sentence-transformers/squad huggingface dataset:
Passage: As a foreign language, Dutch is mainly taught in primary and secondary schools in areas adjacent to the Netherlands and Flanders. In French-speaking Belgium, over 300,000 pupils are enrolled in Dutch courses, followed by over 23,000 in the German states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, and about 7,000 in the French region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais (of which 4,550 are in primary school). At an academic level, the largest number of faculties of neerlandistiek can be found in Germany (30 universities), followed by France (20 universities) and the United Kingdom (5 universities).

Question: About how many students in Belgium are studying Dutch?

Question: How many primary school students are learning Dutch in Nord-Pas-de-Calais?

Question: What country has the most universities offering courses in neerlandistiek?

Question: How many universities in France offer neerlandistiek courses?

Question: Besides North Rhine-Westphalia, which German state has the most pupils of Dutch?
Passage: Despite the Dutch presence in Indonesia for almost 350 years, as the Asian bulk of the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch language has no official status there and the small minority that can speak the language fluently are either educated members of the oldest generation, or employed in the legal profession, as some legal codes are still only available in Dutch. Dutch is taught in various educational centres in Indonesia, the most important of which is the Erasmus Language Centre (ETC) in Jakarta. Each year, some 1,500 to 2,000 students take Dutch courses there. In total, several thousand Indonesians study Dutch as a foreign language. Owing to centuries of Dutch rule in Indonesia, many old documents are written in Dutch. Many universities therefore include Dutch as a source language, mainly for law and history students. In Indonesia this involves about 35,000 students.

Question: For how long have there been Dutch speakers in Indonesia?

Question: In what profession is Dutch often required in the Dutch East Indies?

Question: What institution in Jakarta still teaches Dutch?

Question: About how many pupils in all of Indonesia study Dutch as part of their coursework?

Question: In addition to students pursuing law degrees, what other course of study often includes Dutch?
Passage: Unlike other European nations, the Dutch chose not to follow a policy of language expansion amongst the indigenous peoples of their colonies. In the last quarter of the 19th century, however, a local elite gained proficiency in Dutch so as to meet the needs of expanding bureaucracy and business. Nevertheless, the Dutch government remained reluctant to teach Dutch on a large scale for fear of destabilising the colony. Dutch, the language of power, was supposed to remain in the hands of the leading elite.

Question: Towards the end of what century did it become important for more people in Dutch colonies to speak Dutch?

Question: What VIP segment of the population in Dutch colonies learned Dutch to participate in business and government?

Question: What was the Dutch government afraid of doing if they taught their colonies Dutch?

Question: Leaders wanted to hang onto knowledge of the Dutch language because it's the language of what?
Passage: After independence, Dutch was dropped as an official language and replaced by Malay. Yet the Indonesian language inherited many words from Dutch: words for everyday life as well as scientific and technological terms. One scholar argues that 20% of Indonesian words can be traced back to Dutch words, many of which are transliterated to reflect phonetic pronunciation e.g. kantoor (Dutch for "office") in Indonesian is kantor, while bus ("bus") becomes bis. In addition, many Indonesian words are calques on Dutch, for example, rumah sakit (Indonesian for "hospital") is calqued on the Dutch ziekenhuis (literally "house of the sick"), kebun binatang ("zoo") on dierentuin (literally "animal garden"), undang-undang dasar ("constitution") from grondwet (literally "ground law"). These account for some of the differences in vocabulary between Indonesian and Malay.

Question: What became the official language of Indonesia after they declared their independence?

Question: What's the Indonesian word for "office"?

Question: What term describes the literally translated Indonesian versions of Dutch terms that have become standard?

Question: What is the Indonesian calque for the Dutch word that literally translates as "animal garden"?

Question: What Dutch word for a hospital was calqued into the Indonesian "rumah sakit"?
Passage: In Suriname today, Dutch is the sole official language, and over 60 percent of the population speaks it as a mother tongue. Dutch is the obligatory medium of instruction in schools in Suriname, even for non-native speakers. A further twenty-four percent of the population speaks Dutch as a second language. Suriname gained its independence from the Netherlands in 1975 and has been an associate member of the Dutch Language Union since 2004. The lingua franca of Suriname, however, is Sranan Tongo, spoken natively by about a fifth of the population.

Question: About what percentage of residents of Suriname speak Dutch?

Question: What language would you hear teachers speak if you attended school in Suriname?

Question: When did Suriname officially become independent from the Netherlands?

Question: What year did Suriname join the Dutch Language Union?

Question: What's the common language that around 20% of Suriname's people speak?
Passage: In the United States, an almost extinct dialect of Dutch, Jersey Dutch, spoken by descendants of 17th-century Dutch settlers in Bergen and Passaic counties, was still spoken as late as 1921. Other Dutch-based creole languages once spoken in the Americas include Mohawk Dutch (in Albany, New York), Berbice (in Guyana), Skepi (in Essequibo, Guyana) and Negerhollands (in the United States Virgin Islands). Pennsylvania Dutch is not a member of the set of Dutch dialects and is less misleadingly called Pennsylvania German.

Question: What's the year that Jersey Dutch was last spoken, according to records?

Question: What Dutch-based language popped up in the area of Albany, New York?

Question: What's a more accurate name for Pennsylvania Dutch since it's not a Dutch dialect?

Question: Which Dutch dialect was once spoken in the U.S. Virgin Islands?

Question: In what country were the Berbice and Skepi dialects spoken?
Passage: European Dutch remained the literary language until the start of the 1920s, when under pressure of Afrikaner nationalism the local "African" Dutch was preferred over the written, European-based standard. In 1925, section 137 of the 1909 constitution of the Union of South Africa was amended by Act 8 of 1925, stating "the word Dutch in article 137 [...] is hereby declared to include Afrikaans". The constitution of 1983 only listed English and Afrikaans as official languages. It is estimated that between 90% to 95% of Afrikaans vocabulary is ultimately of Dutch origin.

Question: In what decade did European Dutch yield to the local dialect in South Africa?

Question: At the high end, what percentage of Afrikaans words come from Dutch?

Question: What South African document from 1983 doesn't list Dutch as an official language?

Question: What section of the constitution was changed by Act 8 of 1925 to include Afrikaans with Dutch?

Question: What pressure influenced the shift in South Africa from the use of European Dutch in the 1920s?
Passage: Both languages are still largely mutually intelligible, although this relation can in some fields (such as lexicon, spelling and grammar) be asymmetric, as it is easier for Dutch speakers to understand written Afrikaans than it is for Afrikaans speakers to understand written Dutch. Afrikaans is grammatically far less complex than Dutch, and vocabulary items are generally altered in a clearly patterned manner, e.g. vogel becomes voël ("bird") and regen becomes reën ("rain"). In South Africa, the number of students following Dutch at university, is difficult to estimate, since the academic study of Afrikaans inevitably includes the study of Dutch. Elsewhere in the world, the number of people learning Dutch is relatively small.

Question: Who has a more difficult time understanding the other's language: Dutch speakers or Afrikaans speakers?

Question: Is Afrikaans more or less complex compared to Dutch?

Question: What's the Dutch word for "bird"?

Question: What is the Afrikaans word for "rain"?

Question: Is it difficult or easy to estimate the number of students in South Africa who study Dutch?
Passage: It is the third language of South Africa in terms of native speakers (~13.5%), of whom 53 percent are Coloureds and 42.4 percent Whites. In 1996, 40 percent of South Africans reported to know Afrikaans at least at a very basic level of communication. It is the lingua franca in Namibia, where it is spoken natively in 11 percent of households. In total, Afrikaans is the first language in South Africa alone of about 6.8 million people and is estimated to be a second language for at least 10 million people worldwide, compared to over 23 million and 5 million respectively, for Dutch.

Question: Approximately what percentage of South Africans are native Afrikaans speakers?

Question: Which country has 11% of households who speak Afrikaans?

Question: How many of the South Africans surveyed in 1996 said they speak at least a little Afrikaans?

Question: About how many South Africans speak Afrikaans as their primary language?

Question: Approximately how many people in the world speak Dutch as a second language?
Passage: Unlike other Germanic languages, Dutch doesn't have phonological aspiration of consonants. Like English, Dutch did not participate in the second consonant shift. Like most Germanic languages, the Dutch consonant system did not undergo the High German consonant shift and has a syllable structure that allows fairly complex consonant clusters. Dutch also retains full use of the velar fricatives that were present in Proto-Germanic, but lost or modified in many other Germanic languages. Dutch has final-obstruent devoicing: at the end of a word, voicing distinction is neutralised and all obstruents are pronounced voiceless. For example, goede ("good") is /ˈɣudə/ but the related form goed is /ɣut/. Dutch shares with German Final-obstruent devoicing (Du brood [broːt] and German Brot vs Eng bread).

Question: What sound does Dutch still use from Proto-Germanic that was phased out in other Germanic languages?

Question: Along with English, what pronunciation shift did Dutch not undergo?

Question: How are obstruents pronounced at the end of Dutch words?

Question: How would you say "good" in Dutch?

Question: What language other than Dutch also employs final-obstruent devoicing?
Passage: Voicing of pre-vocalic initial voiceless alveolar fricatives occurs, although less in Dutch than in German (Du zeven, Germ sieben [z] vs. Eng seven and LG seven [s]), and also the shift in /θ/ > /d/. Dutch shares only with Low German the development of /xs/ > /ss/ (Du vossen, ossen and LG Vösse, Ossen vs. Germ Füchse, Ochsen and Eng foxes, oxen), and also the development of /ft/ → /xt/ though it is far more common in Dutch (Du zacht and LG sacht vs. Germ sanft and Eng soft, but Du kracht vs. LG/Germ kraft and Eng cognate craft).

Question: Is the voicing of pre-vocalic initial voiceless alveolar fricatives more common in Dutch or German?

Question: Does the development of /ft/ to /xt/ occur more in Low German or Dutch?

Question: What number word is spelled the same in English and Low German?

Question: What's the German word for "seven"?

Question: Although spelled differently, the first consonant of what Dutch word for "seven" is pronounced the same as its German counterpart?
Passage: Vowel length is not always considered a distinctive feature in Dutch phonology, because it normally co-occurs with changes in vowel quality. One feature or the other may be considered redundant, and some phonemic analyses prefer to treat it as an opposition of tenseness. However, even if not considered part of the phonemic opposition, the long/tense vowels are still realised as phonetically longer than their short counterparts. The changes in vowel quality are also not always the same in all dialects, and in some there may be little difference at all, with length remaining the primary distinguishing feature. And while it is true that older words always pair vowel length with a change in vowel quality, new loanwords have reintroduced phonemic oppositions of length. Compare zonne(n) [ˈzɔnə] ("suns") versus zone [ˈzɔːnə] ("zone") versus zonen [ˈzoːnə(n)] ("sons"), or kroes [krus] ("mug") versus cruise [kruːs] ("cruise").

Question: What quality of Dutch vowels isn't usually recognized as distinctive?

Question: Is it true or false that older Dutch words combine changes in vowel length and vowel quality?

Question: How would you say "sons" in Dutch?

Question: Since vowel quality changes might be very slight between dialects, what's the main vowel feature used to differentiate them?

Question: What does the Dutch word "kroes" mean in English?
Passage: Unique to the development of Dutch is the collaps of older ol/ul/al + dental into ol + dental, followed by vocalisation of pre-consonantal /l/ and after a short vowel, creating the diphthong /ɑu/ e.g., Dutch goud, zout and bout corresponds with Low German Gold, Solt, Bolt; German Gold, Salz, Balt and English gold, salt, bold. This is the most common diphthong along with /ɛi œy/. All three are commonly the only ones considered unique phonemes in Dutch. The tendency for native English speakers is to pronounce Dutch names with /ɛi/ (written as ij or ei) as /aɪ/, (like the English vowel y) which does not normally lead to confusion among native listeners, since in a number of dialects (e.g. in Amsterdam) the same pronunciation is heard.

Question: What letter represents the sound native English speakers often use for Dutch names with "ij" or "ei" in them?

Question: How many unique phenomes are usually attributed to Dutch?

Question: What's the term we use for the type of sound made for two vowels in words like the Dutch "goud" or "zout"?

Question: What pronunciation did the older Dutch ol/ul/al + dental evolve into?
Passage: This change is interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view because it has apparently happened relatively recently, in the 1970s, and was pioneered by older well-educated women from the upper middle classes. The lowering of the diphthongs has long been current in many Dutch dialects, and is comparable to the English Great Vowel Shift, and the diphthongisation of long high vowels in Modern High German, which centuries earlier reached the state now found in Polder Dutch. Stroop theorizes that the lowering of open-mid to open diphthongs is a phonetically "natural" and inevitable development and that Dutch, after having diphthongised the long high vowels like German and English, "should" have lowered the diphthongs like German and English as well.

Question: What linguistic event in English could we parallel with the Dutch lowering of diphthongs?

Question: In what decade did the Dutch diphthong lowering occur?

Question: The lowering of diphthongs is intriguing partly because it's associated with what single gender?

Question: What researcher posited that the lowering of diphthongs is "natural"?

Question: Which language, in addition to German, did Stroop use to compare Dutch with when stating that the diphthongs "should" have lowered?
Passage: Instead, he argues, this development has been artificially frozen in an "intermediate" state by the standardisation of Dutch pronunciation in the 16th century, where lowered diphthongs found in rural dialects were perceived as ugly by the educated classes and accordingly declared substandard. Now, however, in his opinion, the newly affluent and independent women can afford to let that natural development take place in their speech. Stroop compares the role of Polder Dutch with the urban variety of British English pronunciation called Estuary English.

Question: What word did Stroop use to describe the static stage of diphthong pronunciation?

Question: What classes in the 16th century sneered at the pronunciation of Dutch by rural people?

Question: What distinct kind of British English does Stroop say has a similar function to Polder Dutch?

Question: What phenomenon of Dutch pronunciation was brought about by the attitudes of the elite in the 16th century?

Question: What specific type of diphthongs were the less educated Dutch speakers in the countryside using in the 16th century?
Passage: Standard Dutch uses three genders to differentiate between natural gender and three when discerning grammatical gender. But for most non-Belgian speakers, the masculine and feminine genders have merged to form the common gender (de), while the neuter (het) remains distinct as before. This gender system is similar to those of most Continental Scandinavian languages. As in English, but to a lesser degree, the inflectional grammar of the language (e.g., adjective and noun endings) has simplified over time.

Question: How many genders does standard Dutch use for both natural and grammatical gender?

Question: What gender does the majority of non-Belgian Dutch speakers use instead of the masculine and feminine?

Question: Apart from the common gender in non-Belgian Dutch, what other gender do speakers use?

Question: The common/neuter system used in Dutch is a lot like the system used in what other language category?

Question: In its simplified inflectional grammar, what language is Dutch similar to?
Passage: The Dutch written grammar has simplified over the past 100 years: cases are now mainly used for the pronouns, such as ik (I), mij, me (me), mijn (my), wie (who), wiens (whose: masculine or neuter singular), wier (whose: feminine singular; masculine, feminine or neuter plural). Nouns and adjectives are not case inflected (except for the genitive of proper nouns (names): -s, -'s or -'). In the spoken language cases and case inflections had already gradually disappeared from a much earlier date on (probably the 15th century) as in many continental West Germanic dialects.

Question: What's the Dutch word for "my"?

Question: Over what span of time have the rules for written Dutch become less complicated?

Question: What part of speech does Dutch mostly use cases for?

Question: Which parts of speech aren't normally case-specific in Dutch?

Question: In what century long before Dutch did most West Germanic dialects probably lose case inflection?
Passage: More complex inflection is still found in certain lexicalized expressions like de heer des huizes (literally, the man of the house), etc. These are usually remnants of cases (in this instance, the genitive case which is still used in German, cf. Der Herr des Hauses) and other inflections no longer in general use today. In such lexicalized expressions remnants of strong and weak nouns can be found too, e.g. in het jaar des Heren (Anno Domini), where "-en" is actually the genitive ending of the weak noun. Also in this case, German retains this feature. Though the genitive is widely avoided in speech.

Question: What case no longer used in Dutch is still present in German phrases like "Der Herr des Hauses"?

Question: How would you say "the man of the house" in Dutch?

Question: What word described standalone expressions that retain some outdated convention as an exception?

Question: Which word in the phrase "het jaar des Heren" is a weak noun with a genitive ending added?
Passage: In an interrogative main clause the usual word order is: conjugated verb followed by subject; other verbs in final position: "Kun jij je pen niet vinden?" (literally "Can you your pen not find?") "Can't you find your pen?" In the Dutch equivalent of a wh-question the word order is: interrogative pronoun (or expression) + conjugated verb + subject; other verbs in final position: "Waarom kun jij je pen niet vinden?" ("Why can you your pen not find?") "Why can't you find your pen?"" In a tag question the word order is the same as in a declarative clause: "Jij kunt je pen niet vinden?" ("You can your pen not find?") "You can't find your pen?"" A subordinate clause does not change its word order: "Kun jij je pen niet vinden omdat het veel te donker is?" ("Can you your pen not find because it far too dark is?") "Can you not find your pen because it's too dark?""

Question: In what type of Dutch clause does the subject usually follow the conjugated verb?

Question: What's the English type equivalent for the Dutch word order that is an interrogative pronoun/expression, then a verb followed by a subject?

Question: What type of clause has the same word order in Dutch as a tag question?

Question: What never changes in a subordinate clause in Dutch?

Question: What is the literal translation of the Dutch phrase, "Kun jij je pen niet vinden?"
Passage: In Dutch, the diminutive is not merely restricted to nouns and exist in numerals (met z'n tweetjes, "the two of us"), pronouns (onderonsje, "tête-à-tête"), verbal particles (moetje, "shotgun marriage"), and even prepositions (toetje, "dessert"). Most notable however, are the diminutive forms of adjectives and adverbs. The former take an diminutive ending and thus functions as a noun, the latter remain adverbs and have always the diminutive with the -s appended, e.g. adjective: groen ("green") → noun: groentje ("rookie"); adverb: even ("just") → adverb: eventjes ("just a minute").

Question: What word do Dutch speakers use for what we call a "shotgun marriage"?

Question: In Dutch, what part of speech does an adjective with a diminutive ending become?

Question: When the diminutive ending "-tjes" is added to the adverb "even," as what part of speech does it function?

Question: What's the Dutch word for "green"?

Question: With the diminutive ending "-tje" added to the Dutch word for "green," what does the new formation translate to in English?
Passage: Some nouns have two different diminutives, each with a different meaning: bloem (flower) → bloempje (lit. "small flower"), but bloemetje (lit. also "small flower", meaning bouquet). A few nouns exist solely in a diminutive form, e.g. zeepaardje (seahorse), while many, e.g. meisje (girl), originally a diminutive of meid (maid), have acquired a meaning independent of their non-diminutive forms. A diminutive can sometimes be added to an uncountable noun to refer to a single portion: ijs (ice, ice cream) → ijsje (ice cream treat, cone of ice cream), bier (beer) → biertje. Some diminutive forms only exist in plural, e.g. kleertjes (clothing).

Question: Which diminutive of "bloem" means a "bouquet"?

Question: What's the Dutch word for "seahorse" that has no non-diminutive form?

Question: What Dutch word did their word for "girl" come from that has a totally different meaning?

Question: What's the Dutch word for the items like shirts and pants that you wear that only exists in a plural form?

Question: Sometimes uncountable nouns in Dutch get a diminutive ending to make them refer to what, like an ice cream cone?