Linguists like to say Dutch sits roughly between English and German, and there is real truth to it. Like English, Dutch never went through the High German consonant shift that turned English t into German z and English p into German pf - so where a German says zwei and pfeffer, a Dutch person says twee and peper, close enough to the English two and pepper to sound almost familiar. But Dutch kept the Germanic verb structure that puts conjugated verbs in second position in main clauses and conjugated verbs at the end of subordinate ones. The result is a tongue an English speaker can almost read but cannot quite hear, and a German speaker can almost hear but cannot quite read. A Dutch sentence is the structural cousin of both - close enough to make the comparison obvious, far enough that neither neighbor can claim parentage.

What the language is called has been a centuries-long argument, and the English word Dutch is itself a fossil. It descends from Theodiscus, a Latinized term first attested in 786 when a bishop wrote to Pope Adrian I about a synod in Corbridge, England, where decisions were recorded tam Latine quam theodisce - in Latin as well as in the common vernacular. For a thousand years that word covered most continental Germanic speech. English narrowed it down to one country; in German itself the cognate Deutsch went the other way and came to mean the German language. Inside the Low Countries the medieval forms Dietsch and Duytsch gave way, starting in the 1480s at the Burgundian court, to Nederlands - the language of the low lands. The name people use for the same speech depends entirely on where the centuries took them.

When Dutch sailors set up a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, they brought 17th-century Hollandic dialect with them. Three and a half centuries later, what came back is a separate language. Afrikaans evolved in parallel with modern Dutch, shaped by contact with Khoekhoe, Malay, Portuguese, and the languages of enslaved people brought from across the Indian Ocean. The grammar simplified dramatically - Afrikaans dropped most of the verb conjugations and gender distinctions Dutch still carries. Today some 7 million people speak Afrikaans as their first language, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, with perhaps 20 million including second-language speakers, and a Dutch speaker meeting an Afrikaans speaker for the first time has an experience few modern Europeans share: most of what they hear is intelligible, but it sounds, somehow, like a Dutch that has been weathered by a different sun.

Spelling, in the Dutch-speaking world, is politics. Successive 20th-century reforms - 1934, 1947, 1954, 1995, 2005 - rewrote dictionaries and rules, and each one set off arguments that nobody else would recognize as ferocious. Should the verb pannenkoek (pancake) take one n or two between the stems? In 1995 the answer changed. Newspapers and publishers split over which version to follow. Belgium and the Netherlands signed the Language Union Treaty in 1980 specifically to keep these decisions coordinated across borders, because the alternative - a Belgian Dutch slowly drifting from a Dutch Dutch - was the kind of slow-motion disaster small languages cannot afford. To outsiders the disputes look like type-A pedantry. To Dutch speakers they are about who gets to define the shape of a shared tongue.

Inside the Netherlands itself, the regional varieties are quietly fading. In 1995, 27 percent of Dutch adults spoke a dialect or regional language regularly. By 2011 the number was 11 percent. Among primary-school children the decline was steeper: 12 percent in 1995, 4 percent by 2011. Limburgish, with its sing-song tones that sound almost like Chinese to untrained ears, still holds on - 54 percent of adult Limburgers speak it. Dutch Low Saxon, the speech of Groningen and Drenthe across the German border, is fading faster. West Flemish in Belgium has the peculiar trick of swapping the hard g sound for a breathy h, leaving speakers struggling to tell held (hero) from geld (money) when they try to talk Standard Dutch. Each of these is a thousand-year inheritance, and the standard language - the same standard language that exists because people once needed a common Bible - is, gently and without anyone planning it, replacing them all.