Comments in response to this post:
I guessed you might be a Fleming, Michel, just from the large number of Google.be hits, but I have to admit it was a guess. Just how far has Flemish and Dutch diverged over the years? I assume Walloon is also distinct from French?
xian [[email protected]] ? 9/20/02; 4:34:48 PM

Flemish is actually an amalgam of different dialects. The equivalent of “BBC English”, “VRT-Nederlands” is perfectly understandable by everyone in the entire Dutch language community.

The individual dialects (west-flemish, east-flemish, antwerp, ghent, …) are sometimes quite unintelligible to each other (and to an even greater extent, to the Dutch)–witness this lyric of a Flip Kowlier song in West-Flemish, with a standard Dutch “translation” to the right:

There are clear differences between “flemish” (the different dialects) and “dutch” (with its different dialects). There are grammatic, semantic, morphologic and of course vocabulary differences.

All the rest is a question of definitions: is the text on the left a different language to the text on the right above? Or are they both dialects of a West-Germanic, Low Saxon-Low Franconian language? Up to anyone to decide for themselves I guess. I personally feel both languages are drifting apart, certainly in day-to-day usage, and on average spoken Flemish is just a little less understandable to Dutch people than Rab C. Nesbitt would be to the average Floridan or New Yorker.

My trusty Brittanica doesn’teven make the disctinction between German and Dutch, go figure:

In terms of areas of high mutual intelligibility (which do not entirely reflect historical development), there are only five modern Germanic languages: English, Frisian, Netherlandic-German (including Afrikaans and Yiddish), Insular Scandinavian, and Continental Scandinavian. If literary tradition and national criteria are considered, the number is increased by the division of Netherlandic-German into Standard High German, Low German, Dutch-Flemish, Afrikaans, Luxemburgian, and Yiddish; the division of Insular Scandinavian into Icelandic and Faroese (Faeroese); and the division of Continental Scandinavian into Norwegian (which is further subdivided into New Norwegian [or Nynorsk] and Dano-Norwegian [or Bokmål]), Danish, and Swedish.