If you live in a Dutch speaking country, or if you regularly speak Dutch with a native speaker, you’ve undoubtedly encountered the word hè. Hè is a very versatile word that in and of itself doesn’t mean anything at all, but it’s used to add meaning to otherwise not overly obvious sentences or situations. Let’s see what it means and how it’s used.
First things first: hè is used differently in different parts of the Dutch speaking countries, so you might not come across every version of it, or you might come across some that aren’t mentioned in this post. I’ll try to go with the most common ones from the Netherlands.
Hè is pronounced like you would pronounce meh in English, but with an h. It can either be a short and snappy sound, or an elongated one that even involves a change in pitch halfway through – it’s not the same pronunciation as hey, which would be written like hé, as per French rules of pronunciation. In emails or text messages you’ll often see it written like he or even like hé, but technically, this is wrong.
The word itself doesn’t really mean anything, but the way it’s pronounced or the type of sentence it’s used in can tell you why it’s actually there.
Hè?!
The hè from the title of this post has a few obvious additions to it. When typed like this, it means Huh?!, as in: I’m sorry, what?! It’s used to express a feeling of sheer unexpectedness (Hè?! Did you really use to live in Amsterdam?). Obviously, the question and exclamation marks aren’t absolutely necessary and are sometimes not used or even way overdone, but here, I just use them to distinguish the different versions of hè.
Hè?
Hè can also be used to indicate not having heard something correctly – again, much like you would use the English Huh?. It’s basically a less polite version of What did you say? I didn’t catch that. Different sounds are sometimes used, more resembling the English huh or even more like ha. It can also be used in combination with wat, Eng: what, making it even more obvious: Hè, wat?.
Hè???
For this one, I simply added some more question marks, but it’s another version of huh. This one is usually even higher pitched, and it means something along the lines of I have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s most commonly used in math classrooms.
Hè…
Hè can also be used to describe a feeling of mild sadness. This one is usually slightly elongated, hence the dots in the subheading, and it’s often much lower-pitched. It means bummer… and it can be used in reply to a wide array of disappointing bits of information, such as We ran out of sugar all the way up to I’ve been sick for the past four days or Well, there goes our plane.
(I did a full post about the word bummer, or jammer in Dutch, which can be found here).
Hè
For this one, I didn’t add any punctuation, mainly because I kind of ran out of options. This is, I would argue, the most quintessentially Dutch use of the word hè, at least in its pure form. It’s used in the same way as right? is used in English at the end of a sentence. Leuk, hè? means Fun, right?. It’s a thing of confirmation, to see whether the other person or people feel the same way about something as you do. Technically, this version can also be used in a sarcastic manner, but let’s not go there for now. Funnily enough, in both cases a simple Mhmm will suffice as a perfectly acceptable reply.
Hè hè
When another hè is added to the mix, a whole new world opens. I’ll start with the one you might expect most, even though it’s not necessarily the most commonly used version of it: the fake laughter, much like huehuehue. It doesn’t necessarily have to be fake though: just like the English version, it can also be used to express a sort of suppressed laughter in a situation where laughter might be frowned upon a little – in reply to a dodgy joke, for instance.
The most common Dutch version of hè hè, however, is one of sheer comfort. It’s the sound Dutch people make when they sit down on their couch after a long afternoon of shopping, or when they return from their four week holiday and open the front door again. It’s our Ahhhh, finally, although it used to be used this way much more often than it is today.
There’s another iteration of this last one, when it’s used in a much more sarcastic manner. It also means Ahhhh, finally, but more in a sense of: Ah, you finally paid that tikkie I sent you three days ago, or Ah, the food delivery guy has finally arrived.
One more, one that probably doesn’t count: my grandmother, bless her soul, used to use hè hè as a means to break uncomfortable silences. I don’t know if more Dutch grandmas do this, but mine surely turned it into an art form.
Long story short
Hè is amazing. Oftentimes, it’s equivalent to the English huh, with all its different iterations, but it can also be combined to create even more detailed meanings. It can be whispered, shouted, elongated, and more hès can be added to the mix. You’ll hear it all around, and it’s a good idea to start figuring out what it means when it’s used in a certain way, because it tells you a lot about how someone is feeling.
If you made it all the way to the end of this post, you can finally sit back, kick up your feet, and let out a well-deserved hè hè!
