Dutch · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "de vis" in Dutch?

duh FISS — a softly-voiced v, a short tight i, and a clean hiss.

de vis /də ˈvɪs/

Note that the plural of the animal is "vissen" while the mass noun for fish as food stays "vis" — so the accented syllable appears far more often in its bare form than the doubled plural suggests.

Listen: de vis

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

Sound it out

v Barely voiced at the start, so it lands close to f. The word's two ends therefore nearly match in quality.

i The same vowel as English "fish," high and relaxed. It is the ending, not the vowel, that differs between the two languages.

s A sharp voiceless ending — not the "sh" that English uses in the same position in "fish."

Hear it in a sentence

De vis zwemt in de zee.

The fish swims in the sea.

Listen: De vis zwemt in de zee.

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

"De vis zwemt in de zee" opens the verb with the zw- cluster, which is a barely-voiced z running straight into a labiodental w. That is genuinely one of the harder onsets in Dutch, and it sits right in the middle of this simple sentence.

Where English speakers slip

The English "fish" supplies the right vowel but the wrong ending — English has "sh" where Dutch has a plain s. Learners also give the v a full buzz. And beware the near-neighbour "vies" (dirty), which differs only in vowel length: short here, long there.