Language code: nl

Technical information about ISO 639 language code nl

The table below provides technical details for the Dutch language, designated by the nl code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

nl

Name

Official

Dutch

Native

Nederlands

Family
Germanic
Scripts
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Plural rules

More info

Language varieties
HollandicZeelandicBrabantianFlemishSouth Guelderish
Related languages
AfrikaansGermanWest Frisian
Key facts
Source language for Afrikaans, sharing about 90 % of its vocabularyContributed many nautical words to other languages, such as “yacht” and “skipper”Standard Dutch keeps only two grammatical genders (common and neuter)The digraph “ij” is often treated as a single alphabetic unit in puzzles and indexingDiminutives are highly productive and frequent, marked mainly with the suffix “-je”.
Sample phrase

Hallo, hoe gaat het met je?

Character encodings

ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-15, Windows 1252, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Dutch belongs to the Indo-European language family, more specifically to the Germanic subgroup. It is the official language in the Netherlands and Suriname and is one of the official languages in Belgium, Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten, and Saba. It is written using the Latin script (Dutch alphabet). It is estimated that there are more than 25 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

6.8K

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Dutch speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

nl-AW Dutch (Aruba)

nl-BE Dutch (Belgium)

nl-BQ Dutch (Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba)

nl-CW Dutch (Curaçao)

nl-NL Dutch (Netherlands)

nl-SR Dutch (Suriname)

nl-SX Dutch (Sint Maarten)

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