Dutch orthography uses the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...
. The spelling system is issued by government decree and is compulsory for all government documentation and educational establishments.
Legal basis
In the
Netherlands
, Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
, the official spelling is regulated by the Spelling Act of 15 September 2005. This came into force on 22 February 2006, replacing the Act on the Spelling of the Dutch Language of 14 February 1947.
The Spelling Act gives the Committee of Ministers of the Dutch Language Union the authority to determine the spelling of Dutch by ministerial decision. In addition, the law requires that this spelling be followed "at the governmental bodies, at educational institutions funded from the public purse, as well as at the exams for which legal requirements have been established". In other cases, it is recommended, but it is not mandatory to follow the official spelling.
The Decree on the Spelling Regulations of 2005–2006 contains the annexed spelling rules decided by the Committee of Ministers on 25 April 2005. This decree entered into force on 1 August 2006, replacing the Spelling Decree of 19 June 1996.
In
Flanders
Flanders ( or ; ) is the Dutch language, Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium and one of the communities, regions and language areas of Belgium. However, there are several overlapping definitions, including ones related to culture, la ...
, the same spelling rules are currently applied by the Decree of the
Flemish Government
The Flemish Government ( ) is the executive branch of the Flemish Community and the Flemish Region of Belgium. It consists of a government cabinet, headed by the Minister-President of Flanders, Minister-President and accountable to the Flemish Par ...
Establishing the Rules of the Official Spelling and Grammar of the Dutch language of 30 June 2006.
Alphabet
The modern Dutch alphabet, used for the
Dutch language
Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language and is the List of languages by total number of speak ...
, consists of the 26 letters of the
ISO basic Latin alphabet
The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and u ...
. Depending on how is used, six (or five) letters are
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s and 20 (or 21) letters are
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
s. In some aspects, the
digraph ''
'' behaves as a single letter. is the most frequently used letter in the Dutch alphabet, as
it is in English. The least frequently used letters are and , similar to English.
Sound to spelling correspondences
Dutch uses the following letters and letter combinations. For simplicity, dialectal variation and subphonemic distinctions are not always indicated. See
Dutch phonology
Dutch phonology is similar to that of other West Germanic languages, especially Afrikaans and West Frisian.
Standard Dutch has two main ''de facto'' pronunciation standards: Northern and Belgian. Northern Standard Dutch is the most prestig ...
for more information.
The following list shows letters and combinations, along with their pronunciations, found in modern native or nativised vocabulary:
The following additional letters and pronunciations appear in non-native vocabulary or words using older, obsolete spellings (often conserved in proper names):
Loanwords
Loanwords
A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...
often keep their original spellings: 'gift' (from French) (this word is also informally written , but this spelling is not recognized by the
standard spelling dictionary). are sometimes adapted to , but (and rarely ) are usually retained. Greek letters become , not , but usually becomes (except before a consonant, after and word finally). -- in French loanwords are written with a single () except when a
schwa follows ().
Vowel length
Vowel length is always indicated but in different ways by using an intricate system of single and double letters.
Historical overview
Old Dutch
In linguistics, Old Dutch ( Modern Dutch: ') or Old Low Franconian (Modern Dutch: ') is the set of dialects that evolved from Frankish spoken in the Low Countries during the Early Middle Ages, from around the 6th Page 55: "''Uit de zesde eeu ...
possessed phonemic consonant length in addition to phonemic vowel length, with no correspondence between them. Thus, long vowels could appear in closed syllables, and short vowels could occur in open syllables. In the transition to early
Middle Dutch
Middle Dutch is a collective name for a number of closely related West Germanic dialects whose ancestor was Old Dutch. It was spoken and written between 1150 and 1500. Until the advent of Modern Dutch after 1500 or , there was no overarching sta ...
, short vowels were lengthened when they stood in open syllables. Short vowels could now occur only in closed syllables. Consonants could still be long in pronunciation and acted to close the preceding syllable. Therefore, any short vowel that was followed by a long consonant remained short.
The spelling system used by early Middle Dutch scribes accounted for that by indicating the vowel length only when it was necessary (sometimes by doubling the vowel but also in other ways). As the length was implicit in open syllables, it was not indicated there, and only a single vowel was written. Long consonants were indicated usually by doubling the consonant letter, which meant that a short vowel was always followed by at least two consonant letters or by just one consonant at the end of a word.
Later in Middle Dutch, the distinction between short and long consonants started to disappear. That made it possible for short vowels to appear in open syllables once again. Because there was no longer a phonetic distinction between single and double consonants (they were both pronounced short now), Dutch writers started to use double consonants to indicate that the preceding vowel was short even when the consonant had not been long in the past. That eventually led to the modern Dutch spelling system.
Checked and free vowels
Modern Dutch spelling still retains many of the details of the late Middle Dutch system. The distinction between
checked and free vowels
In phonetics and phonology, checked vowels are those that commonly stand in a stressed closed syllable, while free vowels are those that can stand in either a stressed closed syllable or a stressed open syllable.
Usage
The terms ''checked vowe ...
is important in Dutch spelling. A checked vowel is one that is followed by a consonant in the same syllable (the syllable is closed) while a free vowel ends the syllable (the syllable is open). This distinction can apply to pronunciation or spelling independently, but a syllable that is checked in pronunciation will always be checked in spelling as well (except in some unassimilated loanwords).
* Checked in neither: ("to leave", "to let")
* Checked in spelling only: ("laths")
* Checked in both: ("lath"), ("little lath")
A single vowel that is checked in neither is always long/tense. A vowel that is checked in both is always short/lax. The following table shows the pronunciation of the same three-letter sequence in different situations, with hyphens indicating the syllable divisions in the written form, and the IPA period to indicate them in the spoken form:
Free is fairly rare and is mostly confined to loanwords and names. As tense is rare except before , free is likewise rare except before .
The same rule applies to word-final vowels, which are always long because they are not followed by any consonant (but see below on ). Short vowels, not followed by any consonant, do not normally exist in Dutch, and there is no normal way to indicate them in the spelling.
Double vowels and consonants
When a vowel is short/lax but is free in pronunciation, the spelling is made checked by doubling the following consonant, so that the vowel is kept short according to the default rules. That has no effect on pronunciation, as modern Dutch does not have long consonants:
* ''ram-men'' ("rams, to ram")
* ''tel-len'' ("to count")
* ''tin-nen'' ("made of tin")
* ''kop-pen'' ("cups, heads, to head
ball)
* ''luk-ken'' ("to succeed")
When a vowel is long/tense but still checked in pronunciation, it is necessarily checked in spelling as well. A change is thus needed to indicate the length, which is done by doubling the vowel. Doubled does not occur.
* ("window"), ''raam-de'' ("estimated")
* ("cultivate"), ''teel-de'' ("cultivated")
* ("buy, sale"), ''koop-sel'' ("something bought")
* (a name)
A single indicates short and long e but is also used to indicate the neutral schwa sound in unstressed syllables. Because the schwa is always short, is never followed by a double consonant when it represents .
* ''ap-pe-len'' ("apples")
* ''ge-ko-men'' ("(has) come")
* ''kin-de-ren'' ("children")
A word-final long is written (or in some loanwords), as an exception to the normal rules. That means that a word-final single will almost always represent a schwa.
* (expression of woe), ("you")
* ("along, with"), ("me")
* ("contraction of the
womb
The uterus (from Latin ''uterus'', : uteri or uteruses) or womb () is the organ in the reproductive system of most female mammals, including humans, that accommodates the embryonic and fetal development of one or more fertilized eggs until bi ...
"), ("
we")
* Exception: (city name; formerly ''Enschedé'')
Because the position of the stress in a polysyllabic word is not indicated in the
spelling
Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element.
Spelli ...
, that can lead to
ambiguity
Ambiguity is the type of meaning (linguistics), meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making for several interpretations; others describe it as a concept or statement that has no real reference. A com ...
. Some pairs of words are spelled identically, but represents either stressed or or unstressed , depending on how the stress is placed.
* ''be-de-len'' ("to beg") or ("to impart with, to grant ")
* ''ver-gaan-de'' ("far-going, far-reaching") or ("perishing")
Morphological alternations
The length of a vowel generally does not change in the pronunciation of different forms of a word. However, in different forms of a word, a syllable may alternate between checked and free depending on the syllable that follows. The spelling rules nonetheless follow the simplest representation, writing double letters only when necessary. Consequently, some forms of the same word may be written with single letters while others are written with double letters. Such alternations commonly occur between the singular and plural of a noun or between the infinitive and the conjugated forms of verbs. Examples of alternations are shown below. Note that free is spelled in native words:
There are some irregular nouns that change their vowel from short/lax in the singular to long/tense in the plural. Their spelling does not alternate between single and double letters. However, the sound becomes in the plural in such nouns, not That is reflected in the spelling.
* ("day"), ''da-gen'' ("days")
* ("city, town"), ''ste-den'' ("cities, towns")
* ("road, way"), ''we-gen'' ("roads, ways")
* ("ship"), ''sche-pen'' ("ships")
* ("lottery ticket"), ''lo-ten'' ("lottery tickets")
Exceptions
As a rule, the simplest representation is always chosen. A double vowel is never written in an open syllable, and a double consonant is never written at the end of a word or when next to another consonant. A double vowel is rarely followed by a double consonant, as it could be simplified by writing them both single.
The past tense of verbs may have a double vowel, followed by a double consonant, to distinguish those forms from the present tense.
* ''ha-ten'' ("hate"), ''haat-ten'' ("hated"), both
* ''ra-den'' ("guess"), ''raad-den'' ("guessed"), both
Compounds should be read as if each word were spelled separately, and they may therefore appear to violate the normal rules. That may sometimes cause confusion if the word is not known to be a compound.
* ''dag-ar-bei-der'' or more fluently ("day labourer"), a compound of ("day") + ("labourer") so it is not divided as ''*da-gar-bei-der'' . If it were not a compound, it would be written ''*dag-gar-bei-der'' to keep the first "a" short.
* ''een-en-twin-tig'' ("twenty-one"), a compound of ("one") + ("and") + ("twenty"). If it were not a compound, it would be written ''*e-nen-twin-tig'' to avoid having a double vowel at the end of a syllable.
* ''mee-doen'' ("to participate"), a compound of ("along (with)") + ("do"). If it were not a compound, it would be written ''*me-doen'' to avoid having a double vowel at the end of a syllable. The word itself has a double vowel because of the exception with final -, as noted above.
Final devoicing and the'' 't kofschip'' rule
Final devoicing is not indicated in Dutch spelling; words are usually spelled according to the historically original consonant. Therefore, a word may be written with a letter for a voiced consonant at the end of a word but still be pronounced with a voiceless consonant:
* "(I) have" but "to have"
* "horse" but "horses"
* "(I) lay" but "to lay"
Weak verbs form their past tense and past participle by addition of a dental, or depending on the
voicing of the preceding consonant(s) (see
Assimilation (linguistics)
In phonology, assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes (typically consonants or vowels) change to become more similar to other nearby sounds. This process is common across languages and can happen within a word or between words. Fo ...
). However, because final consonants are always devoiced, there is no difference in pronunciation between these in the participle. Nonetheless, in accordance with the above rules, the orthography operates as if the consonant were still voiced. The same dental consonant letter is spelled in the past participle as in the past tense forms in which it is not word-final. To help memorise when to write and when , Dutch students are taught the rule "" ("the merchant ship is loaded with tea"). If the verb stem in the infinitive ends with one of the consonants of "" (), the past tense dental is a --; otherwise, it is a --. However, the rule also applies to loanwords ending in -, - or -, as these are also voiceless.
and
and are somewhat special:
* They are permitted only at the start of a syllable in native words, not at the end.
* For historic reasons, in native words they are never preceded by a short/lax vowel and so never occur doubled.
* When the sounds and occur at the end of a syllable, they are written and respectively.
Then, therefore, final devoicing is reflected in the spelling:
* ("to stay") → "(I) stay"
* "houses" → "house"
However, and are also written at the end of a syllable that is not final. The pronunciation remains voiced even if the spelling shows a voiceless consonant. This is most common in the past tense forms of weak verbs:
* ("to live") → "(I) lived"
* ("to blush") → "(I) blushed"
Compare this to verbs in which the final consonant is underlyingly voiceless. Here, the dental assimilation rule calls for the ending , which gives away the voicelessness of the previous sound even if the spelling of that sound itself does not:
* ("to bark") → "(I) barked"
* ("to rustle, to hiss") → "(I) rustled"
Some modern loanwords and new coinages do not follow these rules. However, these words tend to not follow the other spelling rules as well: ("to page (call on a pager)") → ("(I) page"), ("(I) paged").
Diacritics
Dutch uses the
acute accent
The acute accent (), ,
is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
to mark stress and the
diaeresis (trema) to disambiguate diphthongs/triphthongs. Occasionally, other diacritics are used in loanwords and native onomatopoeic words. Accents are not necessarily placed on capital letters (for example, the word at the beginning of a sentence) unless the whole word is written in capitals.
Acute accent
Acute accents may be used to emphasise a word in a phrase, on the vowel in the stressed syllable. If the vowel is written as a digraph, an acute accent is put on both parts of the digraph. Although that rule includes , the acute accent on the is frequently omitted in typing (resulting in instead of ), as putting an acute accent on a is still problematic in most word processing software.
If the vowel is written as more than two letters, the accent is put on the first two vowel letters – except when the first letter is a capital one. According to the
Taalunie, accents on capital letters are used only in
all caps
In typography, text or font in all caps (short for "all capitals") contains capital letters without any lowercase letters. For example: All-caps text can be seen in legal documents, advertisements, newspaper headlines, and the titles on book co ...
and in loanwords. So, it is correct to write , and , but not to write *. The
Genootschap Onze Taal states that accents can be put on capital letters whenever the need arises, but makes an exception for .
Stress on a short vowel, written with only one letter, is occasionally marked with a
grave accent
The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...
: (equivalent to the example below), . However, it is technically incorrect to do so.
Additionally, the acute accent may also be used to mark different meanings of various words, including (
a(n)/
one
1 (one, unit, unity) is a number, numeral, and glyph. It is the first and smallest positive integer of the infinite sequence of natural numbers. This fundamental property has led to its unique uses in other fields, ranging from science to sp ...
), (for/before), (to occur/to prevent), and (far-reaching/issuing), as shown in the examples below.
Examples
Diaeresis
A
diaeresis is used to mark a
hiatus, if the combination of vowel letters may be either mistaken for a digraph or interpreted in more than one way: (collected), (uploaded), (egoistic), (sympathies, preferences), (coordinate), (realistic), (seas), (two together; the two of them) and even until 1996 (sea duck; now spelled ). On a line break that separates the vowels but keeps parts of a digraph together, the diaeresis becomes redundant and so is not written: ego-/istisch, sympathie-/en, re-/eel, zee-/en, met z'n twee-/en. The rule can be extended to names, such as , e.g.
Michaëlla Krajicek
Michaëlla Krajicek (; born 9 January 1989) is a Dutch former tennis player. She has won three singles and five doubles titles on the WTA Tour, as well as one WTA 125 tournaments, WTA 125 doubles title, and 14 titles in singles and 24 in double ...
. The diaeresis is only used in derivational suffixes since 1996; compounds are written with a hyphen, for example (car accident).
Other diacritics
The
grave accent
The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...
is used in some French loanwords and native
onomatopoeic words, generally when pronunciation would be wrong without it, such as , (barrier), (female cashier), (career) and ("What?"), (to yell). Officially, is always written without an accent, but sometimes an accent is used to distinguish between ("apple") and ("appeal", "roll call", and others).
Besides being used to mark stress,
acute accent
The acute accent (), ,
is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
s are also used in many loanwords (mainly from French) such as (overnight guest), (train compartment), (okay) and . The name of the Dutch town
Enschede
Enschede (; local ) is a list of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the province of Overijssel and the Twente region of the eastern Netherlands. The east of the urban area reaches ...
, pronounced was once upon a time written Enschedé, but later the acute accent fell off without changing the pronunciation, which has not become .
Similarly, a
circumflex accent
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...
is also used in some French loanwords, including (survey), and (to treat). For (embarrassing) it is indecisive, the official spelling has the accent, but the Genootschap Onze also allows the spelling without the accent since it makes no difference to the pronunciation.
Onze Taal: genant / gênant
(in Dutch) The circumflex accent is also used the West Frisian language
West Frisian (; ), or simply Frisian ( ; ), is a West Germanic language spoken mostly in the province of Friesland () in the north of the Netherlands, mostly by those of Frisians, Frisian ancestry. It is the most widely spoken of the Frisian ...
and so in general Dutch as well if there is no translation. is the most common example, where is West Frisian for (to sail) and a is a specific type of sailboat. , the official (and Frisian) name of the province Friesland
Friesland ( ; ; official ), historically and traditionally known as Frisia (), named after the Frisians, is a Provinces of the Netherlands, province of the Netherlands located in the country's northern part. It is situated west of Groningen (p ...
, is also well known, at least in the Netherlands.
Apostrophe
As in English, an apostrophe is used to mark omission of a part of word or several words:
Contrary to the city of Den Haag, 's-Hertogenbosch (also known colloquially as () has decided to retain the more formal orthography of its name for common communication like road signing.
Except in all caps
In typography, text or font in all caps (short for "all capitals") contains capital letters without any lowercase letters. For example: All-caps text can be seen in legal documents, advertisements, newspaper headlines, and the titles on book co ...
, the letter immediately following a word-initial apostrophe is not capitalised. If necessary, the second word is capitalised instead:
: (In the evening, she is never at home.).
See also
* Dutch braille
* History of Dutch orthography
The history of Dutch orthography covers the changes in spelling of Dutch language, Dutch both in the Netherlands itself and in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in Belgium. Up until the 18th century there was no standardization of grammar or s ...
* IJ (digraph)
IJ (lowercase ij; ; also encountered as Unicode compatibility characters IJ and ij) is a Digraph (orthography), digraph of the letters ''i'' and ''j''. Occurring in the Dutch language, it is sometimes considered a Ligature (writing), ligature, o ...
* Matthijs Siegenbeek
* Nederlandse Taalunie
* Grand Dictation of the Dutch Language
Notes and references
Bibliography
* Vincent van Heuven, ''Spelling en Lezen. Hoe Tragisch Zijn de Werkwoordsvormen?'', Assen: Van Gorcum, 1978.
* Rob Naborn, ''De Spelling-Siegenbeek (1804)'', Doctoraalscriptie, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 1985.
* Marijke van der Wal, ''Geschiedenis van het Nederlands'', Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1994.
* Nicoline van der Sijs, ''Taal als mensenwerk. Het ontstaan van het ABN'', Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers, 2004.
* Anneke Nunn,
Dutch Orthography: A Systematic Investigation of the Spelling of Dutch Words
', Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, Doctoral dissertation, 1998.
External links
De grondbeginselen der Nederlandsche spelling. Ontwerp der spelling voor het aanstaande Nederlandsch Woordenboek
(1863) by L.A. te Winkel
* De grondbeginselen der Nederlandsche spelling. Regeling der spelling voor het woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal (1873) by L.A. te Winkel and M. de Vries
Woordenlijst Nederlandse taal online
( Word list of the Dutch language, 2015) by the Dutch Language Union (Taalunie)
De witte spelling
(2006) by the Society "Onze Taal"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dutch Orthography
Dutch language
Indo-European Latin-script orthographies