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Culturally, modern Frisians and the (Northern) Dutch are rather similar; the main and generally most important difference being that Frisians speak West Frisian, one of the three sub-branches of the Frisian languages, alongside Dutch, and they find this to be a defining part of their identity as Frisians.
It includes countries, which have Afrikaans and/or Dutch as (one of) their nationwide official language(s), as well as dependent territories with Afrikaans and/or Dutch as a co-official language. Worldwide, Afrikaans and Dutch as native or second language are spoken by approximately 46 million people.
Dutch speakers, or Batavophones, are globally concentrated in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname. Dutch is also spoken in minority areas through Europe and in many immigrant communities in all over the world. Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch, but is regarded as a separate language and will not be analyzed in this article.
Dutch-speaking immigrant communities can also be found in Australia and New Zealand. The 2011 Australian census showed 37,248 people speaking Dutch at home. [88] At the 2006 New Zealand census, 26,982 people, or 0.70 percent of the total population, reported to speak Dutch to sufficient fluency that they could hold an everyday conversation. [89]
Over 60% of the population are native speakers of Dutch [101] and around 20%–30% speak it as a second language. In 2004, Suriname became an associate member of the Dutch Language Union. [102] Suriname is one of three Dutch-speaking sovereign countries in the world (the others being the Netherlands and Belgium).
It is widely spoken on Saba and Sint Eustatius. On Saba and St. Eustatius, the majority of the education is in English only, with some bilingual English-Dutch schools. 90-93% of the Dutch people can also speak English as a foreign language. (see also: English language in the Netherlands)
A bizarre and relatively new tradition in the Netherlands has it that, every 29 November, Dutch families should sit down for dinner with a pancake on their heads in order to wish one another “a ...
This is a ranking of languages by number of sovereign countries in which they are de jure or de facto official, although there are no precise inclusion criteria or definition of a language. An '*' (asterisk) indicates a country whose independence is disputed.