Talk:Dutch language

Dialect/language

Michel, I see that you distinguish clearly a dialect from a language. I was told a long time ago that the difference was mainly political (own country and/or big mouth). Do linguists have settled the dispute finally?--Paul Wormer 10:07, 1 May 2008 (CDT)

No. :) The varieties of Dutch/Flemish are not clearly differentiated on linguistic grounds, but socially I think the Belgians would see their language as distinct, and not just 'Dutch' (in a similar way that, for example, you could claim that Hindi and Urdu are the same language if you just looked at the grammar and basic vocabulary). I fear this article is a little Dutch-centric at the moment, because it describes Flemish as Dutch. What we actually have in Belgium and the Netherlands are lots of mutually intelligible dialects that don't match up with political borders (and indeed, they merge with varieties across in Germany as well). I don't think Flemish branched off from Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands; but I don't know enough about these varieties to be able to make many meaningful changes. John Stephenson 23:38, 5 May 2008 (CDT)

Afrikaans as a creole

I removed the information about Afrikaans being a creole form of Dutch; this is a controversial claim which involves changing the accepted definition of what a creole is (i.e. a former pidgin language that has become as complex as any other through being acquired as a native language). It is probably more accurate to say that Afrikaans started as a variety of Dutch, whose grammar and lexicon underwent a substrate influence from local African languages. John Stephenson 23:47, 5 May 2008 (CDT)

I agree that this is a tricky question. I don't think there is any consensus. It used to be called a "creole" but that does not quite fit. There is a trend to call Afrikaans a "dialect" of Dutch and there is some justification for that claim based on morphological, phonological, and lexical similarities as well as continued mutual intelligibility. But as the other comment (above) indicates, there are also disputes about the definitions of "language" and "dialect." As I understand it, the problem is in comparative linguistics where scholars have been shifting the definitions of these concepts, largely because of more studies on global languages, with the result that traditional categories no longer apply. I compromised by calling it a "creolized dialect" which, I will grant, is also not accurate. I have no objection to calling Afrikaans a language, because it is a language in its own right. Michel van der Hoek 14:06, 6 May 2008 (CDT)