What's the difference between Dutch and Deutsch?

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

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.

At some later point, a distinction started to be made between the language in the Netherlands and the rest of German-speaking Europe. This started with the Dutch Republic, 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. From this point on, the primary interaction of England with the German-speaking countries was with the Netherlands, against which it fought four major wars in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The word Dutch, therefore, started to be increasingly used with reference to the Netherlands in specific, and less to the lands of Germany and Austria, with which England had less interaction. It was also in this time, that the people in the Netherlands started to standardise their own language in a written form, especially to translate the Bible. The Bible was written in the spoken language of Holland. The same happened in Germany, where the Bible translation into German was used in northern and southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and provided a written form of the language to be used in all these regions.

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.

So, people considered their language to be “Deutsch”, but they were probably not even aware of how differently people spoke German in various regions.

and all these regions continued to call their languages Deutsch, even though the various dialects differed significantly from each other.

Since the Netherlands broke away from the Holy Roman Empire and embarked on such a distinct route compared to the rest of the German-speaking regions, building a colonial empire and trading across the globe, they also started differentiating themselves from the German-speaking regions and started calling their language “Nederlands”, which would be “Netherlandish” in English.

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.

How are Dutch and Deutsch used today?

As in English the word Dutch started being used more and more exclusively for the Netherlands, another word had to be found for the language spoken in Germany, and the word “German” started being used, referring to the Germanic tribes from which the people there descend.

Exonyms and endonyms

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. The word “German” is also an exonym, as Germans call it Deutsch. The word Dutch, on the other hand, was originally not an exonym. It came from Deutsch, as the people themselves called it. But over time it started being used for the Dutch exclusively, and although they themselves also called their language Duits, from the 17^th century on they started using the word “Nederlands” exclusively, making also “Dutch” an exonym.