Dutch · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "welke" in Dutch?

Q: How do you pronounce welke in Dutch?

welke is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈʋɛlkə/. It means “which.” VEL-kuh — soft w, short "eh," a bright l, and a schwa at the end.

VEL-kuh — soft w, short "eh," a bright l, and a schwa at the end.

welke /ˈʋɛlkə/

Weight at the front, ending reduced to nothing. This word inflects like an adjective — "welke" for de-words and plurals, "welk" for singular het-words — and the ending never affects the beat, only the grammar.

Listen: welke

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Sound it out

w Labiodental and light: lower lip near the upper teeth, lips unrounded.

e The vowel of "bell," clipped by the cluster behind it and gone in an instant.

lk A bright l into an unaspirated k. English darkens the l before k in "milk"; Dutch keeps the tongue tip forward and the sound light.

e A quick, relaxed vowel — the one in "bell" — squeezed by the consonants on either side.

Hear it in a sentence

Welke wil je?

Which one do you want?

Listen: Welke wil je?

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"Welke wil je?" uses the question word on its own, without a noun, which Dutch allows freely. The -e ending is kept because an unstated de-word is implied; had the missing noun been neuter, you would say "welk wil je?"

Where English speakers slip

A rounded w and a darkened l are the two sound errors, and both are easy to fix once noticed. The grammatical difficulty runs deeper: choosing between "welke" and "welk" requires knowing the gender of the noun you are asking about, and English speakers, with only "which," default to "welke" everywhere.