its dialects have their own names, e.g. Hollands “Hollandish”, West-Vlaams “Western Flemish”, Brabants “Brabantian”. The language has been known under a variety of names. In Middle Dutch, dietsc (in the South) and diutsc, duutsc (in the North) were used to refer variably to Dutch, Low German, and German. This word is derived from diet “people” and was used to translate Latin (lingua) vulgaris “popular language” to set apart the Germanic vernacular from Latin (the language of writing and the Church) and Romance. An early form of this word appears Latinized in the Strasbourg Oaths (AD 842) as teudisca (lingua) to refer to the Rhenish Franconian portion of the oath and also underlies dialectal French thiois “Luxembourgish”, “Lorraine Franconian”, and which has survived in Italian as tedesco, “German”. During the Renaissance in the 16th century, duytsch (modern Duits) “German” and nederduytsch “Low German” began to be differentiated from dietsch or nederlandsch “Dutch”, a distinction that is echoed in English later the same century with the terms High Dutch “German” and Low Dutch “Dutch”. However, owing to Dutch commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries, the English term came to refer exclusively to the Dutch. In modern Dutch, Duits has narrowed in meaning to refer to “German”, Diets went out of common use because of its Nazi associations and now somewhat romantically refers to older forms of Dutch, whereas Vlaams is sometimes used to name the language as a whole for the varieties spoken in Belgium. Nederlands, the official Dutch word for “Dutch”, did not become firmly established until the 19th century. The repeated use of neder- or “low” to refer to the language is a reference to the Netherlands’ downriver location at the mouth of the Rhine (harking back to Latin nomenclature, e.g. Germania inferior vs. Germania superior) and its position at the lowest dip of the Northern European plain.