Names
While Dutch generally refers to the language as a whole, Belgian varieties are sometimes collectively referred to as Flemish. In both Belgium and Netherlands, the native official name for Dutch is Nederlands, and its dialects have their own name, e.g., Hollands "Hollander", West-Vlaams "West Flemish", Limburgs "Limburger", Brabants "Brabantine".
The language has been known under a variety of names. In Middle Dutch, dietsc (in the South) and diutsc, duutsc (in the North) were used to refer variably to Dutch, Low German, and German. This word is derived from diet "people" and was used to translate Latin (lingua) vulgaris "popular language" to set apart the Germanic vernacular from Latin (the language of writing and the Church) and Romance. An early form of this word appears Latinized in the Strasbourg Oaths (842 a.d.) as teudisca (lingua) to refer to the Rhenish Franconian portion of the oath and also underlies dialectal French thiois "Luxembourgish, Lorraine Franconian".
During the Renaissance in the 16th century, differentiation began to be made by opposing duytsch (modern Duits) "German" and nederduytsch "Low German" with dietsch or nederlandsch "Dutch", a distinction that is echoed in English later the same century with the terms High Dutch "German" and Low Dutch "Dutch". However, owing to Dutch commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries, the English term came to refer exclusively to the Dutch. In modern Dutch, Duits has narrowed in meaning to refer to "German", Diets went out of common use because of its Nazi associations and now somewhat romantically refers to older forms of Dutch, whereas Hollands and Vlaams are sometimes used to name the language as a whole for the varieties spoken in respectively The Netherlands and Belgium. Nederlands, the official Dutch word for "Dutch", did not become firmly established until the 19th century. The repeated use of neder- or "low" to refer to the language is a reference to the Netherlands' downriver location at the mouth of the Rhine (harking back to Latin nomenclature, e.g., Germania inferior vs. Germania superior) and the fact that it lies in the lowest dip of the Northern European plain.
Read more about this topic: Dutch Language
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“Nor youth, nor strength, nor wisdom spring again,
Nor habitations long their names retain,
But in oblivion to the final day remain.”
—Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612–1672)
“Matter and force are the two names of the one artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)