How do you pronounce hallo in Dutch?

Hallo is pronounced HAH-loh, with the stress on the first syllable, written in IPA as /ˈɦɑ.loː/. The h is voiced rather than a plain puff of air, the a is short and open like the o in the British pronunciation of hot, and the final o is a long, steady vowel held without a glide, unlike the ow sound that ends the English word hello.

Dutch pronunciation guide

How do you pronounce hallo

/ˈɦɑ.loː/

Hello, hi

Hallo is pronounced HAH-loh, two beats with the weight up front on the first syllable. The h is voiced, not the plain puff of air English uses, the a is short and flat rather than rounded, and the final o is a long vowel held steady all the way through, without the little glide English tacks onto the end of "oh." Say it briskly: HA-lo, not the drawn-out ha-LOH an English speaker's ear reaches for by habit.

Sound by sound

Dutch hallo is only four sounds, but two of them don't map cleanly onto English, so it's worth slowing down for each one.

/ɦ/

a voiced h, breathy but with your voice humming underneath it, not the silent puff of English "hello"

/ɑ/

short and open, close to the o in British "hot," clipped rather than held

/l/

one clear l sound, the doubled letter is a spelling rule, not an instruction to hold it longer

/oː/

a long, pure "oh," held flat with no drift into a "w" at the end

That doubled l is worth pausing on, because it's not decorative. Dutch spelling only allows a short vowel like a, e, or o to appear in a syllable that ends in a consonant. Writing "halo" with one l would signal a long a and a completely different word shape, so the second l exists purely to close off the first syllable and keep that short, clipped a sound. You still only say one l.

Listen to it

There's no recorded native voice for Dutch in the LingoDrop app yet, so the buttons below use your browser's built-in speech voice instead. It's not a human recording, but it's a genuinely useful way to check the shape and rhythm of the word against the breakdown above.

The word

The example sentence

In a sentence

Hallo, ik ben Tom.

"Hi, I'm Tom."

Hallo is an all-purpose greeting in Dutch. It works at any time of day, with strangers or friends, in person or answering the phone, the way "hi" does in English rather than a formal "good day." Introducing yourself right after it, as in the example above, is the default way Dutch speakers open a conversation with someone new.

Where English speakers usually go wrong

The most common mistake is stress. English "hello" leans on the second syllable (he-LLO), and that habit is hard to shake, so English speakers often say Dutch hallo the same way, as ha-LOH. Dutch does the opposite: the stress sits on the first syllable, HAL-lo. Move the emphasis and the rhythm of the whole word changes, which is one of the fastest tells of a non-native accent even when every individual sound is close.

The second is that final o. English speakers hear "oh" and reflexively glide it into something closer to "oh-oo," the way "boat" or "go" work in English. Dutch o is a single, steady vowel with no glide at all, held flat from start to finish. Cut it off cleanly instead of letting your mouth drift into a w at the end.