Learn Dutch

Category: File - :Jan Steen - Adolf en Catharina Croeser aan de Oude Delft 1655.jpg|thumb|Daily life during the Dutch Golden Age captured in a painting.

The Netherlands (; , ) is a country in Northwestern Europe, constituting the major portion of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is a parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy. The Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east. The capital is Amsterdam and the seat of government is The Hague.

The Netherlands is often called Holland, which is formally incorrect as North and South Holland are actually two of its twelve provinces (see terminology of "the Netherlands"). The word Dutch is used to refer to the people, the language, and anything pertaining to the Netherlands. The difference between the noun and the adjective is a pecularity of the English language and does not exist in the Dutch language.

Being one of the first parliamentary democracies, the Netherlands was a modern country from its inception. Among other affiliations the country is a founding member of the European Union (EU), NATO, OECD, WTO, and has signed the Kyoto protocol. With Belgium and Luxembourg it forms the Benelux economic union. The country is host to five international courts: the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Court and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The former four are situated in The Hague as is the EU's criminal intelligence agency Europol. This has led to the city being dubbed "the world's legal capital"., specifically, "In the 1990s, during his term as United Nations Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali started calling The Hague the worlds legal capital"

The Netherlands is a geographically low-lying country, with about 27% of its area and 60% of its population located below sea level. Significant areas have been gained through land reclamation and preserved through an elaborate system of polders and dikes. Much of the Netherlands is formed by the estuary of three important European rivers, which together with their distributaries form the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta. Most of the country is very flat, with the exception of foothills in the far south?east and several low-hill ranges in the central parts created by ice-age glaciers.

The Netherlands is a densely populated country. It is known for its traditional windmills, tulips, cheese, clogs'' (wooden shoes), delftware and Gouda cheese, for its bicycles, and in addition, traditional values and civil virtues such as its social tolerance. The country has more recently become known for its liberal policies toward drugs, prostitution, homosexuality, and euthanasia. It also has one of the most free market capitalist economies in the world, ranking 12th of 157 countries in one index.Netherlands, Index of Economic Freedom

The various Amish () or Amish Mennonite church fellowships are Christian religious denominations that form a very traditional subgrouping of Mennonite churches. They are best known for their simple living, plain dress and resistance to the adoption of many modern conveniences. The history of the Amish church began with a schism in Switzerland within a group of Swiss and Southern German Mennonites, in 1693. The leader of the schismatic faction was a Mennonite Elder named Jakob Ammann. Those who followed Amman became known as Amish, or Amish Mennonites. In the early 18th century, many Amish Mennonites emigrated to Pennsylvania for a variety of reasons. Today, the most traditional descendants of these Amish Mennonites continue to speak Pennsylvania German (more often referred to as Pennsylvania Dutch). There are also Old Order Amish communities, especially in the US state of Indiana, where a dialect of Swiss German predominates. Over the years, there have been numerous divisions among the Amish churches. The 'Old Order' Amish, an ultra-conservative faction that withdrew from fellowship with the wider body of Amish Mennonites in the 1860s, are those that have most emphasized traditional practices and beliefs. As of 2000, over 165,000 Old Order Amish live in Canada and the United States. A new study, produced in 2008, suggests their numbers have increased to 227,000.

Amish church membership begins with baptism, usually between the ages of 16 and 25. It is a requirement for marriage, and once a person has affiliated with the church, she or he must marry within the faith. Church districts average between 20 to 40 families, and worship services are held every other Sunday in a member's home. The district is led by a bishop and several ministers and deacons.

The rules of the church ? the Ordnung ? must be observed by every member. These rules cover most aspects of day-to-day living, and include prohibitions or limitations on the use of power-line electricity, telephones, and automobiles, as well as regulations on clothing. Many Amish church members may not buy insurance or accept government assistance, such as Social Security. As Anabaptists, Amish church members practice nonresistance and will not perform any type of military service. Members who do not conform to these expectations and who cannot be convinced to repent, are excommunicated. In addition to excommunication, members may be shunned ? a practice that limits social contacts to shame the wayward member into returning to the church. During adolescence (called rumspringa or "running around" in some communities), nonconforming behavior that would result in the shunning of an adult who had made the permanent commitment of baptism may meet with a certain degree of forbearance.http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/inside/3660/amish-rumspringa

It could be said that, to an extent, many Amish church groups seek to maintain a degree of separation from the non-Amish world. There is generally a heavy emphasis on church and family relationships. They typically operate their own one-room schools, and discontinue formal education at grade eight. They value a rural life, where a large family provides an abundance of manual labor. Due to intermarriage among this relatively small population, higher incidences of certain inheritable diseases have been known to occur in some groups.http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/2004/07/23/sids.php

Dutch () is a West Germanic language spoken by over 22 million people as a native language, and over 5 million people as a second language."1% of the EU population claims to speak Dutch well enough in order to have a conversation." (page 153) Outside the European Union the number of second language speakers of Dutch is relatively small. Most native speakers live in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, with smaller groups of speakers in parts of France, Germany and several former Dutch colonies. It is closely related to other West Germanic languages (e.g., English, West Frisian and German) and somewhat more remotely to the North Germanic languages.

Dutch is the parent language of several creole languages as well as of Afrikaans, one of the official languages of South Africa and the most widely understood in Namibia. Dutch and Afrikaans are to a very large extent mutually intelligible, although they have separate spelling standards and dictionaries and have separate language regulators. The Dutch Language Union coordinates actions of the Dutch, Flemish and Surinamese authorities in linguistic issues, language policy, language teaching and literature.The Nederlandse Taalunie

The Pennsylvania Dutch are the descendants of Germanic peoples who immigrated to the U.S. (primarily to Pennsylvania), from Germany and The Low Countries prior to 1800. The Dutch are generally regarded as one of several Germanic peoples. The German, Deutsch, the archaic Dutch, Deitsch, and the modern Dutch, Duits, each mean 'German' yet are all cognates of the English, 'Dutch'. Hostetler (1993) gives the origin of 'Dutch' as a "folk-rendering" of 'Deitsch'.Hostetler, John A. (1993), Amish Society, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, p. 241

Pennsylvania Dutch are a people of various religious affiliations, most of them Lutheran or Reformed, but many Anabaptists as well. They live primarily in southeastern Pennsylvania in the area stretching in an arc from Bethlehem and Allentown through Reading, Lebanon, and Lancaster to York and Chambersburg. They can also be found down throughout the Shenandoah Valley (the modern Interstate 81 corridor) in the adjacent states of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina, and in the large Amish and Mennonite communities in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, in Ohio north and south of Youngstown and in Indiana around Elkhart. Their cultural traditions date back to the German immigrations to America in the 17th and 18th centuries. Only then did German immigration from various parts the southern Rhineland, Palatinate, the southern part of Hesse, Baden, Alsace Switzerland, and Tyrol Austria gain momentum, and soon dominate the area. But the Pennsylvania Dutch language is ultimately a derivative of Palatinate German.

The Pennsylvania German language (usually referred to as Pennsylvania Dutch, or simply as Dutch, in American English; usually referred to in Pennsylvania German as Deitsch, Pennsylvania Deitsch or Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch) is a variety of West Central German possibly spoken by more than 250,000 people in North America. It has traditionally been the language of many of the descendants of late 17th and early 18th century (CE) immigrants to the US states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and even North Carolina from southern Germany, eastern France and Switzerland. Although for many, the term 'Pennsylvania Dutch' is often taken to refer to the Old Order Amish and related groups exclusively, the term should not imply a connection to any particular religious group. The Amish and Mennonites originally made up only a small percentage of the Pennsylvania German population.

In this context, the word "Dutch" does not refer to the people of the Netherlands. "Dutch" in this case is left over from an archaic sense of the English word "Dutch" (compare German Deutsch, Dutch Duits), which once referred to all people speaking a non-peripheral continental West Germanic language on the European mainland.Weaver, Kyle R. (2006), Meet Don Yoder Dean of Folklife Scholars, Pennsylvania Heritage, vol. 32, no. 2, p.9-10 Alternatively, some sources give the origin of "Dutch" in this case as a corruption or a "folk-rendering" of the Pennsylvania Dutch endonym "Deitsch".Hostetler, John A. (1993), Amish Society, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, p. 241

Speakers of the language are primarily found today in in Ontario in Canada and in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana in the United States. Historically, the dialect was also spoken in several other regions where its use has either largely or entirely faded. A few examples would have been the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and the Yadkin River region of North Carolina. The use of Pennsylvania German as a street language in urban areas of Pennsylvania (such as Allentown, Reading, Lancaster and York) was declining by the arrival of the 20th century, while in more rural areas it continued in widespread use through the World War II era. Since that time, its use has greatly declined. The exception to this decline is in the context of the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, and presently the members of these two groups make up the majority of Pennsylvania German speakers. (see Survival below).

(Note that some other North and South American Mennonites of Dutch and Prussian origin speak what is actually a Low German dialect, referred to as Plautdietsch, which is quite different from Pennsylvania German.)