Dutch language started to take shape at the middle of the 5th century AD. The language spoken by the inhabitants of the Netherlands back then was called Old Dutch and it developed from Lower Franconian (Niederfrnkisch), a dialect of Low German.Middle Dutch was the language used during the 12th and the 15th century and since the year 1500 we can speak of Modern Dutch, a language very similar to Standard Dutch, the language currently used by the Dutch people. Standard Dutch is called "Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands" meaning "general civilized Dutch". The name of the Dutch language comes from the word Dietsc / Duutsc (language of the people), as people used to call it in the Middle Ages.Dutch is a West Germanic language spoken in the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname and other Dutch colonies, as well as in small parts of Germany and France. It has an official status in the Netherlands, Flanders, Suriname, Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles and it manages to sum up around 23 million native speakers worldwide (15 million residing in the Netherlands). Dutch used to be the official language of South Africa until 1961, contributing to the development of Afrikaans, one of the official languages of South Africa. Dutch has several dialects, the most important being Flemish, spoken in Flanders (Belgium). Compared to Standard Dutch, it uses older words and a softer pronunciation.Like the other Germanic languages, Dutch uses the Latin alphabet. As a particularity, it contains the group of letters "3" that stands for the more common "y" which is used only in foreign words. Dutch language has three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) but they are quite often reduced to two (common and neuter). Cases are used mainly for pronouns, while common nouns and adjectives are not case inflected. The Dutch vocabulary is predominantly of Germanic origin and it is one of the richest in the world, containing approximately 190,000 words.Other particularities of the Dutch language are the extensive use of doubled letters (mostly due to the formation of compound words) and the devoicing of all consonants at the end of the words.