I’ve always planned to do a post on Dutch syllables, but I’ve never quite remembered to do it. Well, today is a different story. I’ve put together some notes on Dutch syllables. Hopefully someone will find this useful.

Rule #1: When two vowels are separated by one consonant, that consonant forms the beginning of the second syllable. For example, the Dutch word maken (to make) can be broken up into ma-ken.

Rule #2 : If a vowel is separated by more than one consonant, the first syllable gets one consonant, and the second syllable gets the rest of the consonants. So with a word like paarden (horses), it can be separated into syllables as paar-den.

Rule #3 : Prefixes are always separate from the other syllables of a word. For example, besturen (to steer, to reign) is divided like this: be-stu-ren. Gebruiken (to use) is ge-brui-ken, and ontaarden (to degenerate) is ont-aar-den.

Rule #4 : The suffix ische and sche is counted as one consonant. Therefore any letters before this suffix will be a different syllable from ische/sche. An example of this is with the Dutch word for Belgian, which can be divided into Bel-gi-sche.

Rule #5 : The dieresis, which is a punctuation called an umlaut in German, and looks like this ä. In this case the two dots above the a is the dieresis. The dieresis can help you divide Dutch words into syllables. Take a look at the Dutch word for selfish: e-go-ïs-tisch.