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In my country, the three official languages write the name of "pilipili" pepper in three different ways
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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Yes. This is often true. But Flemish and Dutch are far far closer in linguistic distance than dutch and german.
And they are completely mutually intelligeble. Unlike Dutch and German, (which I prefer to call hochdeutsch, since german is a nationalist contruct that erases many other languages spoken by peoples living in Germany-Switzerland-Austria.)
Like here we get a distance between Flemish and Dutch of 5.6, that’s the lowest I’ve ever seen with this tool.
While 13.5 with Dutch and German.
Compare that to French and Occitan, Occitan is a Romance language in southern France, which got erased and often claimed it’s just “part of french”. The distance between them is 20.
Edit: Playing round a bit more with the tool, Your point is proven. The distance between Dutch and Afrikaans is lower. Only 2. Yet that’s considered different languages.
That doesn't make sense to me. I'm a native Dutch speaker, I have little issue understanding Flemish. Afrikaans is clearly closely related too, but definitely harder to understand.
The tool measures distance with vocabulary. Afrikaans may be closer in vocabulary but pronounced very differently (since there’s way less cross talking since it’s so isolated), which would make it harder to understand to a Dutch speaker?
Partially, but even written Afrikaans has much more loanwords from African languages and English, and words that evolved independently, compared to Flemish.
Quite a bit to unpack here.
And that's basically my point: Someone from Oldenburg will have a much easier time understanding someone from Groningen than someone from Vienna, despite the fact that both speak German dialects and not Dutch. Now you can argue that Low German (Plattdeutsch) is its own language in its own right but, again, someone from Cologne will get along with someone from Duisburg (linguistically at least) while Duisburg is Low German and Cologne is Middle German. Where ever you draw the lines and how many lines you might draw, they are always arbitrary.
Now it makes more sense to me to speak of dialect groups where neighboring groups are mutually intelligible. This model comes much closer to the real dialect continuum that continental western Germanic languages form (it's called "continental western Germanic dialect continuum" or in German "Kontinentalwestgerrmanisches Dialektkontinuum" and I had a linguistics docent who really loved this term). You can't group these dialect groups to languages because each time you try, you will end up with neighboring groups in different languages. It's better to just abolish the very concept of distinct languages as a nationalist idea. #nobordernonation
And sorry for the cliff hanger if you happened to read the comment before the edit. I hit "send" by accident.