What's the difference between Dutch and Deutsch?

You've probably heard the word Dutch before, either when someone told you they spoke Dutch or were Dutch, or in expressions such as going Dutch.

You may also have heard the word Deutsch, which sounds almost identical to Dutch, in things like Deutsche Bank, Deutschmark or Deutschland. So, are these two words the same? Not exactly.

The English word Dutch refers to the Netherlands, their people and language. The word Deutsch on the other hand is the German word for “German”, the German people and their language. But why are these two words so similar and mean different things? Let’s go back a few centuries to find out why.

Initially it was all Deutsch

If we go back to the end of the Middle Ages, around the year 1500, most of central Europe was part of the Holy Roman Empire, a large union of various smaller kingdoms and duchies. The Holy Roman Empire comprised most of modern-day Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as the Alps and northern Italy, among others. Many of these areas spoke German, but at that time people did not speak modern standard German like we know it today. Rather, every city, every village, spoke a different dialect. This was the case for most languages in Europe at the time. In England, France, Italy, everywhere people spoke different dialects from town to town and the official language was only used in writing.

And all the various German dialects people spoke where simply called German, or in their own language, Deutsch, Duits, Dütsch or any similar form. At that time, people in the Netherlands did not think of themselves as speaking a different language from people in Germany, Belgium or Austria, just a different variety of Deutsch.

This is the time when the Middle Low German word dütsch entered the Middle English language as Duch, and at this time that word referred to all German languages spoken on the European continent, from Amsterdam to Berlin, from Brussels to Frankfurt, from Vienna to Zürich.

Two languages are born

At some later point, a distinction started to be made between the language in the Lowlands, i.e. around the cities of Antwerp, The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht, and the rest of German-speaking Europe. This started with the Dutch Republic, a newly formed countriy which gained independence from the Holy Roman Empire in 1579 and set the Netherlands on a journey of building a global empire and becoming extremely powerful in trade and warfare. This created a separate national identity in the Lowlands as separate from the rest of Germanic-speaking continental Europe. This separate identity also led them to identify themselves with the locally spoken language, and the people in the Lowlands started to standardise the dialects of Holland that they spoke, into a written Dutch language. This was done especially to translate the Bible. The same happened in Germany, where a standardised language was formed in order to translate the Bible. This standardised written German was accepted as the written language all the way from northern Germany to southern Germany, from Austria to Switzerland.

The English kept "Dutch", the Dutch dropped it

The newly formed Dutch Republic, which was busy building a global empire, met fierce resistance on these endeavours from their neighbours France and England. From this point on, England had a lot more interactions with the Netherlands than it had with all the other German-speaking countries in Europe. England also fought four major wars against the Netherlands in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. While before the word Dutch in English referred to all the languages from Amsterdam to Vienna, this increased focus on the Netherlands led to the word being used exclusively when referring to the Netherlands.

In the Dutch language, however, the opposite happened. While the people in the Lowlands referred to their own language as Duits until the 17th or 18th century, they abandoned that word in favour of the word Nederlands, literally Netherlandish or the language of the Netherlands. This most likely happened as the Dutch saw the German language, the Duits language as the main language of central Europe from which they had separated themselves. In older texts, the word Duits can still be found in reference to the Netherlands. The Dutch anthem also sings ben ik van Duitsen bloed, which means I am of Duits (German) blood.

Nederlands is clearly a “modern” word, by which I mean that it was invented only a few centuries ago, because it is named after the country Nederland. Usually, a country is named after the people or the language of the people, such as England, the land of the Angles, or France, the land of the Franks, Russia the land of the Rus. But the Netherlands is so called because of the geographical characteristics of the region and the language was named after the country later on.

What did the people back then think of this?

We need to remember that most people in those times never wrote, so what the written language was did not really matter that much to the average person. Most people did not move around much in their lifetime, being born and dying in the same village or city. Whether their language was Deutsch or Dutch did not matter that much. The creation of the Dutch Republic did, however, create a permanent rift in the Germanic-speaking continental Europe, dividing this large dialect continuum into two areas with different standardised languages. The fact that we have two languages today is only a coincidence: we could also have three or four. Alemannic German spoken in south-western Germany and Switzerland is just as distinct from modern German as many Dutch dialects are, and could have been standardised into a separate language. At the same time, the Low Countries could also have adopted standard German as their standard language, as did all of the northern German regions. The historical dialects spoken in northern German cities like Hamburg and Bremen is not much closer to standard German than Dutch is. They are actually much closer to standard Dutch.

The linguistic border between standard Dutch and standard German was not born along an existing linguistic border at that time. It was created as a result of a war, an uprising in the Lowlands against the suppressing Habsburgs. As many borders around the world, violent wars have shaped them, not democratic votes.

How are words Dutch and Deutsch used today?

Given that in English the word Dutch started being used more and more exclusively for the Netherlands, a different word had to be found for the language spoken in Germany, and the word German was chosen for this purpose, referring to the Germanic tribes from which the people of Germany descend.

Exonyms and endonyms

The discussion around the words Dutch and Deutsch is also a discussion about exonyms and endonyms. What are they?

An exonym is a name for a place that is used by a foreign group of people and that is different from how the locals themselves call it. E.g. China is an exonym, because in Chinese it is not called China, but Zhongguo. An endonym is the word used in the local language, e.g. Warszawa is the endonym for the capital of Poland, which in English is known by the exonym Warsaw.

The word German is also an exonym, as Germans call it Deutsch. Dutch is an exonym as well, as the Dutch call it Nederlands. But until the 18th century it was an endonym, based on the native name.

Deutsch is the endonym for German, the word used by Germans. Dutch, on the other hand, is an English exonym referring to the Netherlands.