Flemish (linguistics)
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Contrary to popular belief, a Flemish language as such does not exist: there are however variants of the Dutch language spoken in Belgium; and these are, mainly for political reasons, sometimes referred to as "Flemish".
One of these variants is the standard Dutch spoken in Belgium, which is slightly different from the standard in The Netherlands in vocabulary and idiom. This southern standard is largely from Brabantic origin. Belgian television networks feel often obliged to add Dutch subtitles to programming, so that viewers can fully understand what is being said, especially when the speaker has a heavy Randstad accent. In some areas this standard is rarely spoken and only known by many from written texts. This can be compared to the relationship between Americans and Britons (see American and British English differences), where the differences are rather less important though: a better comparison could be made referring to the difference between the Cockney dialect of London and the local dialects in Scotland. These differences are in part originated and kept due to the fact that historically, distinct political entities have governed todays territory of Flanders and The Netherlands. It is not exclusive of the Dutch language, it also occurs with, for example, Portuguese and Galician, the variant of Portuguese spoken in Galicia, Spain (although in this case and contrarily to the Flemish speakers, many Galicians consider they speak a language distinct from Portuguese).
The remaining variants consist of the Dutch dialects spoken in Belgium. These "Flemish dialects", as they are often called by the layman, do not form a unity however: i.e. they are not more closely related to each other than to the dialects spoken in The Netherlands.
Finally, however, there are among these also real Flemish dialects in the linguistic sense, that are spoken in the old county of Flanders (about a third of the Dutch-speaking region in Belgium), among which the most deviant is West Flemish.nl:Vlaams
Categories: Fusional languages | Languages of Belgium | Low German languages | Guttural R | Germanic languages
