ayearinlanguage: ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, day 16: Dutch Dutch is a West Germanic languag
ayearinlanguage: ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, day 16: Dutch Dutch is a West Germanic language, the same branch as English and German. It is primarily spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium, and is colloquially considered to be both a geographic and linguistic halfway point between English and German. It is mutually intelligible with the Afrikaans language of South Africa but not with Pennsylvania Dutch which is actually a descendant of German. Dutch is the direct descendant of the Frankish language. Franks you may remember as the ethnic group to which Charlemagne belonged and the namesake of the modern day country of France. Like English, Dutch is a more isolating language having lost much of the inflection still found in German, though it does retain grammatical gender. Like German, Dutch has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter though the masculine and feminine forms have grown so similar that the language is sometimes classified in the two gender systems found in Scandinavian languages (neuter and common). A distinct feature of Dutch phonology, I.e. It’s inventory of sounds and rules relating to sounds, is that where in English or German you would find a hard “g” sound, instead you get a noise linguists call a “voiced velar fricative”. More familiar to English speakers is the “voiceLESS velar fricative”, which is the sound typically written “ch” and found in foreign words like “loch ness” “Johann Sebastian Bach” or “Chanukah”. The distinction between a voiced and voiceless consonant is dependent on whether or not your vocal chords vibrate. For example: “s” is voiceless, “z” is voiced. Other pairs are “t” and “d”, “f” and “v”, and even “ch” (as in “choose”) and “j”. Note: This entry has been updated to reflect a more accurate take on Dutch grammatical gender. -- source link