Most Dutch punctuation looks reassuringly familiar to an English reader — full stops, question marks, and exclamation marks all behave as you'd expect. But a handful of differences matter, and one of them — the decimal comma — can flip the meaning of a number and cause real-world errors. This page covers the differences that actually trip up English speakers: numbers, commas in clauses, the absence of the Oxford comma, and Dutch quotation styles. Capitalisation is handled on its own page.
Numbers: the reversal that matters
This is the part to get right before anything else, because the stakes are concrete — money, measurements, data.
The decimal separator is a comma. What English writes as a point, Dutch writes as a comma.
Een kilo appels kost € 3,50.
A kilo of apples costs €3.50. (comma = decimal point)
Het is precies 3,14 graden buiten.
It's exactly 3.14 degrees outside. (pi, and a temperature — both use the decimal comma)
The thousands separator is a period — or a thin space. Large numbers group their thousands with a dot (or, increasingly in clean typography, a space). So the dot you'd read as a decimal point in English is a thousands mark in Dutch.
De stad heeft 1.000.000 inwoners.
The city has 1,000,000 inhabitants. (period = thousands separator)
De auto kostte € 25.000.
The car cost €25,000. (NOT 25 euros — the dot is thousands here)
Read those last two carefully and the danger is obvious. To an English eye, € 25.000 looks like twenty-five euros; in Dutch it's twenty-five thousand. And € 3,50 looks, to the same English eye, like three hundred and fifty of something. Whenever you read a Dutch price or statistic, mentally swap the roles of the comma and the dot.
The currency symbol normally precedes the amount with a space: € 3,50. When a price is a whole number of euros, Dutch often writes the cents as a dash: € 12,– ("twelve euros even").
Dat shirt kost € 12,– en de broek € 39,95.
That shirt costs €12 even and the trousers €39.95.
Commas in clauses: lighter than German, looser than you'd fear
If you've studied German, unlearn its rigid comma rules; Dutch is much more relaxed. Dutch does not automatically put a comma before every subordinate clause.
Relative and subordinate clauses that interrupt or extend the main clause usually take a comma — but it's driven by readability and the natural pause, not by a German-style mechanical rule.
De man die naast me woont, is timmerman.
The man who lives next to me is a carpenter. (comma closes the inserted relative clause)
Ik bel je morgen terug, omdat ik nu in een vergadering zit.
I'll call you back tomorrow, because I'm in a meeting right now.
A comma typically marks the boundary between two clauses and sets off an interrupting clause on both sides. But short, tightly bound clauses often run on without one, and Dutch tolerates that.
Ik weet niet of hij komt.
I don't know whether he's coming. (short embedded clause — no comma)
Introductory elements and direct address take a comma, much as in English:
Eerlijk gezegd, ik had iets anders verwacht.
Honestly, I'd expected something different.
Anna, kun je de deur even dichtdoen?
Anna, could you close the door for a second?
No Oxford comma
English (especially American English) often puts a comma before the final and in a list. Dutch does not — there is no comma before the closing en.
Ik heb brood, kaas en appels gekocht.
I bought bread, cheese, and apples. (Dutch: no comma before 'en')
Op de tafel lagen een boek, een pen en een bril.
On the table lay a book, a pen, and a pair of glasses.
The same goes for of ("or") closing a list: no comma before it. Insert one only in the rare case where it genuinely prevents ambiguity — but as a default, leave it out.
Quotation marks
Dutch quotation style is a matter of house style, and you'll see three patterns in the wild. None is "wrong"; pick one and be consistent.
1. Low-high curly quotes — the traditional Dutch style, opening at the baseline and closing up high: „...". This is the classic book-typography form.
2. Single curly quotes ('...') — very common in newspapers and modern prose.
3. English-style double quotes ("...") — increasingly common, especially online and in business writing.
„Ik kom zo,” zei ze, „wacht maar even.”
“I'll be right there,” she said, “just wait a moment.” (traditional low-high Dutch quotes)
‘Heb je het gehoord?’ vroeg hij.
‘Did you hear it?’ he asked. (single-quote newspaper style)
Note the comma and quote interaction: in Dutch, the comma in a quote-plus-attribution sits inside the closing quote in the traditional style, and the attribution (zei ze, vroeg hij) inverts the verb and subject — zei ze, not ze zei.
A note on the colon
The colon (dubbele punt) works much as in English — introducing a list, an explanation, or quoted speech. One small habit: after a colon, Dutch does not capitalise the following word unless it begins a full quoted sentence or is itself a proper noun.
Ik heb maar één wens: rust.
I have only one wish: peace and quiet. (lowercase after the colon)
Hij zei het kort en duidelijk: „We stoppen ermee.”
He said it briefly and clearly: “We're stopping.” (capital, because a full sentence is quoted)
Dates
Dutch dates run day–month–year, with the month spelled out in lowercase and no comma before the year — and ordinal dots are not used the way German uses them.
Hij is geboren op 12 mei 2026.
He was born on 12 May 2026. (day, lowercase month, year — no commas)
De vergadering is verplaatst naar 3 juni 2026.
The meeting has been moved to 3 June 2026.
Common Mistakes
The first two are the dangerous ones — they change numbers — and they're a direct import of English number formatting.
❌ De koffie kost € 3.50.
Incorrect — a period as the decimal point. In Dutch this reads like 350.
✅ De koffie kost € 3,50.
The coffee costs €3.50. (comma as decimal point)
❌ De stad heeft 1,000,000 inwoners.
Incorrect — commas as thousands separators (English habit).
✅ De stad heeft 1.000.000 inwoners.
The city has 1,000,000 inhabitants. (periods for thousands)
❌ Ik kocht brood, kaas, en appels.
Incorrect — Oxford comma before 'en'; Dutch drops it.
✅ Ik kocht brood, kaas en appels.
I bought bread, cheese and apples.
❌ Hij is geboren op 12, mei, 2026.
Incorrect — no commas inside a Dutch date.
✅ Hij is geboren op 12 mei 2026.
He was born on 12 May 2026.
Key Takeaways
- Numbers reverse: comma = decimal point (€ 3,50), period/space = thousands (1.000.000). This is the difference most likely to cause a real error.
- No Oxford comma — never a comma before the closing en or of in a list.
- Clause commas are lighter than German's — driven by readability and natural pauses, not a mechanical rule; short embedded clauses often go without.
- Quotation marks come in three styles (low-high „…", single '…', English "…"); choose one and be consistent.
- Dates: day, lowercase month, year, no commas — 12 mei 2026.
Now practice Dutch
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Start learning Dutch→Related Topics
- Capitalization and the Capital IJA2 — Dutch capitalises far less than English — days, months and the pronoun ik all stay lowercase — but adjectives from country and place names keep their capital (Franse kaas), and when a word beginning with ij is capitalised, both letters go up: IJsland, never Ijsland.
- Writing Numbers, Dates and AmountsA2 — How Dutch writes numbers as words — one solid word up to a thousand, with the units BEFORE the tens (vijfentwintig = five-and-twenty) and a trema in tweeëntwintig — plus the day-month-year date order, the period in 14.30 uur, and the decimal comma in € 1.250,00.
- Cardinal Numbers 0–100 and BeyondA1 — The full Dutch cardinal number system — 0–20, the units-before-tens reversal for 21–99 written as one solid word, and honderd, duizend, miljoen, miljard for big numbers.
- 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.