Quote:
Originally Posted by bartveld
Actually, Dutch is the official language of Surinam (being a former colony of the Netherlands). I was rather surprised by that; usually former colonies can't wait to shed the language of their colonizers (Indonesia being a case in point). For the rest there is Afrikaans, which still is spoken by some South-Africans, but I don't think it's in any way an official language. Afrikaans is rather far removed from Dutch or Flemish. I think most people from Holland or Belgium wouldn't be able to understand it easily.
For the rest, the Dutch and Flemish can understand each other very well, although there may be differences in words. While the Dutch tend to simply adopt English words for new-fangled things, the Flemish get more creative and sometimes make beautiful and funny translations.
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According to Wikipedia, Afrikaans is one of 11(!) official languages in South Africa. I think that in a lot of former colonies, the colonial power's language ends up being more widely spoken than any one of the often many native languages, so it often ends up as the official language, or at least an official language. That seems to be the case in many former British and French colonies.