Dutch · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "de opa" in Dutch?

Q: How do you pronounce de opa in Dutch?

de opa is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /də ˈoːpaː/. It means “grandfather.” duh OH-pah — long flat "oh" under the stress, and a full open "aah" at the end.

duh OH-pah — long flat "oh" under the stress, and a full open "aah" at the end.

de opa /də ˈoːpaː/

Front-stressed, but with the striking feature that the unstressed syllable holds a full vowel instead of reducing. Words in this family — opa, oma, papa, mama — all behave this way, keeping both vowels clear because they come from baby talk rather than from the ordinary vocabulary.

Listen: de opa

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

o Long and pure, stretched because the syllable ends right after it. Keep the tongue still rather than gliding toward "oo."

p Unaspirated between the vowels, released quietly with no puff of air.

a A full open "aah" rather than a schwa — this final syllable keeps its real vowel, which is unusual for an unstressed Dutch syllable and marks the word as a nursery form.

Hear it in a sentence

Mijn opa is tachtig jaar.

My grandfather is eighty.

Listen: Mijn opa is tachtig jaar.

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

"Mijn opa is tachtig jaar" again leaves "jaar" singular after the number. "Tachtig" contains both the cht cluster and the -ig suffix, so it is one of the more demanding words in the sentence despite being just a number.

Where English speakers slip

Learners reduce the final vowel to a schwa, producing "OH-puh," by analogy with the hundreds of Dutch words that end that way. This one does not — say a full "ah." Aspirating the p and gliding the o are the two smaller errors, both imported straight from English habits.