Dutch in Belgium the Brabantic dialects. It is often called ("in-between-language" or "intermediate language", intermediate between dialects and standard Dutch). Dutch in Belgium The Dutch language used in Belgium can also be referred to as Flemish Dutch ("Vlaams-Nederlands"), Belgian Dutch ("Belgisch-Nederlands" ), or Southern Dutch ("Zuid-Nederlands"). Dutch is the mother tongue of about 60% of the population in Belgium, or by approximately 6.5 million people.(over 11 million inhabitants). It is the only official language in the Flemish Region (Flanders) (which consists of the provinces of West Flanders, East Flanders, Flemish Brabant, Antwerp, and Limburg) and, in addition to French, the official language in
History of the Dutch language (modern Wadenoijen), meaning a ford (where one wades), in Tacitus's "Histories". Linguistically speaking, Middle Dutch is a collective name for closely related dialects which were spoken and written between about 1150 and 1550 in the present-day Dutch-speaking region. There was at that time as yet no overarching standard language, but they were all highly mutually intelligible. In historic literature "Diets" and Middle Dutch ("Middelnederlands") are used interchangeably to describe the ancestor of Modern Dutch. Although almost from the beginning, several Middle Dutch variations emerged, the similarities between the different regional languages were much stronger than their differences, especially for written