The W is a bit of an oddball, isn’t it? It’s kind of two letters combined, but which ones is up for debate. Dutch features it too, and although it doesn’t take as strange a place in our alphabet as some of the other letters do, it does come with some quirky habits. Let’s see how the W is used in Dutch.
Want more strange letters? Here’s a post about the Q, and an even more special one about IJ.
The origin of the W isn’t necessarily a straight line. English speakers call it a double U, while French speakers call it a double V – which isn’t that strange when you realize the U and V were considered the same letter in Latin.
We don’t call it double anything, it’s just called W, pronounced something like way in English, but with a minor twist (more on that in a bit).
Most of the time, the W isn’t weird at all. It often occurs at the beginning of words, and it serves a rather normal purpose. Most of our interrogative pronouns (wie, wat, waar / Eng: who, what, where) start with it too, and we don’t even need to use an additional h to make sure these are pronounced correctly.
In these cases, it’s pronounced a bit different from the English W. Where your lips don’t really touch as you pronounce the English W, almost like a consonant version of an O or U, in Dutch, it’s much more consonant-y in and of itself – much more like a V, but with a bit more help from the vocal cords. It’s much more like the German W in Wasser, although slightly less “harsh”, for the lack of a better term.
This changes, however, when the W shows up at the end of words or syllables. In these cases, it’s almost always preceded by a U (save for some loan words like show and a few oddities I’ll talk some more about below), and that U is often (but not always) preceded by one or even multiple other vowels.
This leads to seemingly other-worldly contraptions like:
nieuw (Eng: new)
sneeuw (Eng: snow)
blauw (Eng: blue)
In these cases, we don’t pronounce the W the Dutch way, but much more the English way – it’s barely pronounced at all. In the Dutch of the Middle Ages, which had a much less official set of spelling rules, it didn’t really exist like this, resembling modern German a bit more: blauw was often just blaeu (which looks even stranger to us these days).
It’s not often that the pronounciation of a single consonant is changed around that much, and it almost feels like we should have come up with a new letter to distinguish between the round, vowel-like W sound of English and the more finite, harder German W. But we haven’t, so we’re stuck with it.
This becomes extra clear in compound words or other combinations of two words, in which the first part ends in a W, and the next part starts with it. Like one of my favorite Dutch words, for example:
ruwweg (Eng: roughly)
In this case, the first W belongs to the word ruw, meaning rough in English, pronounced the English way; the second instance is the start of weg, or way (as in: manner, in this case), and it’s pronounced the German, consonant-y way. A similar thing happens with the C in many languages, which can be either an s sound or a k sound, but other than that, it doesn’t occur very often.
Fun fact: there is pretty much only one Dutch word that ends in -rw. The word is murw, and it means something like softened, mellow. It’s most often used in a sentence like “Hij is murw geslagen”, meaning something like “He was beaten to pulp”. In this case, the W is usually pronounced like an F, although the pronunciation with our distinct W sound is also correct, and even more correct in historic perspective. This also occurs in the 1st person singular version of the accompanying verb, vermurwen, which would be “ik vermurw”.
Another oddity is the word erwt (Eng: pea), and all its different iterations. In this case, the W isn’t pronounced at all: we simply skip over it, resulting in something like airt – which funnily enough rhymes with snert, our common name for erwtensoep, or split pea soup, one of our traditional winter dishes.
Long story short
In Dutch, the W is a bit of a two-headed beast. Often, it’s a rather normal consonant minding its own business; other times, it’s a barely-pronounced way to end words that would otherwise have ended in a vowel, or several of those. Once you know the difference, it’s not that difficult to figure out how to pronounce each version, but it might take some getting used to.
Keep in mind that it’s usually pronounced like a German would pronounce their Ws, unless it’s preceded by a U, in which case it’s pretty much pronounced like an English speaker would. For now, I hope you’ll do something with that bit of knowhow – or, as the Dutch tend to say: die wetenswaardigheid.
