Let's say, in some way or another, the Netherlands manage to unify most of germany for the exception of the southern states like bavaria, Wurttemberg etc.. and the dutch language becomes the dominante and native tongue of the peoples. What would this Dutch majority and led country be called?
What would a dutch-led Germany be called?
- Thread starter Angel Grace
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Not going to happen.
Is it theoretically possible that a power based in the Netherlands unifies Germany? Certainly.
Would this united state speak Dutch? Nope. Germany is much bigger than the Netherlands and the power and will shift east.
Your best bet might be to have something like the Hanseatic League spread from a slightly more western nucleus to give 'Dutch' a stronger influence on the lingua franca used. And then have that spread up the Rhine.
But the language is still going to be more heavily Low German than 'Dutch '.
Is it theoretically possible that a power based in the Netherlands unifies Germany? Certainly.
Would this united state speak Dutch? Nope. Germany is much bigger than the Netherlands and the power and will shift east.
Your best bet might be to have something like the Hanseatic League spread from a slightly more western nucleus to give 'Dutch' a stronger influence on the lingua franca used. And then have that spread up the Rhine.
But the language is still going to be more heavily Low German than 'Dutch '.
I could see that this German might use many Dutch loanwords the closer they are to the Dutch area. Could also see enclaves with people who speak nothing but dutch speckled through the German speaking lands, people who moved from their village to find greener pastures, creating a Nether-Deutch dialect over time in said area.
Its pretty significant. Dutch started as a different dialect from mainstream German to start with iirc, and there has been significant divergence since then. With Dutch taking on major amounts of French loanwords and sound changes since then.
also early 1900 the dutch dropped words like des, den, etc wich the German language still uses
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In the 1980s, I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Newspaper clippings from the World War II era were posted on the walls. One clipping had the word "Duitschland" in a headline. I knew the Dutch word for "Germany" was "Duitsland" so this spelling puzzled me. My Dutch hosts explained it was an old-fashioned spelling for "Germany".
I gathered it was much like how English changed from "Tokio" and "Peking" to "Tokyo" and "Beijing" and also how the West is currently shifting to using the Ukrainian words for Ukraine cities instead of the Russian words. ( "Odesa" instead of "Odessa" and "Kyiv" insread of "Kiev")
Anyway perhaps this archaic Dutch word for Germany could have been used when the Dutch in the OP's TTL unified Germany. "Duitschland" is very close to "Deutschland", the German word for Germany.
In English, probably Germany, although personally I like Dutchland as an alternative.
I think in medieval times 'Dutch' was used as a collective for all continental Germanics ('cause anglicized from Deutch, natch) before shifting to mean the Netherlanders specifically come their independence - it wouldn't surprise me to see Dutchland either stay or come back from the dead for this Germany.
Similarities would've been much more apparent in the high middle ages though, and mainstream German ittl would anyway probably end up being low German, which is anyway a lot closer to Dutch. I think low German with a slightly Dutch flavour would end up the Lingua Franca of a HRE where a Flemish dynasty replaces the Hapsburgs and end up having Aachen as their capital. This probably requires France to have been clearly knocked out from the running, and the emperor is more clearly the suzerain of all Charlemagne's territories.
The examples you give are all cases of less accurate transliterations of native names being replaced with more accurate ones. Except for Ukraine, there it's Russian based ones being replaced for Ukrainian based ones.
"Duitschland" in Dutch is a completely different linguistic change. It is plain and simply the original Dutch spelling, with "sch" being pronounced like the English "sh", as the pronunciation of the end or middle-"sch" in a shipload of words (Vlaemsch --> Vlaams, Nederlandsch --> Nederlands, but also visscher --> visser (fisher)) changed to "s", the "ch" part ended up being dropped.
FTR, in the 16th Century, and at least for some time into the 17th, "Duitsch" was actually used in the Netherlands to refer to both the language and its inhabitants (at least sometimes), with German-German being Hoogduitsch (High-German).
You might essentially end up with something like Plattdüütsch or Nedersaksisch. This is actually the twice the same language, the first being the dialect-in-Germany, the other the dialect-in-the-Netherlands, both clearly influenced by the local official language.
Not necessarily. Parisian French basically waged a war on the various other dialects and languages of French. A Nederlander Diets could do the same against the various German dialects.
In this TL the most sensible standard dialect, especially if one wants to unite the Western Continental dialect continuum, arguably would be a dialect of the Rhineland (so Cologne, Dusseldorf). Even IOTL the standards were on the same line, just on opposing ends Dutch (West, Flemish, Brabantian and Hollandish) and German (High Saxon and Thuringian).
I do agree, that the TTL agreed standard will be enforced though. German IOTL did the same in places like Jülich/Gulik and Kleve/Kleef, which have dialects closely related to Dutch.
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