Dutch · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "de persoon" in Dutch?

Q: How do you pronounce de persoon in Dutch?

de persoon is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /də pərˈsoːn/. It means “person.” duh pur-SOHN — unstressed first syllable, then the beat on a long, flat "oh."

duh pur-SOHN — unstressed first syllable, then the beat on a long, flat "oh."

de persoon /də pərˈsoːn/

Weight on the second syllable, as in the whole Latin-derived family — persoon, seizoen, station, natie. When a Dutch word comes from Romance sources, front-stressing is exactly the wrong guess.

Listen: de persoon

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Sound it out

per- An unstressed opening: unaspirated p, schwa, and a very light r. The whole syllable passes in an instant.

s A clean hissing s opening the stressed syllable, never picking up a z-like buzz.

oo Long pure "oh," doubled in spelling to mark length. Hold one tongue position rather than gliding toward "oo" as English does.

n Fully articulated at the end of the word, with the tongue tip held on the ridge a moment before release.

Hear it in a sentence

Zij is een aardige persoon.

She's a nice person.

Listen: Zij is een aardige persoon.

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"Zij is een aardige persoon" uses the emphatic pronoun and the inflected adjective, whose -ig suffix reduces to "-uh-kh" before the -e ending. So the sentence stacks three unstressed syllables before finally landing on SOON.

Where English speakers slip

Front-stressing to "PER-soon" imports the English pattern and is wrong. The vowel is the second issue: English "person" has an r-coloured vowel throughout, while Dutch has a schwa in the weak syllable and a clean long "oh" in the strong one. The two words sound far less alike than they look.