Languages - Weekly tips - Language courses in 12 weeks. Learn Dutch. Dutch Lessons Dutch belongs to the Indo-European family, Germanic group, West Germanic subgroup, and is spoken by 20 million people, (nearly 14 million in the Netherlands).
Standard Dutch, "Netherlandic", is used everywhere in writing and educated speech. "Flemish" is an alternative name for Dutch in Belgium and Westhoek in France but is not a "Dutch dialect". The development of the Dutch language may be divided into three main periods. The only important surviving work in Old Dutch, which extends to 1100, is a translation of the Psalter, a religious text. Nederlandse Tongue Twisters. Dutch Lessons. Spanish Idioms. Webster's dictionary defines an idiom as: "1) the dialect of a people, region,etc., 2) the usual way in which words of a language are joined together to express thought; 3) a conventional phrase or expression having a meaning different from the literal; 4) a characteristic style. " Webster's New World Dictionary,Compact School & Office Edition - The World Publishing Company, 1967 The use of idioms allows you to expand your fluency in a language.
Where in English we might use the common phrase "Can't hold a candle to" when discussing a person's ability, such as in the sentence "As far as her ability to use idioms, no one can hold a candle to her. Learning with Texts.