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Ik Spreche Frank

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Sitting down to write a new post the question came to my mind, "Can a German understand Dutch?" As we have written about before Dutch is thought of as the median between German and English. So what is Dutch? Obviously its a Germanic language, as is English, but couldn't Dutch be classified as a dialect of low German? (By the way low German refers to the area that the German is spoken, mostly Northern Germany where the land is lower in elevation) After reading some posts from native German speakers they agree that the similarity between Dutch and German is close to the similarity between Spanish and Portuguese; they can understand a little of the written language but have a difficult time understanding the spoken language. And linguistics still do not agree on Dutch, some parts of the Netherlands are considered to be low German dialects, Frisian, as well as low Saxon. But, on a whole Dutch is considered a low Franconian, which derived from old Frankish. Yes, the Franks. According to some web sources the Franks first landed in the Netherlands and then spread to northern France and Germany. And yes, the old Frankish had a significant impact on the French language. Dutch is very much a Frankish language.


The picture is of Charles the Great, King of the Franks, also known as Charlemagne.

In the future I'm going to delve more into the history of the Franks, whom seem to be very interesting.
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