More Dutch speakers ==

I would say about 23 million people speak Dutch rahter than 20 million:
 Netherlands                             16 million
 Belgium                                  6 million
 Suriname, Antilles, other communities    1 million
 total                                   23 million
[anonymous]
I don't know where you get those numbers, where comes the 1 million number?
population:
 Antilles 212,226
 Aruba 103,000
 Suriname 438,144
the population of these three regions doesnt reach one million, and Dutch is definetly not a national language in these places. Plus, the Netherlands and Belgium have a lot of immigrants. So I belive more in the 20 million figure, rather than the 23 million one.- 5 July 2005 11:27 (UTC)
There are for example probably about 12 million native speakers in the Netherlands, once you sutract immigrants, Frisian, Limburgish, and other Germanic language speakers. Suriname definitely isn't natively Dutch speaking; some of the languages there are closer to English (if you can even recognize gbe for 'leave' as derived from English!). So 20 million may be a rather generous number.  2005 July 5 17:50 (UTC)

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