Language Overview: Dutch

Links:

Translations:
0:19: Every Dutch speaker outside of Amsterdam because I’m now talking about their dialects
1:34: (Afrikaans) We don’t speak Dutch here!
2:02: (Left) Vowels; (Right) Consonants
2:06: Types of headache; Migraine; Hypertension; Stress; Trying to linguistically analyze Dutch phonemes
3:02: Me wanting to say that [z] is an allophone of /s/; Words beginning with [s]
3:10: How I feel needing to include /z/ in the Dutch phoneme count
6:38: (Spongebob) Me; (Poster) Languages that show vowel length
7:47: (French) Plagiarist!
9:14: Dutch sentence structure now shifts into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE
9:16: *Dutch verbs* I am speed.
11:43: *Cases* I don’t want to play with you anymore.
14:08: (Left) Singular common definite article “de”; (Right) Plural definite article “de”
17:02: (Dog) Dutch adjective suffixes; (Halloween-looking thing) When to add the suffix
20:43: When he’s talking about the -en suffix again
21:14: Say the line Bart!; The language is Germanic, so it has a lot of irregular verbs in the past tense.
21:36: Me when I discovered the regular patterns within the irregular verbs; “It’s beautiful.” “I’ve looked at this for five hours now.”
25:43: Me; That video:: Me; This video

[buurmeisje]

I'm pretty sure you're the only native English speaking person I've ever heard pronouncing 'ui' correctly

[goost]

One of my favourite lesser-known features of Dutch is the use of Modal Particles.
These are words like 'even', 'misschien', 'gewoon' and 'toch', which communicate a mutual emotion or understanding about what is being said.
It's a feature that can make translating sentences from Dutch rather tricky, because communicating this mutual understanding can lead to rather verbose sentences.

For example, when you say "Mag ik jouw pen even lenen?", the 'even' in the sentence implies that you only want to borrow the pen for a short period, and not for the full day.
Similarly, you can say "Ga gewoon naar bed" to someone who's complaining about being tired, where the 'gewoon' part implies that going to bed is the most logical option here.

These can also be combined, to create a whopper of a sentence like: "Luister nou toch eens gewoon". I think the best way to translate this would be something similar to "For the love of God, will you please listen for a moment?"
To break this down:
- Luister: means listen
- nou: indicates frustration
- toch: makes the frustration from 'nou' even bigger
- gewoon: it's in everyone's best interest that the person this is being said to listens to the speakers
- eens: indicates that the person needs to listen now, in this very moment
- even: indicates that the person only needs to listen for a little bit, not the entire day.

It's a feature that all Dutchies do natively, but never realise that it's it's own thing!

[TheFamousYakTamer]

As a native Dutch person learning about the complexities in most of these rules for the first time, I'm pretty sure I actually don't know how to speak Dutch. I've just been lucky with repeating what sounds instinctually good to me 🙃

[benvanzon]

Eindelijk, ik kan iets leren over mijn moedertaal

[orktv]

7:52 Imagine someone saying "ik wil géén appels" ("I /don't/ want apples"). The accents make it clear the person really doesn't want apples, probably after having been insistently offered them.

[SternensLapis]

Dutch speaker here, mad respect for the honestly near perfect attempts at speaking and writing Dutch in parts of the video where you didn’t even really need to. With some of the large paragraphs I noticed a few small grammatical errors, and sometimes some of the words or phrasings used wete awkward or archaic, but overall this is by far the most successful Dutch writing and speaking I’ve ever heard like this from a non-native speaker. Very impressive! It’s so very clear how much effort and genuine care you put into making this video. As a linguistics enthusiast myself, this was an absolute joy to watch. Videos as in depth as these make me realise how blinded I have become by this sense of normality, in regards to how utterly ridiculous our silly little language can be at times.

[carstengrooten]

I noticed 2 inacuracies in the video:

- at 23:47 the perfect tense of eten is gegeten. With a g in the middle and no trema. I think it is the only verb that does this as I cant come up with another example.

- at 27:49 the sentence doesnt really make a whole lot of sense in Dutch. Grammatically it is correct but the choice of words made me guess as to what the meaning was until I saw the English translation. For 'notice' a better translation is 'opmerken/opgemerkt'. I don't even know what bemerken really means😅. I think it is an old fashioned word that is not common anymore. But an even better word here would simply have been 'zien/gezien'. Just like English 'seen' would have fit. Opgemerkt would be a closer translation of noticed, but I guess 4/5 people would use gezien if they were to construct the Dutch sentence on their own without translating. And 'dekking' does mean cover, but only really in a battlefield context. As in to give cover (dekking geven/dekken), or take cover (dekking zoeken). In the sense of one object physically covering another one, there is the word 'bedekken' as a verb, but the noun 'bedekking' is way less widely applicable than 'cover'. In most cases, a Dutch person would name the specific object that is covering by its own name rather than refer to it by the general noun 'cover'. In this case, if the cover were a blanket, we would use 'deken' (which, now that I think of it, is itself derived from the verb 'dekken' which is kinda ironic. As is 'deksel' which means lid 🤔. But if it were a box we would say 'doos'). The verb 'verwijderen' would then also be changed accordingly to fit the blanket. For a blanket this would probably be to pull off or pull away, or 'eraf trekken' in Dutch (not to be confused with aftrekken which means to jerk off) and for deksel it would be 'eraf draaien', meaning to 'twist off'. And finally the word 'sinds' sounds a bit off, but idk why. Maybe it is more common in a historical context. Here I would have used 'nadat', which means after. But 'sinds' is stricly speaking correct. So a more natural sentence would be: "onze konijnen hebben het geld niet gezien nadat ze het deken eraf hebben getrokken" or "our rabbits haven't seen the money after they pulled off the blanket". I guess that in English it is way more common/natural to constrct a sentence using these general verbs and nouns like remove and cover. In Dutch, one would be more specific. It is kinda funny to me that I did understand the English sentence whilst not getting what the Dutch one was supposed to mean.

Otherwise it is a great video and really impressive to have been made by a non native speaker.

[leoaraujo]

12:10 is not weird to think that "Meisje" is neuter, because as "-je" is actually a suffix for the diminutive, Just like "Chen" is the diminutive for german, the grammatical gender rule in both languages is: diminutives must ALWAYS be neuter.

Meisje comes from Meid (Maid in english) and "je" is the diminutive. And the "s" I believe was added because in dutch, when you get an aspirated "t" or "d" followed by an "j" it does the same weird thing as english with aspirated "t" and "d" followed by a "y", like in "Got you" becoming "Gotcha". So yeah, "meisje" is just a "Little maid".

[LotsOfS]

As a native the most surprising factoid was the stress/klemtoon part. The rules for that never made sense to me, probably because it has never been properly taught to me as the instruction the teachers gave us amounted to "just figure it out lolol". You spent a whole grand total of 2 seconds on that, but I have learnt more from those 2 seconds than 18 years of formal education (at least on the subject of klemtonen).

My contribution to the 'add something interesting' prompt at the end:
The verbstem + ze conjugation. Eg. "werkze". "eetze". "loopze", and it means something like "good luck/have fun with working/eating/walking" ('Eetze' could be loosely translated as 'bon appetit'). Apparently this 'success imperative' is something exclusive to Dutch and it is mega weird.

[goppedelospantalones]

@10:49
I don't even think many native language speakers know this, but Dutch actually also makes use of postpositions. It's just that we are never taught this and we just instinctively do it correctly because we are of course native speakers.
Dutch mostly uses preposistions, that is true, but some prepositions denoting a place can be used as postpositions when denoting a direction.
E.g: Ik loop in de school. Which means ‘I'm walking in the school.’
Ik loop de school in. And this means ‘I'm walking into the school.’

Lastly I'd like to add that there is at least one postpostition (at least one that I could think of) that can't function as a preposition, that one being ‘tegemoet’.
E.g: Wij lopen elkaar tegemoet. Meaning ‘We're walking towards each other.’
It can also only be used in such a reciprocal setting. A most direct translation of ‘tegemoet’ would probably be ‘towards each other’.

@22:42
Intransitive verbs don't take ‘zijn‘ as the auxiliary verb in the perfect constructions. They simply take ‘hebben’.
E.g: Ik heb geslapen. Meaning ‘I (have) slept.’
Gisteren heb ik op de tafel gestaan. Meaning ‘Yesterday I (have) stood on the table.’ Although I believe using perfect constructions in these sentences in English is incorrect.
Reflexive verbs do indeed use ‘zijn’, as do verbs of motion.
E.g: Ik ben naar de winkel gelopen. ‘I (have) walked to the store.’
Mijn broer is deze week naar oma gefietst. ‘My brother rode (has ridden) his bike to grandmother this week.‘

[hydrocharis]

From a Belgian: also in the present tense, gij really regularly adds -t to the root while jij has more exceptions. Notably jij bent vs. gij zijt but also it's always gij kunt, gij zult, gij wilt while for jij you also get these alternative, more common forms jij zal, jij kan and jij wil. Gij in oblique cases is u and in the definitive case is uw, leading Dutch people to think we are being polite when really we are using the most informal and amicable way of addressing someone (jij sounds more distant, posh and sometimes even condescending here). Because of this connotation, usage of gij is one of the most stubborn features that got retained from dialects as a result from the long and to an extent ongoing effort to impose the standard language (which is in practice equal to the language from Holland). Speaking about dialect, the reason why we still have more 'feeling' for masculine/feminine distinction is because in the influential Brabantian dialects male words take indefinite article 'ne and female words indefinite article een (not to confuse with German!). Neuter definitive adjectives without -e ending are a lot more common here, but when to use it is a bit vague (and partly depends on prosody?). Dutch is often a bit vague sorry. The word order as well where the v2 word order in main clauses/all verbs at the end in subordinate clauses is the most rigid rule, the 'German' order of putting the infiitives first in a subordinate clause is fine just somewhat less common and more formal sounding.

[yohangamer]

I have just discover this channel as a half dutchie which is i myself that did not consider it to be my fluent/native language. you just did a whole year of my dutch learning summary before i get to (not) use it irl because of covid.
This is the best quality refresher i have ever seen.

[eli-ahu]

OMG! You cant believe how happy l am to see this video! This is so incredible

[pkomelette]

Verbs with a separable particle (like toegeven) are always stressed on the particle. So it's TOE-ge-ven, not toe-GE-ven. Unseparable particles are never stressed (VOOR-komen → separable (ik kom voor); voor-KO-men (ik voorkóm) → not separable).

[CouldBeMathijs]

I find Flemish to be undervalued in the video, but I guess it makes sense because there isn't that much standardization nor a lot of written text just available online. (if you were to look in my DM's with fellow Flemish people, you'd see a lot of the spoken form transcribed, we do that a lot when chatting informally)
Da gezegd zijnde vonneket toch nen toffe video. Merci om em te maken e

[xiyition]

R does liaison as well, its usually pronounces as a trill/tap instead of approximant in situations like "onder het" -> the h is dropped and r becomes a trill as if its in the onset

[Dgnarus]

23:43 The passive participle of eten is gegeten ;)
Thanks for making this video about our silly language

Edit: Also at 28:11 that just looks like a fine sentence to me.

[Kikkerv]

Luidste sounds like [lœytstə] with a T. In Dutch consonant clusters, everything turns voiceless except if there's a voiced stop at the end, then everything gets voiced.

[elfytheanimator]

I love the format of your language overviews, getting to see one on Japanese or Finnish would be awesome❣️

[burnblast]

So what I'm hearing is that dutch is one word-final-shwa-loss away from losing half of its grammar