Dutch Language promotion/ Dutch Institute in India

3rd blogpost 18/03/2020 :

English takes over Dutch:  Dutch people take too much for granted that Dutch Language is slowly taken over by English Language. It happens at universities, multinational companies in the Netherlands and knowledge workers are told: please come to the Netherlands, in the Netherlands you don’t need to know Dutch. Crazy, as Dutch is one of the easiest languages to learn when you know English. A reason that Dutch people know good English is that Dutch and English have a lot of similarities and are belonging to the same language family, so easy to learn. So for you also easy to learn Dutch! English is not an official language in the Netherlands. In India it is, in the Netherlands not.

Dutch Institute in India: There is a long and interesting history between the Netherlands and India. There is even a link between Sanskrit/ Hindi and Dutch. For example, the word ‘naam’ = ‘name’ in Dutch and Hindi. There is the long trade relation between The Netherlands and India. The Netherlands had for centuries trade posts all over India. Please check also the blog of our Business partner Dutch Door in Pune https://thedutchdoor.in/the-dutch-door-blog/.  The current relation between India and the Netherlands is again very special. 2500 Indian students are going yearly to the Netherlands and the Netherlands has relatively the most Indian expats on the European continent. At the moment there are apart from the consulates and the Embassy no Dutch institutes in India. Ambition is to stimulate the creation of such an institute in India, easily accessible for people who want to know more about Dutch culture, learn the language, etcetera. We will update you on this blog about the progress.

06/05/2020    Because of the Corona Crisis this doesn't have our first priority anymore. We will post more on this when the focus can be on this again.