Written and published by Linden Alexander Pentecost, published in the UK and only on this website, published on the 21st of January 2026. This article is unrelated to any and all of my other publications and its content is entirely separate from that of my other publications. This article/blog post contains a total of 948 words.
The linguistics of Holland and of the German coast facing the North Sea, and of northwest Germany in general - is complex. There are the modern standard languages, standard Dutch, Nederlands, standard High German: Deutsch or Hochdeutsch.
Dutch is a Low Franconian West Germanic language, Low Franconian languages also include for example Flemish, Vlaams, which is often, but not always similar to standard Dutch, depending on the register of speech, as well as Zeelandic, Zeêuws, spoken along and around the coastline to the southwest of The Hague, and a variety of other Low Franconian languages, including Brabantian.
Towards eastern and northern Holland, the main native languages are Low German languages, languages which are in many ways akin to Low Franconian languages, but which are nevertheless distinct from them in many important respects. An example of a Low German language in Holland is Drents, in that language known as Drèents. Many varieties of Low German or "Low Saxon" are spoken in both Holland and in northwest Germany, another example being the Northern Low Saxon or Northern Low German language, which has many sub-varieties such as Gronings in Holland, which is a Northern Low German language, unlike Drèents which is a Low Westphalian German language. Another example of a North Low German language is Holsteinisch spoken in the historic region of Holstein in Northern Germany.
Another group of languages in this area are the Frisian languages, which include various dialects of West Frisian, East Frisian, and North Frisian. West Frisian has quite a large number of speakers, and possesses some differences in its dialects. East Frisian is sadly now mostly extinct, except for the Saterland Frisian dialect of East Frisian. North Frisian consists of a fair number of smaller North Frisian languages spoken around the islands and coastal areas of North Frisia. North Frisian languages were I think distinguished already in ancient times, and the North Frisian languages do not actually possess a common name which refers to these languages as a whole.
Dutch is described as being an easy language for English speakers, but many aspects of the Dutch language are also very different from English. The phonology of Dutch for example possesses important differences that make it quite unlike that of English, and to a lesser extent, quite unlike that of German. Of course, there are a huge number of words in Dutch which are, on the surface, very similar to their etymological equivalents in English. For example, vis - "fish", water - "water", zand - "sand", boot - "boat", krab - "crab", strand - "beach", duin - "sand dune", steen - "stone", lang - "tall", beuk - "beech tree", eik - "oak tree", berk - "birch tree", vrij - "free", smid - "smith", heg - "hedge", noord - "north". Whilst other words are entirely different to how we say these things in English, for example paard - "horse", boom - "tree", golf - "wave", hout - "wood", mooi - "beautiful", dop - "shell", kei - "pebble" or "boulder".
There are many terms still which are not recognisable through modern English but which I recognise through Nordic languages, e.g. delen - "to share/divide", compare Swedish: att dela - "to share/divide", gaarne - "gladly", compare Swedish gärna - "gladly", Norwegian gjerne, gjedna, jærn etc, Danish: gerne all of the same meaning. Dutch afstand - "distance", compare Swedish avstånd, Danish afstand and Norwegian avstand etc.
Some words in Dutch, for example kei - "pebble" or "boulder" seem to be of uncertain origin, which is interesting. I have commented on some of these words elsewhere. I think that this root word could be of non-Indo-European origin, like other Dutch and other West Germanic words I have discussed elsewhere. I have discussed loads of others in English (and other Anglic languages), Scots and Shaetlan, but to me these languages are not "West Germanic" in the strictest sense, and could instead be classed as "Insular West Germanic" or even as "Insular British Germanic". I have been unable to find any likely cognates to kei outside of the limited number of possible Germanic cognates, this includes not being able to find any reasonable possible cognates in other language families, although some of the Afro-Asiatic root words for "stone" do bare some similarity. I also think it possible that the English word "cog" and related words could be somehow cognate, but they in part tend to imply something "swollen", which could be semantically attached to the idea of a "stone" or "boulder". I would be interested to know others' thoughts on this.
If we look at the Gronings language for instance, we can see that it contains many different diphthongs and other sounds to those in Dutch. For example Dutch één - "one", Gronings: ain, Dutch het - "it", Gronings: 't , Dutch eik - "oak", Gronings: ekkelboom, Dutch steen - "stone", Gronings: stain, Dutch huis - "house", Gronings: huus, Dutch worm - "worm", Gronings: wurm etc. Some of the sounds in Gronings resemble those of other Low German languages, e.g. North Low German huus compared with Gronings huus, but Dutch huis [ɦɐʏ̯s̠] and German Haus, whereas Gronings stain has more of a phonological resemblance to German Stein [ʃtaɪn] etc.
I hope that this article was interesting! God bless all.
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