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Where is Dutch spoken?

Dutch is the official language of six countries and territories spread over three continents, with about 25 million native speakers. Its daughter language, Afrikaans, adds another 7 million in southern Africa.

Europe: the heartland

The Netherlands is home to about 17.8 million people, virtually all of whom speak Dutch; it is the sole nationwide official language. Regional languages exist alongside it — Frisian holds official status in the province of Friesland, and Low Saxon and Limburgish are recognised regional languages — but Dutch is the language of government, media and education everywhere.

In Belgium, Dutch is one of three official languages and the mother tongue of about 6.8 million people, roughly 60% of the population. It is the sole official language of Flanders, the northern half of the country, and shares official status with French in the Brussels-Capital Region. Belgian Dutch is popularly called Flemish, but it is the same standard language with a different accent and some vocabulary of its own — see Dutch vs Flemish for the details. A small Dutch-speaking community also persists in French Flanders, around Dunkirk in France, though without official status.

South America: Suriname

Suriname, a former Dutch colony independent since 1975, kept Dutch as its official language. Around 500,000 Surinamese speak it, and it remains the language of education, government and the press. Everyday life is multilingual — Sranan Tongo serves as the street lingua franca — but Suriname is a full member of the Taalunie, the treaty body that regulates standard Dutch, alongside the Netherlands and Flanders. Surinamese Dutch is a recognised national variety with its own accepted vocabulary.

The Caribbean

Dutch is official in the three autonomous Caribbean countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands — Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten — and in the special municipalities of Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius. In practice it shares space with Papiamento (Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao) and English (Sint Maarten, Saba, Statia): Dutch dominates administration, law and much of schooling, while the local languages dominate the street.

Africa: the Afrikaans connection

Afrikaans, spoken by about 7 million people natively in South Africa and Namibia, evolved from the Dutch carried to the Cape from 1652 onward. It simplified Dutch grammar dramatically — no verb conjugation, no grammatical gender — yet remains close enough that Dutch and Afrikaans speakers can read each other's languages with little trouble. How the two compare, and how far the mutual intelligibility really goes, is covered in Dutch vs Afrikaans.

Traces elsewhere

Colonial history left Dutch footprints far beyond its official domain. In Indonesia, Dutch was the administrative language for three centuries; it is no longer spoken in daily life, but Indonesian law students still learn to read it because much of the country's civil code exists in Dutch. Indonesian absorbed thousands of Dutch loanwords (kantor from kantoor, “office”). In the United States, Dutch dialect communities in Michigan, Iowa and New Jersey survived into the 20th century, and American English keeps Dutch loans such as cookie, boss and Santa Claus. Substantial emigrant communities also exist in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Speaker numbers at a glance