Five Brothers and a War

The Language

Dutch is a Germanic language, with sister languages of English and German.

Germanic

West Germanic

North Germanic

East Germanic

English German Dutch (Frisian Afrikaans Flemish)

Gothic

Norwegian Swedish Danish Icelandic Faroese

holland

As with other languages, Dutch has evolved dramatically over the past few hundred years, to the point that the modern version is almost indecipherable from that of the 16 th Century. In fact, the Dutch have gone so far as to formally modernize their language, rather than allowing it to develop on its own, the way that English has evolved. They have not gone the route of the French though, where they have a committee to add words that are acceptable and reject words that are not pure enough. Or, indeed, the way that the French Canadians have used, which involves the formal process of making the use of non French illegal, enforced by the so-called “language police”. Therefore, Dutch has a lot of common-use English words included in its everyday vocabulary. The reason to include this basic foundation of the language in this book is due to the number of Dutch words and phrases that are necessarily used throughout. A person who is not conversant in Dutch could be somewhat kerflummoxed by the seemingly unpronounceable combinations of letters. The alphabet pronunciation, which is important because the sounds of the basic alphabet are used with great consistency in the pronunciation of Dutch words is as follows:

Five Brothers and a War

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