Approximately 24 million people speak Dutch as their first language. It is the third most important Germanic language, after English and German. Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands, one of the three official languages of Belgium, and it is also spoken in the former Dutch colonies in South-America. South-Africa has eleven official languages: one of them is Afrikaans, which evolved from the Dutch vernacular spoken by the Hollandic settlers in the XVII century. The linguistic typology of Dutch occupies an intermediate position between English and German: sometimes it shows more similarities English, other times with German. In Italy, Dutch is taught in five universities and in an Institute for Translation and Interpreting.
