Dutch phonology
Dutch phonology is similar to that of other West Germanic languages, especially Afrikaans and West Frisian.
While the spelling of Dutch is officially standardised by an international organisation, the pronunciation has no official standard and relies on a de facto standard documented in reference works such as The Phonetics of English and Dutch by Beverley Collins and Inger M. Mees, The Phonology of Dutch by Geert Booij, Dutch by Carlos Gussenhoven, Belgian Standard Dutch by Jo Verhoeven or pronunciation dictionaries such as Uitspraakwoordenboek by Josée Heemskerk and Wim Zonneveld.
Standard Dutch has two main de facto pronunciation standards: Northern and Belgian. Northern Standard Dutch is the most prestigious accent in the Netherlands. It is associated with high status, education and wealth. Even though its speakers seem to be concentrated mostly in the densely populated Randstad area in the provinces of North Holland, South Holland and Utrecht, it is often impossible to tell where in the country its speakers were born or brought up, so it cannot be considered a regional dialect within the Netherlands. Belgian Standard Dutch is used by the vast majority of Flemish journalists, which is why it is sometimes called VRT-Nederlands, after VRT, the national public-service broadcaster for the Flemish Region.
Consonants
The following table shows the consonant phonemes of Dutch:Obstruents
- The glottal stop is not phonemic because it occurs in a few specific predictable environments—namely, before vowel-initial syllables within words after and and often also at the beginning of a word.
- Apart from, all alveolar consonants are laminal and can be realized as denti-alveolar in Belgium.
- and are fully voiced.
- is not a native phoneme of Dutch and occurs only in borrowed words, like goal, however /g/ is nevertheless analyzed as a phoneme because there exist minimal pairs—e.g. <
> /go:l/ meaning "goal" and < > /ko:l/ meaning "cabbage". Additionally, in native words, occurs as an allophone of when it undergoes voicing assimilation, like in zakdoek. - In the north, often devoices and merges with ; the quality of that merged sound has been variously described as:
- * Voiceless post-velar fricative trill which, before, can be fronted to ;
- * Voiceless post-velar or uvular fricative.
- In the south, the distinction between and is generally preserved as velar or post-palatal. Some southern speakers may alternate between the velar and post-palatal articulation, depending on the backness of the preceding or succeeding vowel. Velar, post-velar and uvular variants are called harde g "hard g", while the post-palatal variants are called zachte g "soft g". There is also a third variant called zwakke harde g "weak hard g", in which is realized as and is realized as and is used in Zeeland and West Flanders, which are h-dropping areas, so that does not merge with glottal variants of and.
- In the Netherlands, can devoice and merge with. According to, there are hardly any speakers of Northern SD who consistently contrast with.
- In low-prestige varieties of Netherlandic Dutch also can devoice and merge with.
- Speakers who devoice and may also hypercorrectively voice and : concert "concert" may thus be compared to the more usual.
- Some speakers pronounce as a voiceless. Some dialects, particularly those from the southwest, exhibit h-dropping.
- In the Netherlands, and may have only mid-to-low pitched friction, and for many Netherlandic speakers, they are retracted. In Belgium, they are more similar to English.
- The sequences and are often assimilated to palatalised, alveolo-palatal, postalveolar or similar realisations.
- Before, is realized as a voiceless post-palatal affricate.
- The sequences and are assimilated to intervocalically and after unless they're at the beginning of a stressed syllable, barring loanwords and some names.
- are not native phonemes of Dutch and usually occur only in borrowed words, like show and bagage "baggage". Depending on the speaker and the position in the word, they may or may not be distinct from the assimilated realisations of the clusters. If they are not distinct, they will have the same range of realisations noted above.
- Unlike English and German, in Dutch the voiceless stops are unaspirated in all positions: thus while English tip and German Tipp are both, Dutch tip is with an unaspirated.
Sonorants
- and assimilate their articulation to a following obstruent in many cases:
- * Both become before, and before.
- * merges into before velars. The realisation of, in turn, depends on how a following velar fricative is realised. For example, it will be uvular for speakers who realise as uvulars.
- * is realised as before. That occurs also before or and, under assimilation, before and.
- The exact pronunciation of varies regionally:
- * In the North, is 'clear' before vowels and 'dark' before consonants and pauses. Intervocalic tends to be clear except after the open back vowels. However, some speakers use the dark variant in all intervocalic contexts.
- * Some accents, such as the Amsterdam and the Rotterdam ones, have dark in all positions. Conversely, some accents in the eastern regions, along the German border, as well as some Standard Belgian speakers, have clear in all contexts.
- * The quality of dark varies; in the North it is pharyngealized, but in a final position, many speakers produce a strongly pharyngealized vocoid with no alveolar contact instead. In Belgium, it is either velarized or post-palatalized.
- The realization of phoneme varies considerably from dialect to dialect and even between speakers in the same dialect area:
- * The historically original pronunciation is an alveolar trill, with the alveolar tap as a common allophone.
- * The uvular trill is a common alternative, found particularly in the central and southern dialect areas. Uvular pronunciations appear to be gaining ground in the Randstad. Syllable-finally, it may be vocalized to, much as in German. This is more common in the eastern areas.
- * The coastal dialects of South Holland produce a voiced uvular fricative.
- * The retroflex approximant or "bunched approximant" is found at the end of a syllable in the pronunciation of some speakers in the Netherlands, especially those from the Randstad, but not in Belgium. Its use has been increasing in recent years.
- The realization of also varies by area :
- * The main realisation is a labiodental approximant, found in central and northern Netherlands.
- * Speakers in southern Netherlands and Belgium use a bilabial approximant. It is like but without velarization.
- * In Suriname and among immigrant populations, is usual.
- An epenthetic may be inserted between and word-final. Thus melk "milk" may be pronounced. This may extend to compounds, e.g. melkboer "milkman". Although this pronunciation is mistakenly thought of as non-standard, it is found in all types of Dutch, including the standard varieties. There is also another type of -insertion that occurs word-medially, which is considered non-standard.
Final -n is retained in the North East and the South West, where it is the schwa that disappears instead. This creates a syllabic or syllabic sounds: laten ; maken. Some Low Saxon dialects that have uvular pronunciations of and also have a syllabic uvular nasal, like in lagen and/or lachen
Final devoicing and assimilation
Dutch devoices all obstruents at the ends of words, as is partly reflected in the spelling. The voiced "z" in plural huizen becomes huis in singular. Also, duiven becomes duif . The other cases are always written with the voiced consonant, but a devoiced one is actually pronounced: the "d" in plural baarden is retained in singular spelling baard, but the pronunciation of the latter is, and plural ribben has singular rib, pronounced.Because of assimilation, the initial of the next word is often also devoiced: het vee is. The opposite may be true for other consonants: ik ben .
Example words for consonants
| Phoneme | Phonetic IPA | Orthography | English translation |
| pen | 'pen' | ||
| biet | 'beetroot' | ||
| tak | 'branch' | ||
| dak | 'roof' | ||
| kat | 'cat' | ||
| goal | 'goal' | ||
| fiets | 'bicycle' | ||
| vijf | 'five' | ||
| sok | 'sock' | ||
| zeep | 'soap' | ||
| chef | 'chief' | ||
| jury | 'jury' | ||
| acht acht | 'eight' | ||
| 's-Hertogenbosch geeuw geeuw | s-Hertogenbosch' 'yawn' | ||
| hoed | 'hat' | ||
| mens | 'human' | ||
| nek | 'neck' | ||
| eng | 'scary' | ||
| land goal | 'land' 'goal' | ||
| rat rad Peru Nederlanders Geert Bourgeois | 'rat' 'wheel' 'Peru' 'Dutchmen' 'Geert Bourgeois' | ||
| wang wang bewering | 'cheek' 'cheek' 'assertion' | ||
| jas'' | 'coat' |
Vowels
Dutch has an extensive vowel inventory consisting of thirteen plain vowels and at least three diphthongs. Vowels can be grouped as front unrounded, front rounded, central and back. They are also traditionally distinguished by length or tenseness. The vowels are included in one of the diphthong charts further below because Northern SD realizes them as diphthongs, but they behave phonologically like the other long monophthongs.Monophthongs
- Dutch vowels can be classified as lax and tense, checked and free or short and long. Phonetically however, the close vowels are as short as the phonological lax/short vowels unless they occur before.
- Phonologically, can be classified as either close or close-mid. Carlos Gussenhoven classifies them as the former, whereas Geert Booij says that they are the latter and classifies and the non-native mid vowels as open-mid.
- has been traditionally transcribed with, but modern sources tend to use or instead. Beverley Collins and Inger Mees write this vowel with.
- The phonemic status of is not clear. Phonetically, a vowel of the type appears before nasals as an allophone of, e.g. in jong . This vowel can also be found in certain other words, such as op , which can form a near-minimal pair with mop . This, however, is subject to both individual and geographical variation.
- Many speakers feel that and belong to the same phoneme, with being its unstressed variant. This is reflected in spelling errors produced by Dutch children, for example for binnen . Adding to this, the two vowels have different phonological distribution; for example, can occur word-finally, while cannot. In addition, the word-final allophone of is a close-mid front vowel with some rounding, a sound that is similar to.
- The native tense vowels are long in stressed syllables and short elsewhere. The non-native oral vowels appear only in stressed syllables and thus are always long.
- The native as well as the non-native nasal are sometimes transcribed without the length marks, as.
- , a phonological back vowel, is central or front in Standard Dutch.
- The non-native occur only in stressed syllables. In unstressed syllables, they are replaced by the closest native vowel. For instance, verbs corresponding to the nouns analyse , centrifuge , and zone are analyseren , centrifugeren , and zoneren .
- is extremely rare, and the only words of any frequency in which it occurs are oeuvre, manoeuvre and freule. In the more common words, tends to be replaced with the native, whereas can be replaced by either or .
- The non-native nasal vowels occur only in loanwords from French. are often nativized as, or, depending on the place of articulation of the following consonant. For instance, restaurant and pardon are often nativized as and, respectively. is extremely rare, just like its oral counterpart and the only word of any frequency in which it occurs is parfum , often nativized as or.
- The non-native is listed only by some sources. It occurs in words such as cast .
Close vowels
- is close to the canonical value of the IPA symbol. The Standard Belgian realization has also been described as close-mid. In regional SD, the realization may be different: for example, in Antwerp it is closer, more like, whereas in places like Dordrecht, Nijmegen, West and East Flanders the vowel is typically more open than the SD counterpart, more like. Affected speakers of Northern SD may also use this vowel.
- are close front, close to cardinal.
- The majority of sources consider to be close-mid central, yet Beverley Collins and Inger Mees consider it to be close-mid front. The study conducted by Vincent van Heuven and Roos Genet has shown that native speakers consider the canonical IPA value of the symbol to be the most similar to the Dutch sound, much more similar than the canonical values of and . In regional SD may be raised to near-close, for example in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. In Antwerp, the vowel may be as high as and the two vowels may differ in nothing but length. A more open vowel of the -type is found in southern accents and in affected Northern SD.
- have been variously described as close front, near-close front and, in Northern SD, near-close central.
- are close back in Northern SD and close near-back in Belgian SD and some varieties of regional SD spoken in Antwerp and Flemish Brabant.
are frequently longer in Belgian SD and most Belgian accents than in Northern SD, in which the length of these vowels is identical to that of lax vowels.
Regardless of the exact accent, are mandatorily lengthened to before in the same word. In Northern SD and in Randstad, these are laxed to and often have a schwa-like off-glide. This means that before, are less strongly differentiated from in Northern SD and Randstad than is usually the case in other regional varieties of SD and in Belgian SD. There is one exception to the lengthening rule: when is followed by a consonant different than and, remain short. Examples of that are words such as wierp, stierf, zwierf andbedierf. The rule is also suppressed syllable-finally in certain compounds; compare roux-room with roerroom and Ruhr-Ohm.
Mid vowels
- are open-mid front. According to Jo Verhoeven, the Belgian SD variants are somewhat raised. Before and the velarized or pharyngealized allophone of, is typically lowered to. In some regional SD, this lowering is generalized to most or even all contexts. Conversely, some regional SD varieties realize the main allophone of as higher and more central than open-mid front.
- is open-mid front.
- has two allophones, with the main one being mid central unrounded. The allophone used in word-final positions resembles the main allophone of as it is closer, more front and more rounded.
- is a very tense, pharyngealized vowel. Its backness has been described as back by Collins and Mees and near-back by Gussenhoven and Verhoeven. The pharyngeal effect is more pronounced in Northern SD than in the standard Belgian variety. is close to in terms of height and backness, but it is unclear whether it has the same secondary articulation of pharyngealization.
The free vowels are realized as monophthongs in Belgian SD and in many regional accents. In Northern SD, narrow closing diphthongs are used. The starting point of is centralized back, and the starting point of has been described as front by Collins and Mees and as centralized front by Gussenhoven. The monophthongal counterparts of are peripheral; the former is almost as front as cardinal, whereas the latter is almost as back as cardinal. Many speakers of Randstad Dutch as well as younger speakers of Northern SD realize as rather wide diphthongs of the type, which may be mistaken for the phonemic diphthongs by speakers of other accents. Using for goes hand in hand with lowering the first elements of to, a phenomenon termed Polder Dutch. Therefore, the phonemic contrast between and is still strongly maintained, but its phonetic realization is very different from what one can typically hear in traditional Northern SD. In Rotterdam and The Hague, the starting point of can be fronted to instead of being lowered to.
In Northern SD and in Randstad, lose their closing glides and are raised and slightly centralized to before in the same word. The first two allophones strongly resemble the lax monophthongs. Dutch children frequently misspell the word weer as wir. These sounds may also occur in regional varieties of SD and in Belgian SD, but they are more typically the same as the main allophones of . An exception to the centralizing rule are syllable-final in compounds such as zeereis , milieuramp and bureauredactrice .
In Northern SD, are mid-centralized before the pharyngealized allophone of.
Several non-standard dialects have retained the distinction between the so-called "sharp-long" and "soft-long" e and o, a distinction that dates to early Middle Dutch. The sharp-long varieties originate from the Old Dutch long ē and ō, while the soft-long varieties arose from short i/e and u/o that were lengthened in open syllables in early Middle Dutch. The distinction is not considered to be a part of Standard Dutch and is not recognised in educational materials, but it is still present in many local varieties, such as Antwerpian, Limburgish, West Flemish and Zeelandic. In these varieties, the sharp-long vowels are often opening diphthongs such as, while the soft-long vowels are either plain monophthongs or slightly closing.
Open vowels
In Northern SD and some other accents, are realised so that the former is a back vowel, whereas the latter is central or front. In Belgian SD is also central or front, but may be central instead of back, so it may have the same backness as.Other accents may have different realisations:
- Many accents realize this pair with 'inverted' backness, so that is central , whereas is closer to cardinal.
- Outside the Randstad, fronting of to central is very common. On the other hand, in Rotterdam and Leiden, the short sounds even darker than the Standard Northern realization, being realized as a fully back and raised open vowel, unrounded or rounded.
- In Groningen, tends to be particularly front, similar to the quality of the cardinal vowel, whereas in The Hague and in the affected Standard Northern accent, may be raised and fronted to, particularly before.
Diphthongs
Dutch also has several diphthongs, but only three of them are indisputably phonemic. All of them end in a non-syllabic close vowel , but they may begin with a variety of other vowels.- has been variously transcribed with,, and.
- The starting points of tend to be closer in Belgian SD than in Northern SD. In addition, the Belgian SD realization of tends to be fully rounded, unlike the typical Northern SD realization of the vowel. However, Jo Verhoeven reports rather open starting points of the Belgian SD variants of , so the main difference between Belgian and Northern SD in that regard may be only in the rounding of the first element of, but the fully rounded variant of is also used by some Netherlands speakers, particularly of the older generation. It is also used in most of Belgium, in agreement with the Belgian SD realization.
- In conservative Northern SD, the starting points of are open-mid and rounded in the case of the last two vowels:.
- The backness of the starting point of the Belgian SD realization of has been variously described as front and centralized front.
- In Polder Dutch spoken in some areas of the Netherlands, the starting points of are further lowered to. This typically goes hand in hand with lowering the starting points of to. These realizations have existed in Hollandic dialects since the 16th century and now are becoming standard in the Netherlands. They are an example of a chain shift akin to the Great Vowel Shift. According to Jan Stroop, the fully lowered variant of is the same as the phonetic diphthong, making bij 'at' and baai 'bay' perfect homophones.
- The rounding of the starting point of the Northern SD realization of has been variously described as slight and nonexistent. The unrounded variant has also been reported to occur in many other accents, for example Leiden, Rotterdam and in some Belgian speakers.
- Phonetically, the ending points of the native diphthongs are lower and more central than cardinal, i.e. more like or even . In Belgian SD, the ending points are shorter than in Northern SD, but in both varieties the glide is an essential part of the articulation. Furthermore, in Northern SD there is no appreciable difference between the ending points of and the phonetic diphthongs, with both sets ending in vowels close to.
- In some regional varieties of SD, the ending points of are even lower than in Standard Dutch:, and in the traditional dialect of The Hague they are pure monophthongs. Broad Amsterdam speakers can also monophthongize, but to. It typically does not merge with as that vowel has a rather back realization in Amsterdam.
In Northern SD, the second elements of can be labiodental. This is especially common in intervocalic positions.
In Northern SD and regional Netherlands SD, the close-mid elements of may be subject to the same kind of diphthongization as, so they may be actually triphthongs with two closing elements . In Rotterdam, can be phonetically, with a central starting point.
is realized with more prominence on the first element according to Booij and with equal prominence on both elements according to Collins and Mees. Other diphthongs have more prominence on the first element.
The ending points of these diphthongs are typically somewhat more central than cardinal. They tend to be higher than the ending points of the phonemic diphthongs.
Example words for vowels and diphthongs
| Phoneme | Phonetic IPA | Orthography | English translation |
| kip | 'chicken' | ||
| biet vier | 'beetroot' 'four' | ||
| analyse | 'analysis' | ||
| hut | 'cabin' | ||
| fuut duur | 'grebe' 'expensive' | ||
| centrifuge | 'centrifuge' | ||
| hoed invoering | 'hat' 'introduction' | ||
| cruise | 'cruise' | ||
| bed | 'bed' | ||
| blèr | 'yell' | ||
| beet beet leerstelling leerstelling | 'bite' 'dogma' | ||
| de | 'the' | ||
| oeuvre | 'oeuvre' | ||
| neus neus scheur scheur | 'nose' 'crack' | ||
| bot | 'bone' | ||
| roze | 'pink' | ||
| boot boot Noordzee Noordzee | 'boat' 'North Sea' | ||
| bad | 'bath' | ||
| zaad | 'seed' | ||
| Argentijn Argentijn | 'Argentine' | ||
| uit ui | 'out' 'onion' | ||
| fout fout | 'mistake' | ||
| ai | 'ouch' | ||
| hoi | 'hi' | ||
| nieuw | 'new' | ||
| duw | 'push' | ||
| groei | 'growth' | ||
| leeuw | 'lion' | ||
| mooi | 'nice' | ||
| haai | 'shark' |
Stress
Most native Germanic words are stressed on the root syllable, which is usually the first syllable of the word. Germanic words may also be stressed on the second or later syllable if certain unstressed prefixes are added. Non-root stress is common in loanwords, which are generally borrowed with the stress placement unchanged. In polysyllabic words, secondary stress may also be present. Certain prefixes and suffixes will receive secondary stress:,. The stressed syllable of a word receive secondary stress within a compound word:,.The vast majority of compound nouns are stressed on the first element: appeltaart, luidspreker. The word boeren generally takes secondary stress in compounds: boerenkool, boerenland. Some compounds formed from two words are stressed on the second element: stadhuis, rijksdaalder. In some cases the secondary stress in a compound shifts to preserve a trochaic pattern: eiland, but schateiland. Compounds formed from two compound words tend to observe these same rules. But in compounds formed from more than two words the stress is irregular.
While stress is phonemic, minimal pairs are rare, and marking the stress in written Dutch is always optional, but it is sometimes recommended to distinguish homographs that differ only in stress. While it is common practice to distinguish een from één, this distinction is not so much about stress as it is about the pronunciation of the vowel, and while the former is always unstressed, the latter may or may not be stressed. Stress also distinguishes some verbs, as stress placement on prefixes also carries a grammatical distinction, such as in ' and '. In vóórkomen and other verbs with a stressed prefix, the prefix is separable and separates as kom voor in the first-person singular present, with the past participle vóórgekomen. On the other hand, verbs with an unstressed prefix are not separable: voorkómen becomes voorkóm in the first-person singular present, and voorkómen in the past participle, without the past participle prefix ge-.
Dutch has a strong stress accent like other Germanic languages, and it uses stress timing because of its relatively complex syllable structure. It has a preference for trochaic rhythm, with relatively stronger and weaker stress alternating between syllables in such a way that syllables with stronger stress are produced at a more or less constant pace. Generally, every alternate syllable before and after the primary stress will receive relative stress, as far secondary stress placements allow: Wá.gə.nì.ngən. Relative stress preferably does not fall on so syllables containing may disrupt the trochaic rhythm. To restore the pattern, vowels are often syncopated in speech: kín.də.rən >, há.ri.ngən >, vər.gə.líj.king >. In words for which the secondary stress is imposed lexically onto the syllable immediately following the stressed syllable, a short pause is often inserted after the stressed syllable to maintain the rhythm to ensure that the stressed syllable has more or less equal length to the trochaic unit following it: bóm..mèl.ding, wéér..lò.zə.
Historically, the stress accent has reduced most vowels in unstressed syllables to, as in most other Germanic languages. This process is still somewhat productive, and it is common to reduce vowels to in syllables carrying neither primary nor secondary stress, particularly in syllables that are relatively weakly stressed due to the trochaic rhythm. Weakly stressed long vowels may also be shortened without any significant reduction in vowel quality. For example, politie may be pronounced, or even.
Phonotactics
The syllable structure of Dutch is V. Many words, as in English, begin with three consonants such as straat. Words that end in four consonants are mostly superlative adjectives.Onset
Notes on individual consonants:- is the only phoneme that can occur at the beginning of a sequence of three consonants: spreeuw, splinter, struik, scriptie, sclerose, schram. It is the only consonant that can occur before : smart. It cannot occur immediately before, though it does phonetically for speakers who drop in the sequence.
- The only possible consonant cluster with is : zwabber.
- is infrequent as the first element, mostly occurring in roots coming from Greek: chiropracticus, chronologisch, chlamydia. It is very common in the sequence.
- , and only occur outside clusters.
- cannot appear in onsets except as an ambisyllabic word-internal consonant.
Voiced obstruents cannot appear in other clusters except for. Voiceless obstruents can occur in stop-fricative and fricative-stop clusters. Sequences of a voiceless obstruent or and are also possible, for only occurs:
- Stop-fricative clusters primarily occur in loan words: tsaar, tsunami, Tsjechisch, pfeiffer.
- * psoriasis, psalm, xylofoon and the rare pterodactylus are typical of words derived from Greek.
- An obstruent followed by appears in many native words: knecht, snikken, more rarely gniffelen, fnuiken.
- * pneumatisch only appears in Greek words.
Coda
- Voiced consonants only appear in loan words: jazz.
- appears alone, preceded by or, or followed by,, or a combination of these.
- does not occur before labials and dorsals, does not occur before labials and does not occur before dorsals. cannot follow long vowels or diphthongs.
- cannot occur after diphthongs.
- , and do not occur.
Historic sound changes
- > : German machen vs. Dutch, English make
- > : German Schaf vs. Dutch, English sheep
- > : German Wasser vs. Dutch, English water
- > : German das, Dutch vs. English that
- Words with -old, -olt or -ald and -alt lost the in favor of a diphthong as a result of l-vocalisation. Compare English old, German alt, Dutch.
- changed to , spelled, but it was later reverted in many words by analogy with other forms. Compare English loft, German Luft, Dutch lucht.
- Proto-Germanic turned into through palatalisation, which, in turn, became the diphthong, spelled. Long also diphthongised to, spelled.
Sample