About the language Dutch (Nederlands) is a West Germanic language spoken by around 22 million people, mainly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname, but also by smaller groups of speakers in parts of France, Germany and several former Dutch colonies. It is closely related to German and also the North Germanic languages, and has some linguistic connections with English. The language is a descendant of Old Frankish which is also the parent language of Afrikaans, one of the official languages of South Africa. Dutch and Afrikaans are to a large extent mutually intelligible, though both have separate spelling standards and dictionaries and have separate language regulators. Standard Dutch (Standaardnederlands) is the standard language of the major Dutch speaking-areas and is regulated by the Nederlandse Taalunie ("Dutch Language Union"). Grammar Dutch grammar follows the same basic word order as all Germanic languages (Subject Verb Object). There are, however, some interesting differences of word order between the main clause and the subclause. Dutch grammar also shares many traits with German, but has a less complicated morphology (inflection system), which puts it closer to English. Dutch has only two basic genders (three in some interpretations), which is similar to the gender systems of the Continental Scandinavian languages. Consonant system The consonant system of Dutch has not been part of the High German consonant shift and has more in common with how English and the Scandinavian languages, especially Swedish and Norwegian, are pronounced. Like most Germanic languages it has a syllable structure that allows fairly complex consonant clusters. Dutch is often noted for the prominent use of velar fricatives (pronounced in the back of the mouth) something which is often a poignant source of amusement or even satire. Dutch vocabulary is predominantly Germanic in origin, considerably more so than English. This is to a large part due to the heavy influence from Romance languages on English and similar patterns of word formation, such as the tendency to form long and sometimes very complicated compound nouns, much like German and the Scandinavian languages. Dialects One of the major dialect groups of Dutch, Flemish, is spoken in the southwestern Netherlands and the northern half of Belgium. It is sometimes claimed to be a separate language, an issue which can be very controversial for the Dutch-speaking population of Belgium. Officially, both Belgium and the Netherlands adhere to Standard Dutch and the difference between Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch are comparable to the difference between American and British English.