When reading a Dutch text, you’ll come across the same word twice in a row a bit more often than you would in most other languages. It can be an awkward sight, but there are a few logical explanations for it. How does it happen, and why shouldn’t you be bothered by it at all, even though many Dutchies themselves are? Find out more about Dutch repeating words here.
Repeating words aren’t an official part of a language’s grammar package, but they can occur every now and then. In Dutch, this happens a bit more often than it does in many other languages, especially English. I’m not talking about contraptions like byebye here, I’m talking perfectly fine grammatical sentences in which the doubled up word means something else entirely both times around.
Plurals vs verbs
If you’ve been reading a lot of DutchDabbles posts, you may already have caught a hint on why this tends to happen so often in Dutch. Take these two facts about our language into account:
- Most plurals of Dutch nouns, aka most of the ones that don’t end in -s, end in -en.
- All Dutch regular verbs, and many irregular verbs, in their most standard version, the infinitive, end in -en, and so do the conjugations for their plural forms (we, they, and you lot) in both present and past simple.
See a pattern emerge there? Plurals of nouns often end in -en, as do versions of verbs associated with plurals of nouns. Obviously, not every noun has a verb directly linked to it, but it does occur. Some examples:
vliegen vliegen (Eng: flies fly)
mollen mollen gras (Eng: moles ruin grass)
ze leken leken (Eng: they looked like novices)
There’s a famous Dutch language joke in which this is pulled into the extreme:
Als vliegen achter vliegen vliegen, vliegen vliegen vliegen achterna
When flies fly behind flies, flies are chasing after flies
A Dutch comedian, Kees Torn, has done an even longer version using the one about moles, which can be found here (but it’s not all that easy to comprehend even for Dutchies).
Je + je
The second reason why you’ll often see the same word twice in a Dutch sentence isn’t as elaborate, but it is quite common. It’s when the word je is repeated.
Again, this has everything to do with two common uses of the word je. Je is one of the two possible options to say you in the singular, informal way, as in: je bent ziek (Eng: you are ill). I’ve done an entire post about it.
However, je is also one of the two main informal possessive versions, for example: je boek (Eng: your book).
Add our funky Dutch ways of creating sentences and word order, and you’ll end up with a doubled up je in very common sentences like:
Ben je je boek vergeten? (Eng: Did you forget your book?)
Als je je boek vergeten bent, kun je de mijne wel lenen (Eng: If you’ve forgotten your book, you can borrow mine)
While I find these sentences perfectly fine and logical (and they’re entirely grammatically correct), many Dutch speakers dislike them, and will go out of their way to avoid them. They’ll come up with contraptions like Als je jouw boek vergeten bent, …, which sounds much more accusive to me (Geez, if you’ve forgotten YOUR book, you can borrow MINE), or Als jij je boek vergeten bent, …, which puts an unnecessary amount of emphasis on the subject, making it all come across much more accusive as well.
I’ve also seen people using a comma to separate the first and second je, which isn’t grammatically correct at all – it sometimes could be when it’s about nouns and verbs, as could be the case in English, but saying Have you, forgotten your book is definitely weird, if not plain wrong.
Haar haar
Similar to this je je thing is haar haar, in which the first haar means her, and the second means hair. Especially in literature, the word hair often directly follows her in a sentence like Haar haar was lang (Eng: Her hair was long). Dutch writers back in the days found this quite ugly, and there are many instances in Dutch literature where the first haar was changed to heur, turning the previously mentioned sentence into Heur haar was lang. Heur is an old version of the feminine pronoun in question, so it was entirely grammatically correct, but even after Dutch had dropped most of its grammatical cases, and the word didn’t really make sense anymore, writers kept using it in this very instance, just to avoid a bit of Double Dutch. Fun fact: heur sounds just like the English her – I wonder why.
Nursery rhyme
There’s a Dutch sort of nursery rhyme (although it isn’t actually a rhyme) that plays with this repetition in a gorgeous little way. It goes like this:
Toen moeder aan de was was
Zag ze zeven vliegen vliegen
Er was ook een bij bij
Ze vlogen onder de deur deur
Over de weg weg
(the last deur is old Dutch, we’d use door instead now – which is quite funny in and of itself, for the first deur actually means door in English)
In English, it means something like this:
When mother was doing laundry
She saw seven flies flying
There was a bee there, too
They flew under the door
Away over the road
Long long long story short
Repeating words occur in many languages, but in Dutch, they are a bit more prevalent than in most others. They often show up in combinations involving plural nouns and their accompanying plural verb conjugations (or other combinations of noun + verb), or with je both as a subject and as a possessive form – but there’s other ways in which they can occur, too.
Dutchies often seem to dislike these contraptions, and will sometimes go out of their way to avoid them, either by changing one of the two to a form that makes less sense or implies a slightly different meaning (which is technically fine), or even by using a comma (which usually isn’t fine at all).
I just wish people wouldn’t try so hard to fix something that isn’t broken, for personally, I find these double-uppings quite charming – or perhaps I should say: I find them pretty pretty.
