Dutch in Belgium families now living across the language border because it is cheaper to build, buy or rent. These developments do not yet lead to legal facilities for Dutch speakers. Dutch is the majority language in northern Belgium, being spoken natively by three-fifths of the population of Belgium. It is one of the three national languages of Belgium, together with French and German, and is the only official language of the Flemish Region. The various Dutch dialects spoken in Belgium contain a number of lexical and a few grammatical features which distinguish them from the standard Dutch. As in the Netherlands, the
History of the Dutch language language are Belgium, the Netherlands, Suriname, Aruba and Curacao. Within the Indo-European language tree, Dutch is grouped within the Germanic languages, which means it shares a common ancestor with languages such as English, German, and Scandinavian languages. This common, but not direct, ancestor (proto-language) of all contemporary Germanic languages is called "Proto-Germanic", commonly assumed to have originated in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. All Germanic languages are united by subjection to the sound shifts of Grimm's law and Verner's law which originated Proto-Germanic. These two laws define the basic differentiating features of Germanic languages that