Ah, the Q. Such a lovely little letter. It’s quite common, too, especially in French and Latin, and therefore in many other languages around the world, including English. But not so much in Dutch. We’ve always seemed reluctant to use it, and we’ve always preferred our own substitutes. Read all about why and how we did that in this post about the letter Q.
Wanna know more about Dutch using certain letters in a funky way? Check out the post about the IJ!
Of all the letters in the alphabet, to a Dutch speaker, the Q is probably the most outlandish one. This is because we don’t actually use it in words that aren’t loan words, and even those we like to change around to get rid of this strange one-legged O – or reverse P, if you’re looking at it in lowercast.
qu-
As mentioned before, the Q is usually used in loan words, and most of them are loaned from French and Latin. In these words, the Q is almost always followed by a U. There are some cases in which this isn’t so, like in the country of Qatar, but other than those few, the Q and U are a solid team. This isn’t all too strange, it happens in most Western languages that feature the Q on a regular basis.
Some sort of widely used Q words that are present in our official dictionaries are:
quiz
quotum
quiche
quarantaine
kw and k
These will look familiar to speakers of many other languages, too. In fact, you guys may have a lot more of them than we do, for we don’t usually keep the qu bit intact. For a fair amount of words, we’ve kicked out the qu part, and traded it in for a more Dutch-looking kw. For example:
kwaliteit (Eng: quality)
kwartier (Eng: quarter, we use it mainly for a period of fifteen minutes)
kwik (Eng: mercury, also known as quicksilver)
kwestie (Latin: questio, from which the English question got its name)
kwadraat (Latin: quadratus, meaning square, as in square root, in English)
This has actually been a fairly old habit. In Middle Dutch, spoken in our neck of the woods around the late Middle Ages, the qu in Latin words quickly got changed to kw instead – why use someone else’s spelling when you’ve got a perfectly good version of the sound yourself, right?
When the Dutch language became more and more standardized, in the early 1800s, this took another flight. The general idea was: write things the way you say them, and since we definitely pronounced qu words as kw words, most of them were Dutchified in this manner. Only some words that were already well-known and widely used in the rest of the world managed to keep their original qu form, as have some of the much more recent additions to our language.
This is one of the reasons why you’ll come across the Q much more often in many other languages: not a whole lot of them feature the kw combination on a regular basis, but Dutch does, and has done so for a long time.
-que
What about words ending in -que, then? French has a lot of them, too, and many of them have found their way into other languages, including Dutch. Well, a similar thing happened! While there are still words in our dictionary that end in -que, the vast majority of them have been turned into words that end in a k.
This usually happens with words of which the French version ends in -ique, although some versions with other vowels exist, too. When it’s -ique, we do add an extra e to make sure the word complies to our rules of pronunciation. For example:
muziek (Fr: musique)
republiek (Fr: république)
techniek (Fr: technique)
barok (Fr: baroque)
Many of these words have undergone a similar change in English, although the -que part is usually substituted with a c instead.
Long story quite short
Okay, this wasn’t that long a story, but that’s because Dutch really doesn’t use the Q as a letter all that much. When we do, it’s almost exclusively in loan words from French and Latin, and even most of those, we’ve Dutchified by using either a kw or just a k instead.
The idea was: we simply don’t need it, since we’ve got perfectly good alternatives for it in our own language. The Q is in our alphabet, and words containing it are in our dictionaries, but they’re few and far between. I generally kwite like this, but I’m not sure whether Shakespeare’s Hamlet would have looked as cool if the most famous line in written history had been: to be or not to be, that is the kwestion.
