Dutch, a West Germanic language, is spoken by about 24 million native speakers, primarily in the Netherlands, Belgium (Flanders), and Suriname. It uses the Latin alphabet with the digraph "ij" often treated as a single letter. Known for its straightforward pronunciation with guttural sounds, Dutch grammar features two grammatical genders (common and neuter), a simple case system, and verb conjugations that vary by tense and mood but not person. Its vocabulary derives from Old Dutch, with loanwords from French, German, and English. As the official language of the Netherlands and Belgium (alongside French), Dutch is central to culture, trade, and literature in the Low Countries, with mutual intelligibility with Afrikaans.