OK you Dutch and Flemish dopers, this one has been puzzling me. Do you guys speak the same language?
I have a Dutch-speaking cousin in Amsterdam who says he watches Belgian TV, and understands it no problem. This to me says that it’s the same language.
I have heard that the difference between Dutch and Flemish comes down to minor regional differences, like the way some of us call it a faucet, others a tap, skillet/pan, elevator/lift, soda/pop, etc. To put it in other words, basically, the difference is like the difference between British and American English, although perhaps slightly more pronounced.
Or is this a woefully inadequate characterization? Are there grammatical differences? If so, do tell!
Is there a difference between your being able to mutually understand each other and your using different languages?
Just how different do two, what are they, dialects?, have to be before they’re considered different languages?
I don’t speak either but I noticed when watching a foreign movie once that I could understand a LOT of what they were saying. (The characters were speaking Flemish. FTR I speak English and a little bit of Spanish.)
IANA Dutch or Flemish speaker…but to a certain extent, I’m confident you’ll be dealing with the political definition of what constitutes a language (there’s a recent thread on Scots which touched on this, if you want to search for it). But FWIW, I’ve met Afrikaans speakers who have no problem understanding Dutch, yet I don’t think anybody will claim they’re the same language.
They are both groups of Low German dialects that have evolved a “standard” form and have a longstanding literary history, and hence qualify for “language” status. They are mutually intelligible but have some minor differences where X is proper in the Netherlands/Dutch and Y in Belgium/Flemish. It’s customary to consider them as separate languages, but they are very close relatives, and under the mutual-intelligibility standard would be considered no different from British vs. American vs. Australian English.
(Note in passing that the Belgium/France border is not the “linguistic frontier”: the Walloon dialect of French is also a national language of Belgium, covering somewhat over half the country, and there are over a million Flemish-speakers in France.
Dutch and Flemish are indeed the same language. They also are not the same language. Does that clear things up?
You have to understand that a language designation is often a political statement rather than a linguistic one. Variations of the same language spoken in different countries are usually called different languages. Part of the confusion for English speakers might be because that is usually **not **true for English. Australians, Canadians, British, and Americans all speak English. We don’t generally differentiate this. All over Europe, though, people speak perfectly mutually understandable langauges but still call them by different names.
Many languages change imperceptably as you move from one country to another. It’s often not possible to draw a line and say: “People left of this line speak language X and people right of this line speak language Y, and neither can understand the other.” This makes it impossible to have hard and fast rules about what is a dielect and what is new language. As with any continuum, wherever you draw the lines ends up being arbitrary.
To complicate things a bit more, consider “Chinese”. For example, we call Cantonese and Mandarin different dielects of “Chinese”, but that is mainly due to the fact that they are both spoken in the same country. Had they been spoken in different countries, there is no doubt they’d be called different languages, as they are **not **mutually comprehensible.
John Mace, I’ve also heard similar things about Serbo-Croatian - that politically they are two different languages - Serbian and Croatian (especially now), but that in the bad old Yugoslavia days, everybody just spoke Serbo-Croatian and understood everything.
I don’t think that the Serbs and Croats ever got along all that well…
That situation is complicated by the fact that Serbian (an Eastern Orthodox country) is written in a Cyrillic alphabet while Croatian (a Catholic country) is written in the Roman alphabet. But they are indeed considered, linguistically, to be the same language.
We had a similar thread on Hindi/Urdu not long ago.
John Mace thanks for the link. (Gee, referring to you like that seems so stiff and formal.) Interesting comments in that thread.
I didn’t know about that thread because we freeloading newbies aren’t allowed to search.
As for me, I don’t think I’ll be joining up. Not because of the money or the quality, mind you. I’ve been “trying” out the boards for four days now and have enjoyed it so much that I’m reading these boards for hours a day (and loving it immensely). But I’m practically jeopardizing my job by not getting any billing done. Not a good thing. . .
I’m practically waiting until my free trial expires on December 11. But what a way to go!
Holy crow, John Mace (why does saying that make me think of some sort of Twilight Zone episode?), I just noticed that you have 8900 posts in the past two years.
What is that, 12 posts a day? Talk about addicted!
Linguistically speaking, the consensus seems to be they are the same. Politically, it seems there may be some disagreement. For a more nuanced opinion, why not “ask a linguist”:
"For a long time, the Dutch-speakers of Belgium insisted that they did not
speak Dutch, but rather a quite different language called “Flemish”, and
they tried hard to develop a standard form of Flemish which was different
from standard Dutch. But finally, several decades ago, they abandoned this
position and agreed that they do in fact speak Dutch. Since then, they
have accepted standard Dutch as their own standard, and the label “Flemish”
is now applied only to the local non-standard varieties of Dutch spoken in
Belgium. "
Would you believe they’re actually claiming three ‘different’ languages now? There’s ‘also’ bosanski, or Bosniak, the Bosnian Muslim variety of the same darn language. Maybe 1 in 50 words has a slightly different ending. I have a manual written in “all 3,” which involves some absurd repetition… There aren’t many readers of Cyrillic or Latin alphabets there who can’t read the other as well. We were encouraged to speak of ‘local language’ instead of saying the name of any of the three to avoid offending when I worked there.
Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are all very close, and would probably be considered dialects of the same language if the three coutnries were united. And that actually was the case between Denmark and Norway for several centuries, when Danish was the written form used in Norway. There are also two main dialects of Norwegian: Bokmal and Nynorsk, with the former resembling Danish more than the latter.
Actually, they got along fine until WW2, and they didn’t really get along too badly between then and the nineties. All this “ancient hatreds” stuff is simplistic western crap.
Back to the OP, I have a friend from Antwerp (in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium) who, when speaking English, refers to her own language as Dutch.
From BBC News - Belgium country profile
Belgium is a federal state consisting of three regions: Flanders in the north where the official language is Dutch; Wallonia in the south where French is the official language and Brussels, the capital, where French and Dutch share official language status. There is also a small German-speaking minority of some 70,000 in Wallonia.
I personally think the Flemish speak better Dutch than we do. Whenever a language quiz is being held, the Flemish win.
Flemish a sort of dialect, though. Sometimes we have subtitles when a Belgian speaks. [and vice versa, I’m sure]
Also: The Flemish pronounce every ‘foreign’ word - for example: ‘handicap’, or ‘gangster’ - the Dutch way. While the Dutch just use the original English pronounciation.
And there are, ofcourse, strange Dutch or Flemish sayings which confuses both sides.
OK, now that we’ve heard from a true Dutch person on the issue, I consider this resolved.
But, what do we think of (maybe retitle this thread and move it to IMHO) France and Netherlands dividing Belgium down linguistic lines?
For that matter, we should just annex Canada and get it over with. Actually, I would prefer that they annex us, because I think they’ve got the whole socialized health care thing going right.
(These questions are all asked with tongue-placed-firmly-in-cheek of course. I do not intend to offend Belgians, but please: other than waffles, chocolate, and beer, what is unique about your country? Oh, and don’t forget those sprouts! And even with the beer and chocolate, you’re not so much unique as just very good at it. Switzerland and Germany do pretty well in these categories, too!)
I define a “real” country as having a separate culture. The only culture I know of in Canada is hockey, and we’ve got that here too now, so what of it?
Again, please don’t take offense - I’m just playing around here.
I was on a business trip to Flanders (specifically, Ghent) a few years ago. On my way home I took a KLM flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco, and sat next to a Dutch lady.
When I told her where I’d been, she said, “Those Flemish people THINK they speak Dutch, but they really don’t!”
Whenever a language quiz is being held, the Flemish win.