Let’s face it: Dutch pronunciation is a bit sloppy. It may not be as bad as English, but it’s definitely not as clean as, for example, Spanish, and there are a few annoying rules that make it a little less fun to learn the language as a whole. In an attempt to fix that, we’ve come up with a set of accents, or diacritics, that should help us all with pronunciation – but understanding how they work isn’t necessarily an easy feat. Let’s dive into the Dutch diacritical marks and see what’s what.
Many languages in the world use diacritics. There’s the famous Scandinavian å, the French cedille (ç), the ñ in Spanish, and a whooooooole bunch of others. Dutch doesn’t necessarily feature a whole lot of them, but you’ll definitely see them thrown around, so it would be nice to know what they mean, and why they’re placed exactly where they are.
First things first: Dutch diacritics only occur on vowels – save from some loan words we temporarily borrowed from other languages (isn’t that a weird term for it? It’s not like we’re going to give them back anytime soon).
They can occur for two reasons: either to change the pronunciation of a vowel that would have otherwise been pronounced differently, if it hadn’t been for the diacritic, or to stress the importance of a certain word or syllable. I’ll talk about this latter option later, but for now, let’s focus on the pronunciation thing.
Four diacritics
Basically, Dutch uses a set of four diacritics:
accent aigu (acute accent): ´
accent grave (grave accent): `
accent circonflexe (circumflex): ^
trema (diaeresis): ¨
Save for that last one, we tend to use the French names, and pronunciations, for them – for good reason, as you’ll find. The circumflex is sometimes jokingly called the accent dakje, meaning small rooftop accent. The diaeresis is sometimes also called (twee) puntjes (two small dots) in Dutch (more about diminutives here).
As you may or may not know, Dutch vowels can be pronounced in multiple ways, depending on the rest of the word – this is the case in many, if not most, languages. I’m not going to go into all the different pronunciation rules here, I’ll just explain the difference with and without the accents.
Accent aigu
With that out of the way: let’s start with the accent aigu, or the acute accent, since it’s probably the most common one (maybe the trema is, I haven’t done the research). It’s used most often when an e would be pronounced as a short vowel as per Dutch pronunciation rules, but is pronounced as a long vowel in real life. This use is never actually necessary in actual, original Dutch words (if there even is such a thing), and we mostly use it on loan words, especially ones we took from French.
The purely pronunciation-based use of the accent aigu mostly occurs in words that already have them in other languages, a.k.a. French, and we need them to keep the original pronunciation intact, rather than to copy-paste our own rules onto it. For example:
café (without the accent, it would be pronounced something like ka-fuh, rather than ka-fay)
logé (now low-zhea instead of low-guh or low-zhuh (this last version exists as a word too, but obviously without the accent)
René (a popular boys’ name, now pronounced ruh-nay instead of ray-nuh. The girls’ version would be Renée, pretty much like fiancé / fiancée in English. It’s not fi-ance, it’s fi-un-say)(Hermione Granger: “It’s le-vi-o-sah, not le-vi-o-sah!!!11!”)
Now for something completely but not entirely different. Without yet dabbling into the realm of purely stressing importance, the accent aigu can also be used to determine which syllable of a word should get emphasized, when there’s more than one option available. Take the word voorkomen, for example. It can mean two (actually more, but sshhhh) different things, depending on where the emphasis is:
voorkomen (Eng: to appear in a court of law, literally: to come forth)
voorkomen (Eng: to prevent)
Now, these are obviously two very different meanings, and it’s usually quite clear which version you mean in any given sentence, but if you were in doubt about whether your readers would get the gist, you’re most welcome to stress one of the syllables with an accent aigu (or two): vóórkomen or voorkómen. Yup, when two of the same vowels are used to form a syllable, both get the accent, at least in this situation.
Fun fact: voorkomen can also mean to occur, as in: it can occur that two snowflakes are actually alike, or a noun that means something like appearance, or even to get ahead in a sports match. All of these are pronounced vóórkomen.
Accent grave
Don’t worry, the accent grave or grave accent isn’t going to be nearly as long a story. It’s a very short one, actually: the accent grave pretty much only appears in Dutch in loan words, again, mostly from French. Some examples:
crème (Eng: cream)
première (Eng: premiere / opening night)
ampère (Eng: ampere, the unit of electric current)
The full list isn’t overly long, so you won’t run into it all that often – and when you do, it’s usually used wrongly, but more on that in the emphasis segment).
One of the very few non-French loan word ways in which the grave accent is used, is with the word hè, an utterly meaningless but highly useful word about which I’ve written an entire post as well.
Accent circonflexe
The accent circonflexe, or circumflex, or dakje, is another one that’s only used in loan words, and not very many of those at that. Some of them are:
crêpe (Eng: crêpe or crepe, a pancake thingie)
fêteren (Eng: to celebrate)
tête-à-tête (Eng: a friendly head-to-head)(look, there’s a grave accent, too!)
Keep in mind that there are some regional dialects, within in the Netherlands but also, for example, Afrikaans (which is actually a language), where the circumflex is actually used. This used to be the case in standard Dutch too, for example when two syllables were combined into one. Take the first line of the previous, old Dutch national anthem for example:
Wien Neêrlands bloed door d’aderen vloeit
Whoever has Dutch blood flowing through their veins
Here, Neêrlands is cramped into two syllables, rather than the original three in Nederlands. To make up for that, we tended to use a circumflex, but as stated earlier, this doesn’t officially happen anymore.
Trema
Expecting another list of random, funny-looking French words, are we? Joke’s on you! This one is actually ours. The trema, or diaeresis, does occur in actual Dutch words, and it’s very important that it does, at least for pronunciation reasons.
It’s also important to not confuse the trema with the Umlaut, the German two dots. While both alter the pronunciation of a vowel, the trema is only used to make sure two adjacent syllables are pronounced as such, rather than turned into one, as would be the case through standard rules.
Take the word ruïne, for example, meaning ruin, or an ancient, broken down castle of some sort. Dutch features an ui sound, which is pronounced as a single syllable, but in ruïne, just like in English, the u and i are pronounced separately. To make sure the reader knows that, we put two dots on the i, telling them: watch it, this is not an ui sound, but two separate syllables.
Another example is coördinatie (Eng: coordination). In English, you’ll just have to know that it’s not core-dination, but rather co-ordination, but in Dutch, we’ve taken the time to tell the reader about it in advance. How nice of us.
The same happens in plurals of words ending in two Es, such as the word zee (Eng: sea). The plural of zee is zeeën. While Dutch doesn’t feature any word that has three of the same vowels in a row that are pronounced as a single syllable, zeeen would still look quite awkward indeed, so we’ve decided to put a trema on the final e, to tell the reader that’s where the new syllable starts. This also used to be the case for compound words, such as zee-egel (Eng: sea urchin), which used to be written like zeeëgel, but we’ve since decided that difficult-to-pronounce compound words get a hyphen instead. More about those in the post about compound words.
Emphasis
A promise is a promise. Dutch speakers use diacritics – or rather, one of them – as a way of putting emphasis on a word or syllable. While this use is less official, there are still official rules to it.
Imagine yourself as a kid, and your mother has baked an undoubtedly delicious cake. Upon returning from grocery shopping, she finds that a large piece of it has already been taken out – and of course, she instantaneously blames you, even though you know for a fact it’s actually your sister who took it.
In that case, in a written world, you can use the accent aigu to put emphasis on the most important word in the entire sentence:
Zíj heeft het gedaan (Eng: She did it (not me))
In English, you might capitalize the whole thing (SHE did it!), but in Dutch, you can get away with just a simple accent.
Some more examples (feel free to come up with a background story for each of them yourself):
Ik wéét het gewoon niet meer (Eng: I just don’t KNOW anymore)
Ik heb wél schoongemaakt (Eng: I DID clean up)
Hij bedoélde het goed (Eng: He MEANT well (but he screwed up anyway))
It can even appear at the start of a sentence, as a capital:
Ík ben er nog nooit geweest (Eng: I, for one, have never been there (but others probably have)).
However! When you’re talking about een (Eng: one) versus een (Eng: a/an), and you decide to emphasize the Es to stress you mean one rather than a simple article, you can totally do so, but at the beginning of a sentence, only the second e gets the accent:
Ik heb maar één broodje gegeten (Eng: I only ate one sandwich)
Eén zwaluw maakt nog geen zomer (Eng: One swallow doesn’t make a summer)(how cool that we both have that saying!)
Note that when a double vowel is used that isn’t made up of two of the same vowels, the accent only goes on the last vowel, even in the middle of a word or sentence – yes, this confuses us too, and you’ll definitely see bedóélde around as well, even though it should technically be bedoélde.
Now, because of the way the grave accent changes the sound of any e into a short vowel sound, like the meeeeehhhh that sheep and goats are so familiar with, people tend to use that one to emphasize a word that happens to end up with that very sound, and you’ll end up seeing a version like Ik bèn helemaal niet moe (Eng: I AM not even tired). While this does make sense, pronunciation-wise, it’s totally wrong and you can’t do it. Thère (kídding).
Lóng story shórt
Yay, you’ve survived an entire article on pronunciation withoút you needing to hear anything spoken out loud. Well dóne, you! Here’s a quick recap.
Dutch uses a set of four diacritics (´, `, ^ and ¨) to make sure a vowel is pronounced the right way, where it would be pronounced wrongly if our standard pronunciation rules were applied, and there was no diacritic. The accent aigu, accent grave and accent circonflexe are pretty much exclusively used in loan words from French, while the trema appears in stock Dutch as well. The accent aigu, however, can also be used to stress emphasis, and although this use is never actually necessary, it cán help the reader in trying to understand what you’re on about a bit better.
Next time you come across one of these marks, try not to freak out, and remember they’re only there to help you. And also remember: Nederlands mag dan een moeilijke taal zijn, het is wél een mooie (Eng: Dutch may be a difficult language, it ís indeed a pretty one).
