If you are interested in studying Dutch online at UCL, please click here.

The SAC is here to pro­vide you with op­por­tu­ni­ties to study Dutch out­side class time. If you need ad­vice and guid­ance on what to study, you should talk to your class tu­tor, who will help you iden­tify your strengths and weak­nesses and make rec­om­men­da­tions on what to study.

A bit about the language

Dutch is a West Ger­manic lan­guage spo­ken by over 22 mil­lion peo­ple as a na­tive lan­guage, and over 5 mil­lion peo­ple as a sec­ond lan­guage.  Most na­tive speak­ers live in the Nether­lands, Bel­gium, and Suri­name, with smaller groups of speak­ers in parts of France, Ger­many  and sev­eral for­mer Dutch colonies. It is closely re­lated to other West Ger­manic lan­guages (e.g., Eng­lish, West Frisian and Ger­man) and some­what more re­motely to the North Ger­manic lan­guages.

Dutch is the par­ent lan­guage of sev­eral cre­ole lan­guages, as well as of Afrikaans, one of the of­fi­cial lan­guages of South Africa and the most widely un­der­stood in Namibia. Dutch and Afrikaans are to a very large ex­tent mu­tu­ally in­tel­li­gi­ble, al­though they have sep­a­rate spelling stan­dards and dic­tio­nar­ies and have sep­a­rate lan­guage reg­u­la­tors. The Dutch Lan­guage Union co­or­di­nates ac­tions of the Dutch, Flem­ish and Suri­namese au­thor­i­ties in lin­guis­tic is­sues, lan­guage pol­icy, lan­guage teach­ing and lit­er­a­ture.