fragment was written around 900. Arguably the most famous text containing what is traditionally taken to be Old Dutch is: "Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan, hinase hic enda tu, wat unbidan we nu" ("All birds have started making nests, except me and you, what are we waiting for"), dating around the year 1100, written by a Flemish monk in a convent in Rochester, England. The oldest known single word is wad, attested in the toponym vadam (modern Wadenoijen), meaning a ford (where one wades), in Tacitus's Histories. Middle Dutch Linguistically speaking, Middle Dutch is a collective name for closely related dialects which were spoken and written between about 1150 and 1550 in the present-day Dutch-speaking region. There was at that time as yet no overarching standard language, but they were all probably mutually intelligible. In historic literature Diets and Middle Dutch (Middelnederlands) are used interchangeably to describe the ancestor of Modern Dutch. Although almost from the beginning, several Middle Dutch variations emerged, the similarities between the different regional languages were likely much stronger than their differences, especially for written languages and various literary works of that time. Within Middle Dutch five large groups can be distinguished: Flemish, (sometimes subdivided into West and East Flemish), was spoken in the modern region of West and East Flanders; Brabantian was the language of the area covered by the modern Dutch province of North Brabant and the Belgian provinces of Walloon Brabant, Flemish Brabant and Antwerp as well as the Brussels capital region; Hollandic was mainly used in the present provinces of North and South Holland and parts of Utrecht; Limburgish, spoken by the people in the district of modern Limburg and Belgian Limburg; Low Saxon, spoken in the area of the modern provinces of Gelderland, Overijssel, Drenthe and parts of Groningen. The last two of the Middle Dutch dialects mentioned above could also be considered part of, respectively, Middle High German and Middle Low German, on purely linguistical grounds. The Dutch state border would later intersect these dialect areas and as a result regions west of it would use the Dutch standard language, the reason why they are subsumed under Middle Dutch. Standardization and Modern Dutch A process of standardization started in the Middle Ages, especially under the influence of the Burgundian Ducal Court in Dijon (Brussels after 1477). The dialects of Flanders and Brabant were the most influential around this time. The