Dutch has absorbed two big waves of foreign vocabulary — an older French and Latin layer, and a newer, still-arriving English one — and a fair amount of that vocabulary keeps sounds that the native inventory does not have. So a fluent speaker fluidly toggles between the Dutch sound system and these borrowed phonemes, often within a single sentence. For an advanced learner this is partly a pronunciation problem (can you produce a French nasal vowel, a /ʒ/?) and partly a sociolinguistic one: how "Dutch" you make an English word signals your register, age, and milieu. This page covers the borrowed sounds and the judgement calls around them. It does not cover native spelling-to-sound rules, which live elsewhere in this group; here every word is, by definition, an outsider.
French nasal vowels: restaurant, parfum, chagrin
French loanwords ending in -on, -ant, -ent, -in, -um (when from French) often keep a nasal vowel — a vowel pronounced with air escaping through the nose and no closing consonant. Educated Dutch speakers preserve these to varying degrees; the more nativised the speaker makes the word, the more the nasal collapses into a plain vowel plus a faint n.
We hebben gisteren in een goed restaurant gegeten.
'We ate at a good restaurant yesterday.' The -ant is a French nasal vowel: roughly 'res-toh-RAHNG' (the final n is barely a hum, not a hard t).
Ze draagt altijd hetzelfde parfum.
'She always wears the same perfume.' parfum keeps a French nasal -um.
Hij kon zijn chagrijn nauwelijks verbergen.
'He could barely hide his vexation.' chagrijn, from French chagrin, carries the nasal heritage (now spelled -ijn in Dutch).
You are not obliged to produce a textbook-perfect Parisian nasal — most Dutch speakers don't. But you should not read restaurant as if the final -ant were the English word "ant"; the t is silent or near-silent and the vowel is nasalised.
The soft g of French: garage, genre, jus
This is the one borrowed consonant most likely to trip an English speaker up in the opposite direction. French loans bring the voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ — the sound in English "measure" or "beige" — written g (before e/i), j, or ge. Crucially, this is not the famous Dutch g (the back-of-the-throat fricative of goed); it is a soft, front, French-style sound. Dutch keeps it, though northern speakers often devoice it toward /ʃ/ ("sh").
| Word | French sound | Gloss |
|---|---|---|
| garage | final -age = /ʒ/ ('zh'), not the hard Dutch g | garage |
| genre | g = /ʒ/: 'zhonruh' | genre |
| jus | j = /ʒ/: 'zhu' (gravy) | gravy / juice |
| etage | -age = /ʒ/ | floor / storey |
| journaal | j = /ʒ/: 'zhoor-naal' | (TV) news |
Zet de auto maar in de garage.
'Just put the car in the garage.' The -age is French /ʒ/ ('garaazh'), never the throaty Dutch g.
Dat is niet echt mijn genre.
'That's not really my genre.' g = /ʒ/, said 'zhonruh'.
Wil je nog wat jus bij de aardappelen?
'Would you like some gravy with the potatoes?' jus = 'zhu', a French j.
English loans: the near-English register layer
Dutch borrows English words constantly, and — unlike older French loans — it tends to leave their pronunciation close to English, including English vowels and the English voiced g and j that Dutch otherwise lacks. This creates a register split: the English-like pronunciation marks business, tech, youth, and media speech.
De deadline voor dat project is vrijdag.
'The deadline for that project is Friday.' deadline keeps its English vowels and voiced d.
Heb je de manager al gesproken?
'Have you spoken to the manager yet?' manager keeps an English /dʒ/ in -ager.
We hebben morgen een meeting over de planning.
'We have a meeting about the planning tomorrow.' meeting and planning are near-English.
The catch is that Dutch partially adapts these too, and over-nativising or under-nativising both sound off. Computer is a good example: it is said roughly 'kom-PJOE-ter' — English-ish, but with a Dutch uu-coloured vowel and Dutch stress, not a fully English "com-PYOO-ter." Baby is 'BEE-bie', and its plural is the spelling-driven baby's with an apostrophe. The skill is calibrating: take the English word, but file off the most un-Dutch edges.
Mijn computer is alweer vastgelopen.
'My computer has frozen again.' 'kom-PJOE-ter' — English-derived but Dutch-coloured.
Ze hebben twee baby's gekregen.
'They had two babies.' baby = 'BEE-bie'; plural baby's with an apostrophe.
The letters c, q, x, y in loans
Dutch has no native use for c, q, x, y as independent sounds; they live almost entirely in loanwords, and their value is borrowed too.
- c is /k/ before a, o, u and consonants (café, contact, club), but /s/ before e, i, y (cent, citroen, cyclus). Same rule as English and French.
- q appears only as qu = /kw/ in loans (quiz, antiquair) and is otherwise replaced by k in nativised spellings.
- x = /ks/ (taxi, examen — though examen is spelled with x and said 'ek-SA-men').
- y is /i/ or /j/ in loans (baby, yoghurt, systeem); its letter-name is i-grec / Griekse y (see the alphabet page).
Zullen we even een kopje koffie halen in dat café?
'Shall we grab a coffee in that café?' café: c = /k/ before a; note the acute accent.
Dat kost vijftig cent.
'That costs fifty cents.' cent: c = /s/ before e.
Ik heb een quiz voor vanavond bedacht.
'I've come up with a quiz for tonight.' qu = /kw/.
Common Mistakes
❌ garage with the hard throaty Dutch g of 'goed'
Incorrect — over-nativising a French loan; -age is the soft front /ʒ/.
✅ garage with -age = /ʒ/ ('garaazh')
'garage' — French soft g, optionally devoiced toward 'sh' in the north.
❌ restaurant read as 'res-tau-RANT' with a clear final t
Incorrect — the -ant is a French nasal; the t is silent/near-silent.
✅ restaurant with a nasal -ant ('res-toh-RAHNG')
'restaurant' — keep the French nasal vowel, drop the hard t.
❌ Fully Dutchifying 'manager' to 'ma-NA-gher' with a Dutch g
Incorrect — under-adapting; English loans keep an English-style /dʒ/ here.
✅ manager with an English -ager ('MEH-ne-dzjer', voiced /dʒ/)
'manager' — near-English pronunciation marks the business register.
❌ cent pronounced 'kent' with a /k/
Incorrect — c before e is /s/, not /k/.
✅ cent = 'sent'
'cent' — c is /s/ before e and i.
❌ Writing the plural of baby as 'babys' or 'babies'
Incorrect — Dutch uses an apostrophe before the plural s after a long final vowel.
✅ baby's
'babies' — the apostrophe keeps the y-vowel long, as in foto's, taxi's.
Key Takeaways
- French loans keep nasal vowels (restaurant, parfum) and the soft front fricative /ʒ/ in garage, genre, jus, journaal — never the throaty native Dutch g.
- The native-g rule and the loanword-g rule are opposites: goed (back /x/) vs genre (front /ʒ/) share a letter, not a sound.
- English loans stay close to English (deadline, meeting, manager, computer, baby), but file off the most un-Dutch edges; the degree of nativising is a register signal.
- c = /k/ before a/o/u, /s/ before e/i/y; qu = /kw/; x = /ks/; y = /i/ or /j/ — all borrowed values.
- Loanwords carry the accents Dutch otherwise avoids: café, scène, privé, cliché, and coördinator with a trema — see Accent Marks.
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Start learning Dutch→Related Topics
- Dutch Pronunciation: OverviewA1 — A high-level map of the Dutch sound system for English speakers — the hard/soft g, front rounded vowels, diphthongs, schwa, final devoicing — and how phonemic spelling ties it all together.
- The Dutch G and CHA1 — The voiceless and voiced velar/uvular fricatives written g and ch — the most iconic Dutch sound — including the sch cluster, the -isch exception, and the hard-g/soft-g regional split.
- Word StressB1 — Where the stressed syllable falls in Dutch words — first-syllable default, unstressed prefixes, compound and separable-verb stress, and the meaning-changing pair vóórkomen / voorkómen.
- Acute, Grave and Circumflex AccentsB1 — Dutch is normally accent-free, but the acute accent does real work: it distinguishes één 'one' from een 'a/an', marks contrastive emphasis in writing (Dít wil ik, héél mooi), and is inherited in loanwords (café, scène, enquête, ça va). The acute on één is the single most important grammatical accent in Dutch.
- Spelling of Loanwords and AnglicismsC1 — How Dutch spells and inflects borrowed words: English nouns take Dutch plurals (managers, baby's), English verbs conjugate by Dutch rules (updaten → ik update, geüpdatet), and -tie answers English -tion.