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DUTCH

Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language

DUTCH. The national language of the Netherlands, virtually identical with Flemish and ancestral to AFRIKAANS. Scholars use the term Netherlandic as a general and especially historical term for the varieties spoken in the Netherlands, Belgium, and north-western France. With English and FRISIAN, Dutch belongs to the Low German branch of the West Germanic group of INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES; all are structurally similar. Such words as lip, maken, open, water show that Dutch is closer to English than is GERMAN, whose equivalents are Lippe, machen, offen, Wasser. It was a major language of commerce in the 17c, and was established in North America (especially in the colony first known as New Amsterdam, then New York), in southern Africa (where Cape Dutch became Afrikaans), in the Caribbean region, and in Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies).

Dutch and English

(1) Dutch in English. There was a considerable influence on English from the later Middle Ages, through migration and commerce (especially the English wool trade with Flanders), as numerous Dutch nautical terms testify: boom, deck, freebooter, sloop, smuggler, yacht. Dutch was widely known in Europe in the 17c, when the first English—Dutch dictionaries appeared and such Dutch-derived artistic terms as easel, etch, landscape, maulstick, sketch were adopted into English. Later, many loans entered the language in the US: boss, coleslaw, cookie, dope, poppycock, Santa Claus, snoop, spook. (2) English in Dutch. Because of purist sentiment in the 16c and 17c, Dutch kept more of its Germanic character and resisted Latin more strongly than English did, but many Latinate words, such as cruciaal, informatie, and educatie (alongside Dutch onderwijs), are now entering Dutch from English, which has been the dominant foreign influence since the Second World War. English is now widely used for scholarly publishing in The Netherlands, is the first choice of foreign language in schools, and there is general exposure to it through the media, especially in TV from Britain. The effect is seen in BORROWINGS (management, research, service), loan translations (diepvries deep freeze, gezichtsverlies loss of face, gouden handdruk golden handshake), changes in the meanings of established words (controle in the English sense as well as earlier ‘check, supervision’), and idioms (je nek uitsteken to stick your neck out).

See AMERICAN LANGUAGE, CANADIAN LANGUAGES, CARIBBEAN LANGUAGES, DIALECT IN THE UNITED STATES, EUROPEAN LANGUAGES, EUROPEAN UNION, FRISIAN, GERMANIC LANGUAGES, HISTORY OF ENGLISH, NORSE, OLD ENGLISH, ORKNEY AND SHETLAND DIALECTS, SCOTS, SOUTH AFRICAN ENGLISH, SPELLING REFORM.

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© Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998.

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