Dutch orthography uses the Latin alphabet and has evolved to suit the needs of the Dutch language. 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: Weak verbs form their past tense and past participle by addition of a dental, ⟨d⟩ or ⟨t⟩ depending on the voicing of the preceding consonant(s) (see Assimilation (linguistics)). The modern Dutch alphabet consists of the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet and is used for the Dutch language. This page was last edited on 3 November 2020, at 09:44. However, these words tend to not follow the other spelling rules as well: buzzen ("to page (call on a pager)") → buzz ("(I) page"), buzzde ("(I) paged"). Accents are not necessarily placed on capital letters (for example, the word Eén at the beginning of a sentence) unless the whole word is written in capitals. Each letter is discussed in detail. This is most common in the past tense forms of weak verbs: Compare this to verbs in which the final consonant is underlyingly voiceless. Learn Dutch grammar: Spelling and pronunciation, verbs, pronouns, nouns and articles, word order, and more. The spelling rules nonetheless follow the simplest representation, writing double letters only when necessary. google_ad_client = "pub-0441962132703029"; google_ad_width = 160;google_ad_height = 600;google_ad_format = "160x600_as";google_ad_type = "text"; The pronunciation remains voiced even if the spelling shows a voiceless consonant. However, it is technically incorrect to do so.[43]. 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). Occasionally, other diacritics are used in loanwords. The spelling system used by early Middle Dutch scribes accounted for that by indicating the vowel length only when it was necessary (sometimes by writing a double vowel but also in other ways). Dutch uses the following letters and letter combinations. That commonly occurs between the singular and plural of a noun or between the infinitive and the conjugated forms of verbs. Alphabet Practice Game: How to Say The Dutch Alphabet by The Dutch Lady: Pronunciation 1 - The Alphabet. Later in Middle Dutch, the distinction between short and long consonants started to disappear. Vowel length is always indicated but in different ways by using an intricate system of single and double letters. [47] The circumflex accent is also used in West Frisian Dutch and so in general Dutch as well if there is no translation. That eventually led to the modern Dutch spelling system. If the verb stem in the infinitive ends with one of the consonants of "'t kofschip" (-t, -k, -f, -s, -ch or -p), the past tense dental is a -t-; otherwise, it is a -d-. Since the introduction of typewriters and, later, computers, the use of a single quote ( ' ) has become common. Note that for simplicity, dialectal variation and subphonemic distinctions are not always indicated. On the next page, you can listen to each letter separately (if you have a slow internet connection, this page may take some time load). Regeling der spelling voor het woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal, De woordenlijst der Nederlandse taal online, Phonetic/spelling alphabets for various languages, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dutch_orthography&oldid=986841904, Articles with Dutch-language sources (nl), Articles needing additional references from November 2020, All articles needing additional references, Articles needing additional references from March 2020, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from June 2020, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. That means that a word-final single ⟨e⟩ will always represent a schwa. A double vowel is rarely followed by a double consonant, as it could be simplified by writing them both single. Their spelling does not alternate between single and double letters. 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. The alphabet and its pronunciation by Leviwosc, www.youtube.co.. We will start from scratch: The Dutch alphabet contains the same 26 letters as the English alphabet. Compounds should be read as if each word were spelled separately, and they may therefore appear to violate the normal rules. You are here: This video lesson is about the Dutch alphabet and it’s pronunciation. The Genootschap Onze Taal states that accents can be put on capital letters whenever the need arises, but makes an exception for Eén. Besides being used to mark stress, acute accents are also used in many loanwords (mainly from French) such as logé (overnight guest), coupé (train compartment), oké (okay) and café. Thus, long vowels could appear in closed syllables, and short vowels could occur in open syllables. 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. ⟨(i)ll⟩ is found in words from French or occasionally Spanish. Therefore, any short vowel that was followed by a long consonant remained short. Dutch uses the acute accent to mark stress and the diaeresis (trema) to disambiguate diphthongs/triphthongs. The length of a vowel generally does not change in the pronunciation of different forms of a word. That may sometimes cause confusion if the word is not known to be a compound. In Latin words, it is treated identical to ⟨ee⟩. As the length was implicit in open syllables, it was not indicated there, and only a single vowel was written. Consonants could still be long in pronunciation and acted to close the preceding syllable. 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 often keep their original spellings: cadeau /kaːˈdoː/ 'gift' (from French). Old Dutch possessed phonemic consonant length in addition to phonemic vowel length, with no correspondence between them. A single ⟨e⟩ indicates short and long e but is also used to indicate the neutral schwa sound /ə/ in unstressed syllables. The past tense of verbs may have a double vowel, followed by a double consonant, to distinguish those forms from the present tense. Officially, appel is always written without an accent, but sometimes an accent is used to distinguish between appel ("apple") and appèl ("appeal", "roll call", and others).[46]. Learn Dutch Alphabet ABC - Pronunciation - Het Alfabet ABC … This is what the Dutch alphabet looks like in phonetics (IPA): [a] [be] [se] [de] [e] [ɛf] [ɣe] [ha] [i] [je] [ka] [ɛɫ] [ɛm] [ɛn] [o] [pe] [ky] [ɛɾ] [ɛs] [te] [y] [ve] [ʋe] [ɪks] [ɛi] [zɛt] . For historic reasons, they are never preceded by a short/lax vowel and so never occur doubled. 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: "geïnd" (collected), "geüpload" (uploaded), "egoïstisch" (egoistic), "sympathieën" (sympathies, preferences), coördinaat (coordinate), "reëel" (realistic), "zeeën" (seas). https://www.colanguage.com/dutch-alphabet-and-pronunciation [45], Stress on a short vowel, written with only one letter, is occasionally marked with a grave accent: Kàn jij dat? //2007-06-01: rightbar600 The letter E is the most frequently used letter in the Dutch alphabet. 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