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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
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Dutch, French, and German?
Belgium!
Gesundheit
That was uncalled for 🥺
As always is with Belgium
Germans always pop upp somewhere univited
Sie riefen nach mir?
We call it 'Chili'
Suprised no ones attacked you for calling Flemish Dutch ahhaha.
(They lowkey are the same language but many people in Flanders hate it being called dutch ahhaha)
It's mutually understandable but there are quite some differences. I would name them separately.
Both are just lower german with extra steps
The more drunk we get the more it sounds like English.
There is a saying in linguistics attributed to every smart person who ever worked in that field: A language is a dialect with a navi and an army.
Basically saying it's a political idea to separate dialects into distinct languages. Historically, it was the formation of nation states and it's part of the national identity to speak a common language.
TLDR Sure, Flemish and Dutch form a dialect continuum but so does Dutch and German (and obviously Luxembourgish)
Yes. This is often true. But Flemish and Dutch are far far closer in linguistic distance than dutch and german.
And they are completely mutually intelligeble. Unlike Dutch and German, (which I prefer to call hochdeutsch, since german is a nationalist contruct that erases many other languages spoken by peoples living in Germany-Switzerland-Austria.)
Like here we get a distance between Flemish and Dutch of 5.6, that’s the lowest I’ve ever seen with this tool.
While 13.5 with Dutch and German.
Compare that to French and Occitan, Occitan is a Romance language in southern France, which got erased and often claimed it’s just “part of french”. The distance between them is 20.
Edit: Playing round a bit more with the tool, Your point is proven. The distance between Dutch and Afrikaans is lower. Only 2. Yet that’s considered different languages.
That doesn't make sense to me. I'm a native Dutch speaker, I have little issue understanding Flemish. Afrikaans is clearly closely related too, but definitely harder to understand.
The tool measures distance with vocabulary. Afrikaans may be closer in vocabulary but pronounced very differently (since there’s way less cross talking since it’s so isolated), which would make it harder to understand to a Dutch speaker?