<P> Outside the Low Countries, it is the native language of the majority of the population of Suriname, and also holds official status in Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, which are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands . Historical minorities on the verge of extinction remain in parts of France and Germany, and in Indonesia, while up to half a million native speakers may reside in the United States, Canada and Australia combined . The Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa have evolved into Afrikaans, a mutually intelligible daughter language which is spoken to some degree by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia . </P> <P> Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English and is colloquially said to be "roughly in between" them . Dutch, like English, has not undergone the High German consonant shift, does not use Germanic umlaut as a grammatical marker, has largely abandoned the use of the subjunctive, and has levelled much of its morphology, including most of its case system . Features shared with German include the survival of two to three grammatical genders--albeit with few grammatical consequences--as well as the use of modal particles, final - obstruent devoicing, and a similar word order . Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and incorporates slightly more Romance loans than German but far fewer than English . </P> <P> In both Belgium and the Netherlands, the native official name for Dutch is Nederlands, and its dialects have their own names, e.g. Hollands ("Hollandic"), West - Vlaams ("West Flemish"), Brabants ("Brabantian"). Sometimes Vlaams ("Flemish") is used as well to describe Standard Dutch in Flanders . Over time, the Dutch language has been known under a variety of names . In Middle Dutch Dietsc, Duutsc or Duitsc was used . It derived from the Old Germanic word theudisk, which literarily means "popular" or "belonging to the populace". In Western Europe the term was used for the language of the local Germanic populace as opposed to Latin, the non-native language of writing and the Catholic Church . In the first text in which it is found, dating from 784, theodisce refers to Anglo - Saxon, the West Germanic dialects of Britain . Although in Britain the name Englisc replaced theodisce on an early age, speakers of West Germanic in other parts of Europe kept on using it as a reference to their local speech . </P> <P> Owing to commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries between England and the Low Countries, the English cognate of theodisk developed into the exonym Dutch, which came to refer exclusively to the people of the Netherlands . Although the wider definition of Dutch that included "German" continued for a while longer in the US and survived there in the name Pennsylvania Dutch, a local German dialect . In the Low Countries on the contrary, Dietsch or Duytsch as endonym for Dutch went out of common use and had been gradually replaced by the Dutch endonym Nederlands . This designation started at the Burgundian court in the 15th century, although the use of neder, laag, bas and inferior ("nether" or "low") to refer to the area known as the Low Counties, goes back further in time . Earlier the Romans have been referring to the region as Germania Inferior ("Lower" Germania). It is a reference to the Low Countries' downriver location at the Rhine--Meuse--Scheldt delta near the North Sea . </P>

Where are you from if you speak dutch