Cleft Sentences: Het is...die/dat

A cleft sentence takes a perfectly good single clause and breaks it into two, purely to put a spotlight on one piece of it. Jan heeft het gedaan (Jan did it) becomes Het is Jan die het gedaan heeft (It's Jan who did it) — same facts, but now Jan is unmistakably the answer to "who?". English does this constantly with it is...that/who, and Dutch has a close parallel — close enough to lull you into calquing it word for word, which is exactly where it goes wrong. The Dutch cleft forces you to choose between die and dat based on agreement, a choice English never makes, and its pseudo-cleft cousin uses wat where English uses what. This is a C1 topic because clefting is rarely necessary — there is almost always a simpler way to say the thing — but using it well is a mark of genuine fluency.

What a cleft does and why Dutch needs one

Dutch normally signals focus through intonation and word order: you can stress JAN heeft het gedaan, or front a constituent for emphasis (see Topicalisation and Focus). The cleft is a heavier, more explicit device. It is reached for when you want to do more than emphasise — when you want to isolate one element as the sole new information and present everything else as already established (presupposed) background.

The structure is fixed: het + a form of zijn + the focused element + die/dat + the rest of the clause (verb-final, because it is a relative clause). Note that the leftover clause is a relative clause, so its verbs cluster at the end: die het gedaan heeft, not die heeft het gedaan.

Die or dat? Agreement with the focus

Here is the choice English does not force on you. The relative pronoun that opens the second part must agree with the focused element, following the ordinary die-versus-dat rule:

• die for persons, for plural nouns, and for singular de-words;
• dat for singular het-words.

Notice the third example: when the focused element is plural, the linking verb agrees with it — het *zijn de buren, not *het is de buren. English keeps the dummy it is invariant; Dutch makes zijn agree with the plural focus. This is a second point of divergence layered on top of the die/dat choice.

Clefting things other than the subject

You can cleft almost any constituent, not just the subject. When the focused element is a time, place, or other circumstance, the linking word is usually dat (referring to the whole circumstance), and Dutch often prefers a different construction entirely — but the cleft is grammatical.

For a clefted object that is a person, you can also use a die-cleft: Het is Marie die ik bedoel (It's Marie that I mean). Be careful, though: heavy adverbial clefts like het was toen dat... sound translated and stilted in Dutch. A native speaker would far more often front the element directly — Gisteren zag ik hem voor het laatst — than reach for a circumstance cleft. Use circumstance clefts sparingly and mainly in formal writing.

Pseudo-clefts: wat...is...

The pseudo-cleft (or wh-cleft) puts the presupposed part into a free relative clause headed by wat and equates it with the focus via a form of zijn. English: What I need is rest. Dutch: Wat ik nodig heb, is rust.

Three things to watch. First, the wat-clause is a subordinate clause and therefore verb-final (wat ik nodig heb, with heb at the end). Second, when that whole clause sits in first position, the following main clause undergoes normal inversion — Wat me het meest stoort, *is zijn toon (verb before the focus). Third, Dutch uses *wat here, not dat — wat is the free relative ("the thing which"), and substituting dat is wrong (see Wat as a Relative Pronoun).

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• A cleft is het + zijn + focus + die/dat + verb-final clause; it isolates one element as the sole new information.
• The pronoun agrees with the focus: die for persons, plurals and de-words; dat for het-words.
• With a plural focus, the linking verb agrees too — het *zijn..., not *het is....
• The pseudo-cleft uses wat (not dat), is verb-final inside, and triggers inversion when fronted.
• Dutch clefts far less freely than English; for circumstances and whole ideas, fronting or a wat-cleft usually sounds more native.