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Is there really that much of a difference between Flemish and Dutch?

• mtts 16y ago
  It depends. Some Flemish dialects are nearly unintelligible for a speaker of standard Nothern Dutch, but standard Flemish and standard Nothern Dutch are fairly similar. Which isn't surprising because standard Nothern Dutch was heavily influenced by the Flemish of well to do Belgians that fled to the North during the sixteenth century.
• Yaa101 16y ago
  Most people mistake "Brabantian" with "Flemish" Flemish is spoken in East and West Flanders and sounds very much like Hollands, which is the dutch dialect spoken in the west of The Netherlands. This is not strange as it were Flanders monks that started to cultivate the peat bogs in the west of the Netherlands round 850 - 900 AD. In most other parts of dutch speaking Belgium they speak Brabantian or Limburgish (cross between Brabantian and Lower Saxon) which has a soft G and a lot of it is hard to understand for people of western Netherlands, but not hard for the people living in Dutch Brabant or Limburg, likewise the north eastern provinces in The Netherlands they speak "Nieder Saksisch" (Lower Saxon) which is closer to German than to Dutch. Like Belgium The Netherlands is situated exactly on the border of of 2 main language areas that is Lower Frankish and Lower Saxon. We have many crossing dialects between those 2 language groups and many people cannot understand each other when speaking in their native dialect, that is why the standardization of languages is so strong here. I live in Amsterdam and can understand Flemish without any trouble but when listening to somebody talking in dialect from Antwerpen where they have Brabants dialects it sound like they speak Russian or Chinese, no kidding. Hollands and Flemish come from Middle Dutch which is exactly the same Language Group as Middle English. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Dutch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Dutch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_english http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_english