What is the language of this song (details inside)? Dutch?

Dutch‘k%20Geef%20den%20bras%20van%20al%20dat%20smeden%0AIk%20ga%20naar%20de%20Franse%20zwier%0A’k%20Wil%20mij%20tot%20den%20trouw%20begeven%0ANooit%20een%20schoner%20vrouw%20gezien

Smidje = Smith, or blacksmith, pronounced Smeed-yeh, accent on the first syllable. Sometimes pronounced colloquially as “Shmeed-yeh.”
Smeden = Forge, smithy, blacksmith’s workshop

That sounds like late medieval Dutch. It’s definitely Dutch, but not modern Dutch.
It doesn’t sound like really archaic Dutch, either. (I’ve read 13th century Dutch stuff in high school, that was far more different from modern Dutch than this.)

The singer in the video sounds Flemish (Belgian Dutch).

You can pronounce the title as “hut smitshe”, that’ll be close enough. :)

P.S.: Sorry, @Espiritus_Corvus, but “shmeed-yeh” sounds nothing like normal Dutch pronunciation. You’ll sound super foreign if you say it like that. :P
“Smitshe” is much better, trust me. I’m a Dutchman.

^^^He is even though he looks like a dressed up doggums.

Also: yes, ‘t is a colloquial form of het, which is a definite article.

(‘t Smidje would mean “the little smith”, literally. Smid = smith, and -je is a diminutive suffix. -je is also used for other things than indicating literal smallness, though, it can also be used to sound affectionate or a little bit belittling about something. It adds that sort of feel.)

And while I’m at it, have some IPA: [ət smɪtʲə]

Now sorry for splitting this all up into three posts instead of reading properly the first time around. :) Figured I’d load all the information I could into this one post now.

Oh, another thing. Smeden is a verb, actually. ‘To forge’. A smithy is een smidse. :)

A smart linguist of a doggums.

I’ve been listening to this song for a while now. It’s very catchy. :)
If you were wondering, it tells the tale of a smith who gave up his craft to marry a woman for her beauty, but she nagged too much for his liking and he ended up regretting it and longing for his hammer and anvil again.

^^^Swoon. I’ve never met anyone yet who read 13th century Dutch.

Zal je van me houdt?

You know I wub you a whole bunch, @gailcalled.

^^^ You probably can read Chaucer and Beowulf in middle English too, I bet. You Dutch seem to share this annoying trait.

I don’t know about that, I thought Shakespeare was challenging enough to keep up with.

I think it’s a dialect from the Dutch language.

It comes across to me to a relatively modern Dutch dialect spoken in Belgium or the south of the Netherlands. I googled the song and it seems to be a local traditional without a clear author and or origin.

@Fyrius already gave a pretty acurate interpretation of its meaning. Thanks for sharing this…

It’s a Belgian band, so technically it would be Flemish.
This is also a nice song by them, imo.

Hey, superb answers, everyone! Special thanks to @Fyrius for all the details and the IPA pronunciation!

Is Flemish a lot different from Dutch, or is it considered a dialect of Dutch?

Happy to help! :)

You can think of Flemish and Dutch as probably about as similar to and different from each other as American and British English are. We understand each other fine most of the time, but there’s a bunch of things we say differently. And we like to poke fun at each other for sounding silly.

Ah, I see. Thank you, @Fyrius.