Amerikaans (The Orange Outback)

Amerikaans is a West Germanic language native to the western United States, the Canadian province of Nanaimo and to a lesser extent, Alberta and Saskatchewan. The language evolved from the Dutch vernaculars of South Holland and Brabant, although it generally follows English grammatical rules due to standardization and influence from American and Canadian English. The language is currently spoken by most, if not all descendants of Dutch and other Germanic settlers in western North America in the mid to late 17th century.

Although the grammar is largely English based and features loanwords from other languages such as Danish, Navajo, Apache, French, Spanish and English, an estimated 85-91% of the vocabulary of the language is of Dutch and Brabatine origin. The language also has differences in pronounciation from Dutch and is noticably less mutually intelligible to Standard Dutch than Afrikaans is.

The language has about 20 million native speakers in the United States and about 2 million in Canada. The majority of speakers of Amerikaans are descendants of Dutch, Brabatine, and Saxon settlers in western North America, although many Anglo-Americans have picked up the language as a second language.