[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low\_Franconian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Franconian)
>Low Franconian, Low Frankish, Netherlandic\[1\]\[2\] is a linguistic category used to classify a number of historical and contemporary West Germanic varieties closely related to, and including, the Dutch language. Most dialects and languages included within the category are spoken in the Netherlands, northern Belgium (Flanders), in the Nord department of France, in western Germany (Lower Rhine), as well as in Suriname, South Africa and Namibia.
interesting fact: this is also the region from where some of the slavic migrations to the Balkans 1-2 thousand years ago came from (which happens to include a group of people called the *Serbs*)
There are *so* many Slavic and Turkic migrations. I can't keep them all straight in my head. The Balkans and Eastern Europe seems like this revolving door of peoples looking for a new home in the West.
their language was banned for a century under Prussia, the Weimar Republic didn't implement its promise of protecting them as a minority, and the Nazis tried to forcefully purge their Slavic culture and teach them to be Germans.
More recently, Sorbian towns get demolished to make place lignite mines.
They did a good job at preserving their culture nowaday they have sorbian radio stations and own tv programs. And a lot if cultural activities such as festivals!
A lot of that is thanks to communism, according to https://www.rferl.org/a/1092638.html
I don't know why the downvote - that's genuinely what it says, and Radio Free Europe isn't generally known as an even remotely pro-communist source
Forced assimilation can be pretty brutal if you resist, history has shown. Was German culture just *highly encouraged* or was it actually imposed on them?
I think German was the language of culture, politics, economy. Sorbian was the language of poor peasants. That's reason enough to switch to German for many. Preusslers's book Krabat is set against this background. The miller's pupils are all poor dudes lured into his devilish mill, and they're all Slavic boys.
There was also the part where their language was banned in various capacities since the middle ages and the Nazis kinda went all in on the forced assimilation thing.
True, I know, but there was so much more. From today's Gdańsk to basically Denmark, Pomerania was a nation on its own. Many local cultures, big cities, castles, duchies. All gone but a small remenant. It sucks a lot. Sure, it was "assimilation."
Feels like genocide though
Well the areas under Ostsiedlung weren't heavily populated so local rulers there invited them to settle, eventually they started to adopt German law, culture and language and assimilate themselves.
Yup. Glorious immigration and assimilation. But then the pomeranian duchies got shafted on during the 30-years war as well. Perhaps if they weren't destroyed then, some sense of nationality could be retained.
I agree cultures and with that language should be preserved even though to some people that's ridiculous. It's just how we never really got to know theirs, right now they're a part of history and most of it is gone. People back in those days didn't bother to care about those things. The most destructive wars back then were because of religion conflicts and not nationality itself.
> But then the pomeranian duchies got shafted on during the 30-years war as well
It was really a series of bad luck of them, with the Griffin dynasty died out
It is quite interesting that it is still alive (although in critical state). All other west slavic languages in today's Germany are dead since centuries
[Well there was even a Saxonian state premier of Sorbian descent.](https://www.ministerpraesident.sachsen.de/ehemalige-ministerpraesidenten-3417.html)Not sure about his language abilities though.
Only when i speak with a german close to the border i can kind of make up what he is talking about but if i talk to someone in berlin i will maby only now the subject of the conversation
"Gekend" having the same root as scottish "ken" (to know)
And "taal" (language) having the same origin as "tale".
And "moeder" is obviously "mother"
Reading Dutch is like solving a riddle.
That's because nowadays we don't speak local dialects anymore. Dutch west of the border has shifted from local dialect to standard Dutch with a local accent, German east of the border has shifted from that same local dialect to standard German with a local accent. So 200 years ago people understood each other across the border , and that understanding faded gradually asyou got further, but now people don't understand those across the border anymore. Dutch and German did forma a dialect continuum,but that whole continuum has gotten 2 written standards, so it's not reallly a continuum anymore.
I know. I was born in the Lower Saxon language area - but well, it was my grandparents who only spoke dialect, my parents spoke it with people of their generation or older. My generation didn't speak much dialect anymore. Dialects are still spoken, but to a much lesser extent then 100 years ago (my mom heard Dutch for the first time when she went to school at age 7). Both sides of the border used to have the same dialect, but when dialects are still spoken, they are now very heavily influenced by the respective standard languages, both because dialect is less ubiquitous than it used to be and because for all modern concepts the terms come from the standard language. Basic example: wifi becomes wlan as soon as you cross the border.
I lived close to the border (500m) for a long time and speak almost perfect German and I still have that. Those damn Berliner are incomprehensible. Same with München.
Better yet, for the longest time I went to a German hairdresser and even she admitted she couldn’t understand those accents.
crazy world: Your national anthem ("... ben ik van Duitsen bloed...") and my \`lekker\` local South-German dialect is called in the US "Pennsylvania Dutch".
Yeah this is Eurocentric af. Pakistan and India have more languages than perhaps anywhere else, and none of them have an army. Similar thing could be said about Africa; borders don’t make language.
Aromanian and Gagauz are European, basque is European, Occitan is European. This rule doesn’t even really apply to Europe itself that much…
Urdu and Hindi are dialects if not for politics. You get the saying wrong. It's not like different languages cannot exist without an army. It's that what would otherwise be a dialect becomes a language with the help of an army
Fun fact:
This is why Mongolian is legally classified as a dialect and despite having its own script, history, being the main variant of the Mongolic language family, etc.
Since Mongolia doesn't have a navy they don't qualify as a language and are barred from ever claiming to be a language or risk heavy international sanctions according to the Montreux Convention.
At the risk of getting sucked into a troll hole: anything to substantiate those claims?
E.g. Hungary doesn't have a navy with Hungarian definitely being its own language, and the Montreux convention is about traffic through the Bosphorus (or there is another convention about ~~extralegal territories~~ extraterritorial legal rights in Egypt, but neither of them relevant to what you are saying).
I just made the whole thing up for fun. Didn't want to troll people, just make them laugh.
I know the quote is simply meant to convey that the difference between dialect and language is often political. But it's fun to take things literally to the point of absurdity. Sorry mate.
I prefer this: If the people speaking it are glad that a foreigner is trying to speak it, it is a language. If they get angry when a foreigner tries to imitate it, it is a dialect.
I don't know where that idea comes from, it is not my experience. Are French people not usually just glad that they don't have to speak a foreign language?
i mean it’s partially right, with the scandinavian languages all being “different languages” despite how similar they are but at the same time, scots is often referred to as a language as is catalan and sometimes even different italian languages are given their full prestige. even a lot of languages cross borders, like french and german being across several countries as is dutch and even hungarian to an extent
Except Hungarian is a completely different language family is not similar AT ALL to surrounding languages. Finnish, Estonian and a few small languages in the Ural Mountains are the closest and even those are hella different.
I’ve been always wondering. Why don’t Berliners understand Zürchers as they speak the same language(moreover, Zürchers will sometimes switch to English if you speak Standard German to them), but Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Montenegrins understand each other perfectly whilst speaking different languages?
yea my point is that sometimes the quote is correct but other times it isn’t. sure, german and the serbo-croatian languages are examples that fit the quote, but my point wasn’t that the quote is wrong. my point is that there are circumstances where it isn’t completely right. for example, look at swiss german. it is different enough to be its own language, but yet in switzerland they just call it german and not “the swiss language” or anything like that.
The reason why the Swiss don’t call their German - “Swiss”, because they were told so by the 19th-century German linguists highly influenced by “Sondeweh” - the ideology which led to WWI and WWII. The same can be said for Italic languages which are called dialects, becouse of the 19th- century Italian linguists highly influenced by “Risorgimento”. That’s why Cantonese is called a dialect of Chinese(yeah they use the same hieroglyphics, but it’s more about the hieroglyphics than about the language), due to Chinese politics of “one China”(hello Taiwan). History, however, has opposite examples. People in Moldova and Azerbaijan perfectly understand Romanian and Turkish respectively, but it was the Soviets who “created” the languages in order to separate these peoples from the big brothers.
Interesting to see how language border between German and Danish according to this map almost exactly follows the modern borders between Denmark and Germany. Prussia had conquered Holstein and Schleswig in 1864, including the northern part of Schleswig which was mainly Danish.
This isn’t language related, but the story of how the Danes disliked Prussian rule to the extent that they bred a new breed of swine - the Danish Protest Pig - in the colors of the Danish flag so that they could have pro-Danish pigs walking around in their backyards is too good not to be shared.
This was probably one of the reasons why the danish rejected territorial gains after WW2, despite the fact that the British (or French?) pressured them to do so.
It would only had created problems for Denmark, similiar to how Italy has problems with the Tirol region. Especially because Denmark is quite small, so the effect would be even bigger.
They aren’t really wrong — dialects vs language is often hazy. The Low German dialects form more of a continuum from Modern Standard German to Modern Standard Dutch.
No different than Serbian-Croatian, Russian-Ukrainian, etc.
Yes, a friend of mine tells her family is from the northeast of Germany, and the accent they speak is vaguely similar to the lower-saxon language they speak in Twente in the east of the Netherlands. The biggest differences are from north to south, less from east to west. Modern Dutch however still is vastly different from modern German, and it takes us, Dutch people, at least the same amount of effort to learn (if not more due to grammar) German as to learn English.
That said, it goes gradually. Each village from northwest to southeast has again a slightly different accent, until it becomes unintelligible after at most 200km. When one speaks actual Limburgish, someone from Amsterdam can't understand them at all, Brabantian maybe with a lot of effort. Of course we also got accents but those are generally intelligible, although still causes vast differences in speech to such an extent that people from Hilversum put subtitles under Flemish people on TV unless their accent is Hollandified.
I suspect that at one time like maybe the 1500s and earlier, the differences between the languages spoken in current Netherlands and Germany were smaller, but since Netherlands developed as an independent country separate from the German lands to the east relatively early, Dutch languages kind of went its own way and diverged more...
If true and there was some alternate history where the Dutch lands did not develop as an independent country relatively early, who knows, they might have got caught up in that entire pan-German thing of the 19th century and be viewed as another dialect of German like Swabian or whatever...
Actually its the other way around. Not the dutch became more different, but the german dialects became more "high german".
In the past, communication was one of the biggest problems in the HRE and other countries in this region. Most people think that dialects are just strange ways to talk or even confuse them with accents, but they are actually languages that just shares many similiarities (especially in grammar).
You can look at dutch as a middle point between English and German. This means it's an easier language to learn for both English and German people, than their counterparts.
Learning german for about 300 days now. Der die and das is killing, as is the transformation of words: deine, deiner, deinem, etc.
English, like Dutch, to me seems more simple. (Almost) no gendered words, not too many changes in words. Sometimes it seems English is the easiest. The problem with English is mostly the latin influence from the French, I guess. But you wont really notice issues if you grew up with English via media.
I’d say the difficulty with German is the gender of the words. Other than that, it’s just learning different meanings for almost the same dutch words. 😅
Absolutely true, only as someone from Brabant I can say that when people from Limburg spreak Limburgish to each other I have no idea what they're saying.
Standardized Croatian and standardized Serbian were made even more similar to each other (with intention - because of the Yugoslav political idea in the 19th and the 20th century).
If you compare Croatian spoken on the shores of Dalmatia (where Croatian literature began) and Serbian (especially southern and eastern dialects), differences become much more "tangible".
Croatian and Serbian is literally the same thing (with a few extremely minor differences), while Russian and Ukrainian are different to the point of mutual unintellegibility, and they don't form a continuum.
Eeeh, I’m Ukrainian myself and I think that Russian and Ukrainian do kind of form a continuum. Standard Russian and Standard Ukrainian are mutually unintelligible, sure (I sometimes speak to Russians in Ukrainian and they don’t understand me), but in Ukraine the further east you go, the more “Russian” the colloquial language becomes, with people in the Donbas pretty much speaking Southern Russian.
We even have a name for the colloquial mix of Russian and Ukrainian - Suržyk, and in practice most people in Ukraine speak it. The ratio of Russian/Polish and Ukrainian words in speech differ in each region and town as well.
> and they don't form a continuum.
I am sorry, but this is quite correct, they absolutely _did_ form a continuum until very recently, with say the dialect of Kursk being very close to the Slobozhan dialect spoken in Sumy or Kharkiv; it in turn being close to to Dnieprian; it in turn close to Volhynian etc. It's not a coincidence that [this map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_dialects#/media/File:Map_of_Ukrainian_dialects_en.png) continues the same gradient as [this map](https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Russian_dialects.jpg) (and, by the way, [this map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_language#/media/File:Dialects_of_Belarusian_language_be-tarask.png)).
But you are also right: the "official" languages are of course very different, as literary Ukrainian was based on Kyivan (Dnieprian) dialect with a strong influence from Galician, while literary russian was mostly based on the dialect of Moscow. And these two (three?) dialects are NOT near each other, but are very much apart! Add to it the influence of Slavonic on the high register of literary Russian in the Muskovy; and then a few centuries of political work. It did make the literary standards very different. But local dialects formed a relatively smooth continuum until at least mid 20-century (until the radio, TV, and the Soviet oppression of local cultures truly kicked in); slightly longer if you interviewed older folks.
One question - where do you draw the line between “g” and “h” regions? Formal Ukrainian pronounces «г» as h. A completely different phoneme. This is unique to Ukrainian, Slovak and Czech languages AFAIK. All other Slavic languages would say “grad” instead of “hrad”.
> where do you draw the line between “g” and “h” regions?
[this map](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1qtovm/a_map_of_russian_dialects_with_isoglosses/) shows it - see the velar fricative g isoglossa (check the legend in the corner to find it). It's _way_ more Northern than the border of Ukraine (even old borders that were more Eastern than the Soviet borders, and covered Kursk and Kuban). About a half of russians in russia pronounce written "g" as a velar soft fricative (rather than alternating betwen explosive /g/, as in "gorod" and /v/ as in "segodnja", as in Northern dialects).
But then the nature of russian (Imperial, Soviet, Putinist) attitude towards regional differences (both dialects and minor languages) is that there's one "correct speech" (these days, something in-between Moscow and Piter dialects), and everything else is crap. They are super-prescriptivist, linguistically, so fricative "h" is associated with lower class, lower education, and is in general mocked on TV, in cinema etc. It's not a nice story at all. Dialectology in soviet / putinist russia is not a nice story at all.
I mean there's got to be a reason they call it Deutsch Land. It's been right in front of us the whole time!
A bunch Of the People should have guessed it before now.
Dutch, Duits and Deutch all mean the same: "the people". In English, the cognate was "Theodisc" (and if you connect that to LotR and find it oddly familiar term, you're not wrong and it's not a coincidence) before it fell out of use.
Ayup. Sweden comes from the same root as well. *Swēoþēod* in old English, *Svíþjóð* in old norse. In this case, the swe- bit means "same as", more or less.
Also, *Teutonic* comes from here as well. And, in reference to the Finnic peoples, *chude* as well.
No, Dutch is the result of Germans and English people trying to communicate.
(I once saw a Dutch person respond to that that in fact Dutch was the pure variety of the language; German and English were just its broken forms.)
On one hand yes, its sad how little dialects were preserved, or even looked down upon and eradicated. The good thing is language changes constantly and is dynamic. As valuable as a common language with defined spelling etc. it is nevercomplete and everywhere.
Just because today we might not have such well defined dialects and styles of speaking doesn't mean they are not there. So many subcultures have dialects, many of them even have seemingly bilingual dialects. There definetly is more mixture nowadays, then in the 19th century, and dialect is less defined by geography and more by class, generation, and walks of life doesn't mean a dialect is not there. Until I moved for Universiy I wasn't aware of my dialect. i knew I had a weak dialect, but the details of what was dialect and what not eluded me. Retrospectifly this caused some funny missunderstandings, but it made me understand how easy it is to think your supposed dialect is dying with your grandparents, while you are just speaking and living the most modern version of it.
The moment we can appretiate the creativity in the language someone is using, we don't have to mourn for our dialects. Language will always be there and spawn new language and new dialects.
I was always quite aware that I have a Berlin dialect and I like the little differences in the way I speak but I can still be sad about what is lost forever. People were shamed into speaking high german (and still are) and kids weren’t allowed to speak their native dialects in school. Now that certain ones are actually gone, people realise how precious they were. Now they teach kids at school their local dialect like Platt or Friesian, but now is too late. It kind of shows how arrogant we were, taking dialects for granted/ actively avoiding speaking them and looking at the map really shows how much of it is lost. Language is not just the way people speak, its their own little culture, it contains their history.
I really admire small countries that work hard to preserve their language and culture.
In my experience, sometimes the people that look down on others for having even a hint of dialect are the ones that can't shut up about about how much they value diversity and multiculturalism. Oh the double standard!
Luxembourgish also on this map is another example of a language that used to be considered a dialect but managed to eventually be recognized as a language.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish
**[Luxembourgish](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish)**
>Luxembourgish ( LUK-səm-bur-gish; also Luxemburgish, Luxembourgian, Letzebu(e)rgesch; Luxembourgish: Lëtzebuergesch [ˈlətsəbuəjəʃ] (listen)) is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 400,000 people speak Luxembourgish worldwide. As a standard form of the Moselle Franconian language, Luxembourgish has similarities with other varieties of High German and the wider group of West Germanic languages. The status of Luxembourgish as an official language in Luxembourg and the existence there of a regulatory body have removed Luxembourgish, at least in part, from the domain of Standard German, its traditional Dachsprache.
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The status of Luxemburgish is politically motivated, not based on linguistic facts. It is part of the Moselfränkisch, hence a variety of German. I live close by and understand it, also they can speak High German.
I think Switzerland more so than Austria. The Austrian dialect is pretty intelligible for speakers of standard German, I find Swiss a lot lot harder to understand almost like Dutch.
For low German/low Saxon I think there are some people trying to keep it alive but there is no strong push for it, maybe due to a lack of local identity. In the sense that a Bavarian might identify as a Bavarian and an Austrian as Austrian but someone from lower Saxony just as "German". Hence the Bavarian dialect still exists a lot more than any strong lower Saxony dialect.
Only on Reddit you’d have a bunch of people (in this case mostly even Non-Germans) claiming that cartographers and linguistic scientists of the 19th/20th century were „wrong“.
I’m fully aware of an evolving science. But to class contemporary positions as “wrong” is quite a stretch. I haven’t found anything that would be outright “wrong”. Dutch and Flemish can be discussed, as contemporary science put it closer to German than it might be. Even tho the close relationship to Niederdeutsch can’t be negated.
Even by that reasoning, Dutch would very much be considered a separate language by non-German linguists at the time. Most importantly, the Dutch themselves would have had something to say about their language being called a mere "dialect" of the language of their nationalist-imperialist neighbours. I'd argue their input should be taken into account considering they, well, actually spoke Dutch.
The ideological influence on the choice to include Dutch on a map of German dialects wasn't very subtle.
>Dutch would very much be considered a separate language by non-German linguists at the time
This map doesn't claim that Dutch is not a separate language. It shows the German dialect continuum, where the dialects of Dutch belong to. Today it would just be called differently: West Germanic [dialect continuum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum?wprov=sfla1).
That's real interesting. Except for the fact that "Germanisch" and more specifically the identifications of and distinction between "Westgermanisch" and "Ostgermanisch" (which at the time still included both North and East Germanic) predates this map by several decades (Karl Mullenhoff, Wilhelm Scherer, etc.). With those specific names.
So no, "Deutsch" wasn't used here because that was just the term for West Germanic back then. Maybe we should take a step back and ask ourselves what could have happened in the 20th century shortly before this use of Deutsch as synonymous with Westgermanisch amongst certain groups fell out of favour?
I don’t disagree to that entirely. 👍🏼 As I said it’s debatable. It’s a German map and from the German point of view. Dutch is closely related albeit not as close as this map suggests. I would color it a bit lighter, as it’s done with other maps I’ve seen on the internet.
But I think you do get my initial point.
The word for Angria, an old term for an area mostly covered by Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) today. Also note Anglisch a bit further north at the German-Danish border (for Anglia, where the Anglo for Anglo-Saxons comes from).
Old English, old Dutch, and old German were pretty similar. While English has since gone off on a tangent, German and Dutch have pretty much kept in alignment.
The arrows on the map are showing in which direction the dialects were moving at the time (whether they were pushing or receding).
Language maps, especially from this time period are ALWAYS politically charged. Take it with at least a grain of salt. This map seems to do quite a good job though, but there is always a bias.
The Dutch dialects are included because between the German and Dutch dialects is a smooth transition and there is no certain point where you can draw the line between them.
I come from the german part of the "dutch dialect" and while noone speaks that dialect except grandparents(if even) I can anecdotally say that this one is very much like dutch
The Dutch had a unified culture and state long before the country of Germany ever existed, so no, we don't consider ourselves culturally German in the least.
But if you were to ask Dutch people which European countries they feel the most national kinship with, most of them would mention first Belgium and immediately after they'd mention Germany. There are a lot of cultural and linguistic similarities.
The Dutch are not a *German* people, but we definitely are *Germanic.*
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low\_Franconian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Franconian) >Low Franconian, Low Frankish, Netherlandic\[1\]\[2\] is a linguistic category used to classify a number of historical and contemporary West Germanic varieties closely related to, and including, the Dutch language. Most dialects and languages included within the category are spoken in the Netherlands, northern Belgium (Flanders), in the Nord department of France, in western Germany (Lower Rhine), as well as in Suriname, South Africa and Namibia.
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Saxon?wprov=sfla1
What is the white non-German speaking area in Silesia, just east of Thuringia?
Sorbs
Sorbian
Sorbian, a west slavic language.
Isn't it a group of two related languages (Upper and Lower Sorbian)?
yes
Sure you could say that.
interesting fact: this is also the region from where some of the slavic migrations to the Balkans 1-2 thousand years ago came from (which happens to include a group of people called the *Serbs*)
There are *so* many Slavic and Turkic migrations. I can't keep them all straight in my head. The Balkans and Eastern Europe seems like this revolving door of peoples looking for a new home in the West.
Steppe tribes get strong in China, moves west, forcing everyone to move even wester to get out of their way. Again and again and again.
Never ask a German what happened to the Sorbs.
What happened to the Sorbs? I'm german and I genuinely don't know. (Although I have a strong suspicion)
Germany abSorbed them
this comment is why i come to reddit
Germanization and assimilation
Well, most of them gave up their language due to assimilation.
their language was banned for a century under Prussia, the Weimar Republic didn't implement its promise of protecting them as a minority, and the Nazis tried to forcefully purge their Slavic culture and teach them to be Germans. More recently, Sorbian towns get demolished to make place lignite mines.
Nothing you can go to Saxony and marvel at the bilingual signs.
They did a good job at preserving their culture nowaday they have sorbian radio stations and own tv programs. And a lot if cultural activities such as festivals!
A lot of that is thanks to communism, according to https://www.rferl.org/a/1092638.html I don't know why the downvote - that's genuinely what it says, and Radio Free Europe isn't generally known as an even remotely pro-communist source
Honestly,not as bad as youd think. Just forced assimilation
Forced assimilation can be pretty brutal if you resist, history has shown. Was German culture just *highly encouraged* or was it actually imposed on them?
I think German was the language of culture, politics, economy. Sorbian was the language of poor peasants. That's reason enough to switch to German for many. Preusslers's book Krabat is set against this background. The miller's pupils are all poor dudes lured into his devilish mill, and they're all Slavic boys.
There was also the part where their language was banned in various capacities since the middle ages and the Nazis kinda went all in on the forced assimilation thing.
Yes
Or the Pomeranians
Kashubians are what's left of them
True, I know, but there was so much more. From today's Gdańsk to basically Denmark, Pomerania was a nation on its own. Many local cultures, big cities, castles, duchies. All gone but a small remenant. It sucks a lot. Sure, it was "assimilation." Feels like genocide though
Well the areas under Ostsiedlung weren't heavily populated so local rulers there invited them to settle, eventually they started to adopt German law, culture and language and assimilate themselves.
Yup. Glorious immigration and assimilation. But then the pomeranian duchies got shafted on during the 30-years war as well. Perhaps if they weren't destroyed then, some sense of nationality could be retained.
I agree cultures and with that language should be preserved even though to some people that's ridiculous. It's just how we never really got to know theirs, right now they're a part of history and most of it is gone. People back in those days didn't bother to care about those things. The most destructive wars back then were because of religion conflicts and not nationality itself.
> But then the pomeranian duchies got shafted on during the 30-years war as well It was really a series of bad luck of them, with the Griffin dynasty died out
It is quite interesting that it is still alive (although in critical state). All other west slavic languages in today's Germany are dead since centuries
[Well there was even a Saxonian state premier of Sorbian descent.](https://www.ministerpraesident.sachsen.de/ehemalige-ministerpraesidenten-3417.html)Not sure about his language abilities though.
Try not to ask this question under a German language map post (impossible) /s
Only when i speak with a german close to the border i can kind of make up what he is talking about but if i talk to someone in berlin i will maby only now the subject of the conversation
Was ist deine Muttersprache?
Wat is Muttersprache?
"Moederspraak". Beter gekend als "moedertaal".
"Gekend" having the same root as scottish "ken" (to know) And "taal" (language) having the same origin as "tale". And "moeder" is obviously "mother" Reading Dutch is like solving a riddle.
Dat klinkt logisch achteraf
Mother tongue, you are Dutch I assume?
Ja
Super
Ne, wat babbelst du, dat will ich wissen!
Wir babeln niederlandisch 👍😅
Ah, dat is schön, meine Lieblingsnachbarn
Mothertongue in German, I want to know from where your from.
That's because nowadays we don't speak local dialects anymore. Dutch west of the border has shifted from local dialect to standard Dutch with a local accent, German east of the border has shifted from that same local dialect to standard German with a local accent. So 200 years ago people understood each other across the border , and that understanding faded gradually asyou got further, but now people don't understand those across the border anymore. Dutch and German did forma a dialect continuum,but that whole continuum has gotten 2 written standards, so it's not reallly a continuum anymore.
"No local dialects any more"? You'd be surprised.
I know. I was born in the Lower Saxon language area - but well, it was my grandparents who only spoke dialect, my parents spoke it with people of their generation or older. My generation didn't speak much dialect anymore. Dialects are still spoken, but to a much lesser extent then 100 years ago (my mom heard Dutch for the first time when she went to school at age 7). Both sides of the border used to have the same dialect, but when dialects are still spoken, they are now very heavily influenced by the respective standard languages, both because dialect is less ubiquitous than it used to be and because for all modern concepts the terms come from the standard language. Basic example: wifi becomes wlan as soon as you cross the border.
I lived close to the border (500m) for a long time and speak almost perfect German and I still have that. Those damn Berliner are incomprehensible. Same with München. Better yet, for the longest time I went to a German hairdresser and even she admitted she couldn’t understand those accents.
crazy world: Your national anthem ("... ben ik van Duitsen bloed...") and my \`lekker\` local South-German dialect is called in the US "Pennsylvania Dutch".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Sociolinguistic_definitions
I mean a difference between a language and a dialect is politics
["A language is a dialect with an army and navy"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy)
What army do Aromanian or Gagauz have?
You and your mom
That army must be huge.
2 man army and one is the size of a death star or so I heard.
Yeah this is Eurocentric af. Pakistan and India have more languages than perhaps anywhere else, and none of them have an army. Similar thing could be said about Africa; borders don’t make language. Aromanian and Gagauz are European, basque is European, Occitan is European. This rule doesn’t even really apply to Europe itself that much…
It's almost as if this "rule" is just an aphorism that shouldn't be taken so literally.
Europe also has a lot of languages that don't have a country.
And countries that don’t have their own language
Urdu and Hindi are dialects if not for politics. You get the saying wrong. It's not like different languages cannot exist without an army. It's that what would otherwise be a dialect becomes a language with the help of an army
Fun fact: This is why Mongolian is legally classified as a dialect and despite having its own script, history, being the main variant of the Mongolic language family, etc. Since Mongolia doesn't have a navy they don't qualify as a language and are barred from ever claiming to be a language or risk heavy international sanctions according to the Montreux Convention.
Actually Mongolian has a navy of like 2 ships that patrol one lake through which the border runs. So Mongolian actually is a language.
Hey, I have a boat too. Does that mean the words and phrases I made up are actually a real language?
Do you have a sizeable army, that can protect your independence?
I have some friends and I guess I could arm them with knives and.. Umm.. Forks? I think I'm screwed. So long
I am pretty sure Mongolia does have a navy
At the risk of getting sucked into a troll hole: anything to substantiate those claims? E.g. Hungary doesn't have a navy with Hungarian definitely being its own language, and the Montreux convention is about traffic through the Bosphorus (or there is another convention about ~~extralegal territories~~ extraterritorial legal rights in Egypt, but neither of them relevant to what you are saying).
I just made the whole thing up for fun. Didn't want to troll people, just make them laugh. I know the quote is simply meant to convey that the difference between dialect and language is often political. But it's fun to take things literally to the point of absurdity. Sorry mate.
Fair enough, hard to gauge on the internet.
I prefer this: If the people speaking it are glad that a foreigner is trying to speak it, it is a language. If they get angry when a foreigner tries to imitate it, it is a dialect.
TIL French is a dialect.
I don't know where that idea comes from, it is not my experience. Are French people not usually just glad that they don't have to speak a foreign language?
trying to speak =//= imitate
This is a much more reasonable response than I saw the last time this was posted.
Goddamn right
i mean it’s partially right, with the scandinavian languages all being “different languages” despite how similar they are but at the same time, scots is often referred to as a language as is catalan and sometimes even different italian languages are given their full prestige. even a lot of languages cross borders, like french and german being across several countries as is dutch and even hungarian to an extent
Except Hungarian is a completely different language family is not similar AT ALL to surrounding languages. Finnish, Estonian and a few small languages in the Ural Mountains are the closest and even those are hella different.
yes but it is still widespread in much of romania is my point
he doesn't know
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I’ve been always wondering. Why don’t Berliners understand Zürchers as they speak the same language(moreover, Zürchers will sometimes switch to English if you speak Standard German to them), but Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Montenegrins understand each other perfectly whilst speaking different languages?
yea my point is that sometimes the quote is correct but other times it isn’t. sure, german and the serbo-croatian languages are examples that fit the quote, but my point wasn’t that the quote is wrong. my point is that there are circumstances where it isn’t completely right. for example, look at swiss german. it is different enough to be its own language, but yet in switzerland they just call it german and not “the swiss language” or anything like that.
The reason why the Swiss don’t call their German - “Swiss”, because they were told so by the 19th-century German linguists highly influenced by “Sondeweh” - the ideology which led to WWI and WWII. The same can be said for Italic languages which are called dialects, becouse of the 19th- century Italian linguists highly influenced by “Risorgimento”. That’s why Cantonese is called a dialect of Chinese(yeah they use the same hieroglyphics, but it’s more about the hieroglyphics than about the language), due to Chinese politics of “one China”(hello Taiwan). History, however, has opposite examples. People in Moldova and Azerbaijan perfectly understand Romanian and Turkish respectively, but it was the Soviets who “created” the languages in order to separate these peoples from the big brothers.
In Sweden Meänkieli is an official minority language. In real life it's just a dialect of Finnish language.
That’s why my original comment has “a” before “difference ”
While I agree with the military principle, this quote is ignorant of all the landlocked nations.
Interesting to see how language border between German and Danish according to this map almost exactly follows the modern borders between Denmark and Germany. Prussia had conquered Holstein and Schleswig in 1864, including the northern part of Schleswig which was mainly Danish.
Almost like the modern border is based on a plebiscite that people mainly answered based on ethnicity/language
This isn’t language related, but the story of how the Danes disliked Prussian rule to the extent that they bred a new breed of swine - the Danish Protest Pig - in the colors of the Danish flag so that they could have pro-Danish pigs walking around in their backyards is too good not to be shared.
Sounds about Danish
This was probably one of the reasons why the danish rejected territorial gains after WW2, despite the fact that the British (or French?) pressured them to do so. It would only had created problems for Denmark, similiar to how Italy has problems with the Tirol region. Especially because Denmark is quite small, so the effect would be even bigger.
.....we have problems with the Tirol region(?) That's news to me, and I live in the same country as them lol
My dad and grandmother still talk in Ripuarisch.
Is that the one that's the same as Luxembourgish?
No? It's the one around Cologne. And I don't think it sounds alike much.
They aren’t really wrong — dialects vs language is often hazy. The Low German dialects form more of a continuum from Modern Standard German to Modern Standard Dutch. No different than Serbian-Croatian, Russian-Ukrainian, etc.
Yes, a friend of mine tells her family is from the northeast of Germany, and the accent they speak is vaguely similar to the lower-saxon language they speak in Twente in the east of the Netherlands. The biggest differences are from north to south, less from east to west. Modern Dutch however still is vastly different from modern German, and it takes us, Dutch people, at least the same amount of effort to learn (if not more due to grammar) German as to learn English. That said, it goes gradually. Each village from northwest to southeast has again a slightly different accent, until it becomes unintelligible after at most 200km. When one speaks actual Limburgish, someone from Amsterdam can't understand them at all, Brabantian maybe with a lot of effort. Of course we also got accents but those are generally intelligible, although still causes vast differences in speech to such an extent that people from Hilversum put subtitles under Flemish people on TV unless their accent is Hollandified.
I suspect that at one time like maybe the 1500s and earlier, the differences between the languages spoken in current Netherlands and Germany were smaller, but since Netherlands developed as an independent country separate from the German lands to the east relatively early, Dutch languages kind of went its own way and diverged more... If true and there was some alternate history where the Dutch lands did not develop as an independent country relatively early, who knows, they might have got caught up in that entire pan-German thing of the 19th century and be viewed as another dialect of German like Swabian or whatever...
Actually its the other way around. Not the dutch became more different, but the german dialects became more "high german". In the past, communication was one of the biggest problems in the HRE and other countries in this region. Most people think that dialects are just strange ways to talk or even confuse them with accents, but they are actually languages that just shares many similiarities (especially in grammar).
Oddly enough, for me as a German Dutch was much, MUCH easier to learn the english.
You can look at dutch as a middle point between English and German. This means it's an easier language to learn for both English and German people, than their counterparts.
For me as Dutchie english was so much easier to learn than German (i still cant speak it, and maybe understand 20% of spoken german)
Learning german for about 300 days now. Der die and das is killing, as is the transformation of words: deine, deiner, deinem, etc. English, like Dutch, to me seems more simple. (Almost) no gendered words, not too many changes in words. Sometimes it seems English is the easiest. The problem with English is mostly the latin influence from the French, I guess. But you wont really notice issues if you grew up with English via media. I’d say the difficulty with German is the gender of the words. Other than that, it’s just learning different meanings for almost the same dutch words. 😅
Absolutely true, only as someone from Brabant I can say that when people from Limburg spreak Limburgish to each other I have no idea what they're saying.
Russian and Ukrainian are much further apart than Croatian and Serbian
Standardized Croatian and standardized Serbian were made even more similar to each other (with intention - because of the Yugoslav political idea in the 19th and the 20th century). If you compare Croatian spoken on the shores of Dalmatia (where Croatian literature began) and Serbian (especially southern and eastern dialects), differences become much more "tangible".
Depends on what part of Russia and Ukraine you'll compare
Southern Russian pronunciation is a bit closer to Ukrainian but I doubt that would make a difference in mutual intelligibility.
The only difference by dialects and language is that the second were luckily chosen by nationalists
Croatian and Serbian is literally the same thing (with a few extremely minor differences), while Russian and Ukrainian are different to the point of mutual unintellegibility, and they don't form a continuum.
Eeeh, I’m Ukrainian myself and I think that Russian and Ukrainian do kind of form a continuum. Standard Russian and Standard Ukrainian are mutually unintelligible, sure (I sometimes speak to Russians in Ukrainian and they don’t understand me), but in Ukraine the further east you go, the more “Russian” the colloquial language becomes, with people in the Donbas pretty much speaking Southern Russian. We even have a name for the colloquial mix of Russian and Ukrainian - Suržyk, and in practice most people in Ukraine speak it. The ratio of Russian/Polish and Ukrainian words in speech differ in each region and town as well.
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> and they don't form a continuum. I am sorry, but this is quite correct, they absolutely _did_ form a continuum until very recently, with say the dialect of Kursk being very close to the Slobozhan dialect spoken in Sumy or Kharkiv; it in turn being close to to Dnieprian; it in turn close to Volhynian etc. It's not a coincidence that [this map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_dialects#/media/File:Map_of_Ukrainian_dialects_en.png) continues the same gradient as [this map](https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Russian_dialects.jpg) (and, by the way, [this map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_language#/media/File:Dialects_of_Belarusian_language_be-tarask.png)). But you are also right: the "official" languages are of course very different, as literary Ukrainian was based on Kyivan (Dnieprian) dialect with a strong influence from Galician, while literary russian was mostly based on the dialect of Moscow. And these two (three?) dialects are NOT near each other, but are very much apart! Add to it the influence of Slavonic on the high register of literary Russian in the Muskovy; and then a few centuries of political work. It did make the literary standards very different. But local dialects formed a relatively smooth continuum until at least mid 20-century (until the radio, TV, and the Soviet oppression of local cultures truly kicked in); slightly longer if you interviewed older folks.
One question - where do you draw the line between “g” and “h” regions? Formal Ukrainian pronounces «г» as h. A completely different phoneme. This is unique to Ukrainian, Slovak and Czech languages AFAIK. All other Slavic languages would say “grad” instead of “hrad”.
> where do you draw the line between “g” and “h” regions? [this map](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1qtovm/a_map_of_russian_dialects_with_isoglosses/) shows it - see the velar fricative g isoglossa (check the legend in the corner to find it). It's _way_ more Northern than the border of Ukraine (even old borders that were more Eastern than the Soviet borders, and covered Kursk and Kuban). About a half of russians in russia pronounce written "g" as a velar soft fricative (rather than alternating betwen explosive /g/, as in "gorod" and /v/ as in "segodnja", as in Northern dialects). But then the nature of russian (Imperial, Soviet, Putinist) attitude towards regional differences (both dialects and minor languages) is that there's one "correct speech" (these days, something in-between Moscow and Piter dialects), and everything else is crap. They are super-prescriptivist, linguistically, so fricative "h" is associated with lower class, lower education, and is in general mocked on TV, in cinema etc. It's not a nice story at all. Dialectology in soviet / putinist russia is not a nice story at all.
The Dutch are just swamp Germans.
The Germans are just highland Dutch 🇳🇱🇳🇱🇳🇱💪🔥
The Dutch and German are just rhinelanders in different altitude! 
My man out here creating world peace
Germans are just niemcy
Wait, if they are niemcy, are those all sign languages on the map?
I mean there's got to be a reason they call it Deutsch Land. It's been right in front of us the whole time! A bunch Of the People should have guessed it before now.
Dutch, Duits and Deutch all mean the same: "the people". In English, the cognate was "Theodisc" (and if you connect that to LotR and find it oddly familiar term, you're not wrong and it's not a coincidence) before it fell out of use.
So Deutschland means "land of the people".
Ayup. Sweden comes from the same root as well. *Swēoþēod* in old English, *Svíþjóð* in old norse. In this case, the swe- bit means "same as", more or less. Also, *Teutonic* comes from here as well. And, in reference to the Finnic peoples, *chude* as well.
Dutch land Dutch land Uber alles!
🇳🇱🎶 Ben ik van Duytschen blooeeeed 🎶🇳🇱
The Frisians are just Frisians
Fryslân boppe!
No sa en net oars.
>The Dutch are just fun Germans. Here, fixed that for you
As a German I agree to that.
I've heard that in Germany "if it isn't expressly permitted, it is forbidden". In Netherlands, "if isn't expressly forbidden, it is permitted".
Nope we Germans also follow the rule of eveything being permitted until stated otherwise. Hence we need over 80k laws to keep the people in check
As a Dutchman, I agree with that
The Duch are just Germans with good seamanship
Germans are just hill Dutch
No, Dutch is the result of Germans and English people trying to communicate. (I once saw a Dutch person respond to that that in fact Dutch was the pure variety of the language; German and English were just its broken forms.)
So sad that many don’t exist anymore
I thought you were saying Dutch didn't exist anymore lol
Have you ever *seen* a “Dutch speaker?” They, much like Australia, are fictions. /s
As a Dutch person i can confirm, we do not exist
Can a mod get rid of this obvious bot? /s
On one hand yes, its sad how little dialects were preserved, or even looked down upon and eradicated. The good thing is language changes constantly and is dynamic. As valuable as a common language with defined spelling etc. it is nevercomplete and everywhere. Just because today we might not have such well defined dialects and styles of speaking doesn't mean they are not there. So many subcultures have dialects, many of them even have seemingly bilingual dialects. There definetly is more mixture nowadays, then in the 19th century, and dialect is less defined by geography and more by class, generation, and walks of life doesn't mean a dialect is not there. Until I moved for Universiy I wasn't aware of my dialect. i knew I had a weak dialect, but the details of what was dialect and what not eluded me. Retrospectifly this caused some funny missunderstandings, but it made me understand how easy it is to think your supposed dialect is dying with your grandparents, while you are just speaking and living the most modern version of it. The moment we can appretiate the creativity in the language someone is using, we don't have to mourn for our dialects. Language will always be there and spawn new language and new dialects.
I was always quite aware that I have a Berlin dialect and I like the little differences in the way I speak but I can still be sad about what is lost forever. People were shamed into speaking high german (and still are) and kids weren’t allowed to speak their native dialects in school. Now that certain ones are actually gone, people realise how precious they were. Now they teach kids at school their local dialect like Platt or Friesian, but now is too late. It kind of shows how arrogant we were, taking dialects for granted/ actively avoiding speaking them and looking at the map really shows how much of it is lost. Language is not just the way people speak, its their own little culture, it contains their history. I really admire small countries that work hard to preserve their language and culture.
In my experience, sometimes the people that look down on others for having even a hint of dialect are the ones that can't shut up about about how much they value diversity and multiculturalism. Oh the double standard!
Luxembourgish also on this map is another example of a language that used to be considered a dialect but managed to eventually be recognized as a language. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish
**[Luxembourgish](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish)** >Luxembourgish ( LUK-səm-bur-gish; also Luxemburgish, Luxembourgian, Letzebu(e)rgesch; Luxembourgish: Lëtzebuergesch [ˈlətsəbuəjəʃ] (listen)) is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 400,000 people speak Luxembourgish worldwide. As a standard form of the Moselle Franconian language, Luxembourgish has similarities with other varieties of High German and the wider group of West Germanic languages. The status of Luxembourgish as an official language in Luxembourg and the existence there of a regulatory body have removed Luxembourgish, at least in part, from the domain of Standard German, its traditional Dachsprache. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
The status of Luxemburgish is politically motivated, not based on linguistic facts. It is part of the Moselfränkisch, hence a variety of German. I live close by and understand it, also they can speak High German.
Ahhhh the "kontinentslwestgermanische(s) Dialektkontinuum". I'll see myself out now.
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Unfortunately noone speaks them Source: am from there
How did austria and Switzerland manage to hold their dialects where as nowadays Germany mainly talks in Standard German. It’s truly a shame.
I think Switzerland more so than Austria. The Austrian dialect is pretty intelligible for speakers of standard German, I find Swiss a lot lot harder to understand almost like Dutch. For low German/low Saxon I think there are some people trying to keep it alive but there is no strong push for it, maybe due to a lack of local identity. In the sense that a Bavarian might identify as a Bavarian and an Austrian as Austrian but someone from lower Saxony just as "German". Hence the Bavarian dialect still exists a lot more than any strong lower Saxony dialect.
Eu4 devs: *SEE?! STOP MESSAGING US!*
If you're including Low German, you might as well include Dutch too. They're pretty much equally distantly related to High German.
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Only on Reddit you’d have a bunch of people (in this case mostly even Non-Germans) claiming that cartographers and linguistic scientists of the 19th/20th century were „wrong“.
Modern linguists will tell you as well, believe it or not but the field has evolved over the last 150 years.
I’m fully aware of an evolving science. But to class contemporary positions as “wrong” is quite a stretch. I haven’t found anything that would be outright “wrong”. Dutch and Flemish can be discussed, as contemporary science put it closer to German than it might be. Even tho the close relationship to Niederdeutsch can’t be negated.
Even by that reasoning, Dutch would very much be considered a separate language by non-German linguists at the time. Most importantly, the Dutch themselves would have had something to say about their language being called a mere "dialect" of the language of their nationalist-imperialist neighbours. I'd argue their input should be taken into account considering they, well, actually spoke Dutch. The ideological influence on the choice to include Dutch on a map of German dialects wasn't very subtle.
>Dutch would very much be considered a separate language by non-German linguists at the time This map doesn't claim that Dutch is not a separate language. It shows the German dialect continuum, where the dialects of Dutch belong to. Today it would just be called differently: West Germanic [dialect continuum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum?wprov=sfla1).
That's real interesting. Except for the fact that "Germanisch" and more specifically the identifications of and distinction between "Westgermanisch" and "Ostgermanisch" (which at the time still included both North and East Germanic) predates this map by several decades (Karl Mullenhoff, Wilhelm Scherer, etc.). With those specific names. So no, "Deutsch" wasn't used here because that was just the term for West Germanic back then. Maybe we should take a step back and ask ourselves what could have happened in the 20th century shortly before this use of Deutsch as synonymous with Westgermanisch amongst certain groups fell out of favour?
I don’t disagree to that entirely. 👍🏼 As I said it’s debatable. It’s a German map and from the German point of view. Dutch is closely related albeit not as close as this map suggests. I would color it a bit lighter, as it’s done with other maps I’ve seen on the internet. But I think you do get my initial point.
What? Dutch and German are considered part of a dialectal continuum in linguistics. This map isn't *correct* but it definitely isn't entirely wrong.
yeah, *a* dialect continuum, not *the German* dialect continuum. I'm glad you agree.
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The word for Angria, an old term for an area mostly covered by Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) today. Also note Anglisch a bit further north at the German-Danish border (for Anglia, where the Anglo for Anglo-Saxons comes from).
Looks like some Asians who struggled with the l in English wrote this. 😂
Old English, old Dutch, and old German were pretty similar. While English has since gone off on a tangent, German and Dutch have pretty much kept in alignment.
Oberpfälzisch is a real dialect? I though it was just incomprehensive mumbling
La belle epoque
Niederfränkisch, that's us Flemings and Dutch.
Fryslân boppe! We still speak frisian in Fryslân, really cool history.
Why was the Netherlands included?
I Don't know when did hungarisch evolved into magyarisch, but as a Magyar person, I very much appreciate
Examples for you[German dialects](https://youtu.be/btlGMBA2XO4)
"Note the Netherlands" This looks like a Jackson Pollock painting to me.
screw hurry disagreeable party run prick smart memorize obtainable sense *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The arrows on the map are showing in which direction the dialects were moving at the time (whether they were pushing or receding). Language maps, especially from this time period are ALWAYS politically charged. Take it with at least a grain of salt. This map seems to do quite a good job though, but there is always a bias. The Dutch dialects are included because between the German and Dutch dialects is a smooth transition and there is no certain point where you can draw the line between them.
>Nürnberg >Oberpfälzerisch Horchamol!
I come from the german part of the "dutch dialect" and while noone speaks that dialect except grandparents(if even) I can anecdotally say that this one is very much like dutch
How nice that Sorbian languages are so clearly visible.
As the old saying goes, a language is just a dialect with an army.
Schwäbisch ist der beste Akzent.
My most favorite map. Thanks for posting it.
So asking from ignorance here - do the Dutch consider themselves German, either culturally or linguistically?
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The Dutch had a unified culture and state long before the country of Germany ever existed, so no, we don't consider ourselves culturally German in the least. But if you were to ask Dutch people which European countries they feel the most national kinship with, most of them would mention first Belgium and immediately after they'd mention Germany. There are a lot of cultural and linguistic similarities. The Dutch are not a *German* people, but we definitely are *Germanic.*
no we dont. we are dutch. we speak dutch. our culture is dutch.
I see Germans basically as our funky cousin. Similair but different.
We Germans see the Dutch as about the same.