There is one job er does that has nothing to do with location, quantity, or replacing a preposition: it props up a sentence that has no subject at all. Dutch is a V2 language — the finite verb must be the second element, and something has to sit in first position before it. When the verb describes an event with no doer worth naming ("there is dancing," "there was laughter"), Dutch wedges in a contentless er to fill that opening slot. This er refers to nothing. It is pure scaffolding. English has no real equivalent, which is exactly why this construction trips learners for years — so the goal of this page is to make you treat it as a fixed frame rather than something to translate word by word.
The impersonal passive: the core case
This is the construction to anchor everything to. Dutch can make a passive out of a verb that has no object — an intransitive verb like dansen (to dance), werken (to work), or lachen (to laugh). When you do, there is no noun to promote to subject, because there was never an object in the first place. The subject slot is left empty, and er steps in to fill it.
Er wordt gedanst.
There is dancing. / People are dancing. (lit. 'there is danced')
Er wordt hard gewerkt op kantoor.
People are working hard at the office. (lit. 'there is worked hard')
Er werd gelachen.
There was laughter. / People were laughing. (lit. 'there was laughed')
Notice what the er is doing — and not doing. It is not the thing that dances or works; nobody is named at all. The whole point of the impersonal passive is to report that an activity is happening while keeping the agent deliberately vague. A sign on a building site reads Er wordt gewerkt not because some specific "there" is working, but because the language needs a placeholder in front of the verb and er is the designated filler.
This is genuinely foreign to English. You cannot say "There is danced" or "There is worked." English forces you to invent a subject — "people," "everyone," "they" — or to switch to the active voice. Dutch (and German, with Es wird getanzt) lets the event stand on its own with a dummy holding the door. Do not try to map er onto an English word here; learn the frame Er wordt + past participle as a single unit meaning "[activity] is going on."
Why er and not something else
You might wonder why Dutch reaches for er specifically. The reason is that er is the language's lightest, most contentless pro-form — it is the unstressed counterpart of daar ("there"), the same way je is the unstressed counterpart of jij. When the grammar needs a body to fill the subject position but has no meaning to express, it grabs the emptiest available word. Er carries no person, no number, no gender, and crucially no stress. That weightlessness is the qualification for the job: a meaningful word in that slot would imply a real subject, which is precisely what the impersonal passive wants to avoid.
Because this er is meaningless, it never moves for emphasis and never gets stressed. You will not hear a contrastive Daar wordt gedanst meaning "the dancing is happening over there" unless daar genuinely is locative. The dummy stays put, light and unspoken-over.
Word order: where the dummy sits
In a plain main clause, the dummy er takes first position and the finite verb (wordt, werd, is) follows in second — standard V2.
Er wordt vanavond gedanst in het dorpshuis.
There's dancing tonight in the village hall.
But the moment you front something else — a time phrase, a place — the dummy slides to just after the finite verb. It does not vanish; it just gives up first position to the new opener.
Vanavond wordt er gedanst in het dorpshuis.
Tonight there's dancing in the village hall.
Op de bouwplaats wordt er hard gewerkt.
On the building site they're working hard.
This shuffling is the single biggest source of dropped er. English speakers, having fronted the time or place phrase, feel the sentence is "complete" and leave the er out — but Dutch still needs it. Vanavond wordt gedanst is wrong; it must be Vanavond wordt er gedanst. See word-order/v2-main-clause for the general mechanics of what fills first position.
Weather and other truly subjectless verbs
A handful of verbs describe events with no conceivable doer — knocking at the door, ringing, certain weather expressions. These also reach for a placeholder, though here Dutch most often uses het for weather (het regent, "it rains") and reserves er for the "something happened, agent unknown" flavour.
Er is gebeld.
Someone rang (the doorbell / phoned). (lit. 'there has been rung')
Er wordt geklopt — doe eens open.
Someone's knocking — go open up.
Er is gebeld is worth dwelling on. There clearly was a person who rang, but the speaker either doesn't know or doesn't care who — so Dutch uses the impersonal passive of bellen and props it with er. English has to supply "someone." This is the everyday register: you'd shout Er wordt geklopt! from the kitchen, not anything more formal. (Weather proper — het regent, het sneeuwt — takes het, not er; don't extend the dummy er to those.)
How to recognise it in a real sentence
When you meet an er in the wild, run this quick check:
- Is there any other word in the sentence that could be the grammatical subject (a noun, a pronoun like iemand)? If yes, the er is probably existential or one of the other functions, not this dummy.
- Is the verb a passive (wordt/werd/is + ge-...) built from an intransitive verb, with no object anywhere? If yes, you're looking at an impersonal passive and er is the contentless subject.
- Could the sentence survive being turned active with a vague agent like "people" or "someone"? Er wordt gedanst → "People are dancing." If that paraphrase works, it's the dummy.
Er wordt veel over geklaagd, maar er gebeurt niets.
There's a lot of complaining about it, but nothing happens.
That last example is a useful stress test: the first clause is a dummy-subject impersonal passive (er wordt geklaagd, with over stranded — "people complain about it"), while er gebeurt niets is existential (niets is the real, indefinite subject). Same little word, two different jobs in one breath. For the full picture of how several er-functions can coexist, see er/overview.
Common Mistakes
These are the errors English speakers make most, and almost all of them come from the absence of any English model for the construction.
❌ Wordt gedanst op het feest.
Wrong — the impersonal passive needs the dummy er; the subject slot can't be empty.
✅ Er wordt gedanst op het feest.
There's dancing at the party.
❌ Vanavond wordt gewerkt.
Wrong — fronting 'vanavond' doesn't remove the need for er; it just moves er after the verb.
✅ Vanavond wordt er gewerkt.
Tonight people are working.
❌ Er is iemand gebeld.
Wrong — if you name an agent ('iemand'), it's no longer impersonal; this reads oddly, as if someone was phoned.
✅ Er is gebeld.
Someone rang — agent left unspecified, which is the whole point.
❌ Het wordt gedanst.
Wrong — het is for weather and clausal subjects, not for impersonal passives of activity verbs.
✅ Er wordt gedanst.
There is dancing.
❌ There is danced — trying to translate er wordt gedanst literally into English.
Wrong — English has no impersonal passive; render it as 'there is dancing' or 'people are dancing'.
✅ Er wordt gedanst = 'People are dancing / there's dancing going on.'
Treat the Dutch as a fixed frame, not a word-for-word equivalent.
Key Takeaways
- The dummy er fills the empty subject slot in impersonal passives of intransitive verbs: Er wordt gedanst / gewerkt / gelachen. It refers to nothing.
- It exists only to satisfy V2 — Dutch needs something before the finite verb. When another phrase is fronted, the dummy slides to right after the verb (Vanavond wordt er gewerkt), but never disappears.
- This construction has no English equivalent — you cannot say "there is danced." Learn the frame Er wordt + participle as a unit meaning "[activity] is going on, agent unspecified."
- Er is gebeld / Er wordt geklopt are the everyday "someone rang / is knocking" forms. Weather proper uses het (het regent), not this er.
- Don't confuse it with the existential er, which introduces a real indefinite subject (Er staat een man voor de deur).
Now practice Dutch
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Start learning Dutch→Related Topics
- Er: The Five Uses OverviewA2 — A map of the notorious word er and its five distinct jobs — existential, locative, pronominal, quantitative and placeholder subject — that happen to share one spelling, with a route to the dedicated page for each.
- Existential and Presentative ErA2 — Presentative er introduces a brand-new, indefinite subject onto the scene — Er is koffie, Er staan veel mensen op straat — and is omitted the moment the subject becomes definite.
- The Impersonal Passive (Er wordt gedanst)B2 — Dutch can passivise intransitive activity verbs that have no object at all, using a dummy er to fill the empty subject slot: Er wordt gedanst ('there is dancing / people are dancing'). The construction names an activity without naming who does it, and it has no English equivalent — learn it as a fixed frame, er wordt + past participle.
- Verb-Second (V2) in Main ClausesA1 — The backbone of Dutch main clauses — the finite verb sits in the second position, where 'position' means the second constituent, not the second word.
- Choosing Er, Daar or HierB2 — A decision guide for the unstressed anaphoric er versus the stressed, deictic daar and hier — the same stressed/unstressed logic as je/jij and me/mij.