Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of most of the population of the Netherlands, and about sixty percent of the populations of Belgium and Suriname. Dutch also holds official status in the Caribbean island nations of Aruba, Curaçao and Saint Maarten. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second language for another 5 million people.

Dutch is closely related to German and English. Dutch shares with German a similar word order, having grammatical gender, and a largely Germanic vocabulary, it has however—like English—not undergone the High German consonant shift, does not use Germanic umlaut as a grammatical marker, and has levelled much of its morphology, including the case system. Dutch has three grammatical genders, but this distinction has fewer grammatical consequences than in German. Dutch also shares with German the use of modal particles, final-obstruent devoicing, and the use of subject–verb–object word order in main clauses and subject–object–verb in subordinate clauses. Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and contains the same Germanic core as German and English, incorporating more Romance loans than German and fewer than English.