Ah, family. Or, as the Dutch say: familie. That was easy, wasn’t it? In fact, since the words we use for relatives are generally very old, there are a lot of similarities between English and Dutch. And, of course, there are quite a few dissimilarities as well. Here’s a who’s-who of Dutch family members.
Disclaimer: many Dutch-speaking regions, both within and outside the country of the Netherlands, use different words. I’m going to stick to the official ones, used in most parts of the Netherlands.
Direct family
Let’s start with the obvious. Many of the world’s languages feature an M sound for everything related to mothers, and a P sound for everything related to fathers. Dutch isn’t all that different.
mama = mom
papa = dad
There are more versions of these, such as pap/mam and pa/ma. These aren’t the official words, though, as these are only used to talk to your parents, rather than about them. The official ones are even more closely related to the official English ones:
moeder = mother
vader = father
The Dutch word for parents, ouders, literally means elders.
The names word your children, or kinderen in Dutch, will also look very familiar:
zoon = son
dochter = daughter
And it goes for the slightly more ancient generation too. Note that groot literally means great or grand:
grootvader = grandfather
grootmoeder = grandmother
You will see these words used in official texts, but you won’t hear them around a lot these days. That’s because nowadays, Dutch people tend to address their grandparents as opa for the male and oma for the female. Also, instead of just slapping the prefix great- in front a few times to talk about even more ancient generations, we use the word over: your over-overgrootmoeder is one of your grandparents’ grandmother.
Now, let’s backtrack to our very own generation for a bit, and talk about our siblings. These are quite similar to English, too:
broer = brother
zus = sister
These might not look perfectly similar, but they have actually been shortened over time. The original words are broeder and zuster, which is pretty much exactly the same as their English counterparts. You could say we just popularized the use of bro and sis at a very early stage, and it’s now officially in use. These archaic versions are still used, but they mean something else: a broeder is a monk, and a zuster is a nurse.
Now for perhaps the most intriguing factoid of this entire post: Dutch doesn’t have a word for siblings, meaning a set of brothers and/or sisters combined. If you want to ask how many siblings someone has in Dutch, you’ll have to go with Hoeveel broers en zussen heb je? (Eng: How many brothers and sisters do you have?). Many Indo-European languages lack a word for siblings, oddly enough.
Another interesting thing is that the verkleinwoordje, about which I’ve made a very lengthy post, is more than useful when it comes to siblings. Broer and zus almost exclusively mean older brother and older sister, while broertje and zusje almost always mean younger brother and younger sister. I, for example, have one zus, one broertje, and one zusje.
Let’s expand our horizons a bit, and talk about the broers and zussen of your very own parents – your aunts and uncles. (Off-topic: in Dutch, when listing these types of family members, we pretty much always start with the male name and then complete it with the female, but in English, I think aunts and uncles is more popular, and nieces and nephews definitely is. How thoughtful of you! It’s usually mom and dad rather than dad and mom, too.).
oom = uncle
tante = aunt
Fun fact: I recently learned that in English, a Dutch uncle is a person who gives slightly annoying but well-intentioned advice. That’s exactly what they do. Figures.
Now, as for their children, there’s another dissimilarity, but I fully blame English for that. One of the things I find strangest about English, is that it doesn’t have separate names (at least not that I know of) for male and female cousins. You could easily argue it’s not important, and I’d applaud you for it, but there are circumstances in which it is at the very least nice to know. Dutch does use different words:
neef = cousin (male)
nicht = cousin (female)
Now, here’s where it gets tricky. You may have recognized these words, because they’re similar to the English words for nephew and niece. In fact, that’s exactly what they are, too. We use the same words for that very purpose as well:
neef = nephew
nicht = niece
However, since your nieces and nephews are generally younger than you, we almost always use – here we go again – the verkleinwoordje. So while your neef or your nicht is generally your aunt’s and uncle’s son or daughter, who happens to be older than you, your neefje and nichtje can both be your aunt’s and uncle’s son or daughter who is younger than you, or your brother’s or sister’s son or daughter. Still with me? It’s a tad complicated, I have to admit.
Fun fact: like English, Dutch doesn’t really have a word for your cousin’s husband or wife. Sometimes, we just call them neef or nicht as well, or simply XXX’s husband/wife. I have one of those, my male cousin’s wife, who, on family gatherings, always jokingly calls me nepneef, or fake (male) cousin. It’s quite elegant, when you think about it.
One more thing about aunts and uncles: when you’re talking about the aunts and uncles of your parents, you can use the word oudoom or oudtante, literally meaning old-uncle and old-aunt. I think you can use great-uncle or grand-uncle in English, but I don’t think it’s very common – by all means, do let me know if I’m wrong.
A similar thing, but in reverse, happens when it’s about the children of your cousins. We call them achterneefje en achternichtje (again, we use the verkleinwoordje because they’re generally younger than you), literally meaning behind-cousin. These terms are also used for the children of your parents’ cousins, and when there’s an extra generation added, you can add an extra achter: your achter-achternichtje is the daughter of your parent’s niece or nephew, or the granddaughter of your parent’s cousin.
Look, we’ve stumbled upon another one!
kleindochter = granddaughter
kleinzoon = grandson
Klein literally means small or little, which is why I’ve always found the surname Smallchild one of the more hilarious ones, because just like in English, you can talk about them combined:
kleinkind = grandchild
kleinkinderen = grandchildren (more about Dutch plurals here)
Here, you can use the word achter to move onto the next generation as well: odds are you’re the achter-achter-achter-achter-achterkleinkind of someone quite famous who lived back in ye olde days.
Indirect family
In English, you can use the prefix step- to indicate someone doesn’t necessarily share a blood relationship with you, but is still considered to be part of the family by means of marriage – or at least dating. In Dutch, we use the prefix stief- in a similar way. Some examples:
stiefvader = stepdad
stiefzusje = (younger) stepsister
For some reason, many Dutch people feel the word stief has a negative ring to it, probably mainly due to the evil stepmothers in fairytales. For that reason, many of us resort to more positive substitutions, of which bonus and plus are the most wide-spread ones.
When you do share a family bond, but only a 50-50 one, things get fairly easy, at least in the Dutch-English language department. Just like English, we use the word half to indicate you only share one parent with your sibling:
halfzusje = (younger) half-sister
halfbroer = (older) half-brother
Yes. Half means half in Dutch. How convenient! We just get rid of the hyphen, which is kind of weird, for we very much like hyphens in Dutch.
In-laws
Now, what about the family you married into, or as English puts it: your in-laws? In Dutch, we use the prefix schoon- for that. While you may recognize schoon as a word meaning clean, this version finds its origin in Old Dutch, where it meant something like not related – which is exactly what your in-laws are. So:
schoonfamilie = your in-laws
schoonvader / schoonmoeder = father-in-law / mother-in-law
schoonzus = sister-in-law
zwager = brother-in-law
Wait, what? Zwager? Why isn’t is schoonbroer? This is due to the fact that Dutch used to use two different systems for naming in-laws. One had the schoon- prefix, the other used different words for all the different people. Zwager is left over from that era, and it’s still used as Schwager in German too, for example. People will obviously understand you when you say schoonbroer, but zwager is the official term.
Long story short
Naming family members isn’t as easy as it may seem. That’s the case for every language out there. Dutch and English are fairly similar, and the words we use to describe our relatives often look very much alike, but there are some exceptions that are completely different.
It might be worth your while to study all the different variations, because it can be quite important to know whether someone is talking about their cousin or their nephew, about their aunt or their niece, about their stepfamily or their in-laws. If you made it all the way to the end of this post, I can congratulate you with a solid Well done, bruv!
