Dutch · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "de vakantie" in Dutch?

Q: How do you pronounce de vakantie in Dutch?

de vakantie is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /də vaːˈkɑntsi/. It means “vacation.” duh vah-KAHN-tsee — stress on the middle syllable, and the "-tie" ending is "tsee."

duh vah-KAHN-tsee — stress on the middle syllable, and the "-tie" ending is "tsee."

de vakantie /də vaːˈkɑntsi/

The beat sits on the middle syllable, with the "-tie" ending unstressed. That ending reliably marks a borrowed noun and always sits immediately after the accented syllable, which makes stress placement predictable once you spot it.

Listen: de vakantie

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Sound it out

va- A half-devoiced v plus a long open a, unstressed and quick on the way to the beat.

kan- A quiet k, a short open "ah," and n, carrying the primary stress. The vowel stays short because the cluster closes it.

-tie Said "tsee," with a genuine ts affricate. The same ending appears in politie, informatie and dozens of other borrowed nouns, always unstressed and always with this sound.

Hear it in a sentence

We gaan in augustus op vakantie.

We're going on vacation in August.

Listen: We gaan in augustus op vakantie.

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"We gaan in augustus op vakantie" uses the fixed expression "op vakantie gaan," with "op" rather than "in" or "naar." The month name carries stress on its second syllable, au-GUS-tus, so the sentence has two mid-word peaks.

Where English speakers slip

The "-tie" ending gets read as "-tee" or "-shee." It is "tsee." Learners also front-stress the word, and they reach for the wrong preposition — English "on holiday" happens to match "op vakantie," but "in vakantie" is what many learners produce by analogy with other time expressions.