Dutch (Nederlands) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million people as a second language, constituting most of the population of the Netherlands (where it is the only official language countrywide) and about 60% of the population of Belgium (as one of three official languages).It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives English and German.Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English[n 5] and is colloquially said to be "roughly in between" them.[n 6] Dutch, like English, has not undergone the High German consonant shift, does not use Germanic umlaut as a grammatical marker, has largely abandoned the use of the subjunctive, and has levelled much of its morphology, including most of its case system.
