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:
“Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“I do not see why, since America and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves should not compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors; and, indeed, I believe that in course of time the names of some of our trees and shrubs, as well as flowers, will get into our popular chromatic nomenclature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)