Dutch · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "weten" in Dutch?

Q: How do you pronounce weten in Dutch?

weten is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈʋeːtə(n)/. It means “to know (fact).” VAY-tuh — soft w, long "ay," and a clean t that is never flapped.

VAY-tuh — soft w, long "ay," and a clean t that is never flapped.

weten /ˈʋeːtə(n)/

Stress sits on the first syllable, and the open-syllable spelling is doing double duty — it marks the vowel as long and it tells you the beat lands there. Compare "wetten" (laws) with a doubled t, where the vowel goes short: the spelling difference is the pronunciation difference.

Listen: weten

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Sound it out

w The labiodental approximant again: bottom lip near the teeth, minimal friction, no rounding.

e Long and tense, near "ay" in "say." The syllable is open, which is why a single e stretches here without needing to be doubled.

t A full stop between vowels. English turns intervocalic t into a quick tap in words like "better"; Dutch keeps it firm and unaspirated.

en A grammatical tail with no vowel colour. Singers and poets restore the n for the extra consonant; ordinary speech leaves the word ending on a breath.

Hear it in a sentence

Ik weet het niet.

I don't know.

Listen: Ik weet het niet.

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"Ik weet het niet" is one of the most useful sentences in the language and shows the negator landing at the end after the object pronoun. The three words run together tightly, with "het" reduced to "ut," giving "ik-VAYT-ut-neet" as a single rhythmic unit.

Where English speakers slip

Learners import the English "wet" and shorten the vowel, or they flap the t American-style into a d. Both flatten the word. There is also a semantic split English speakers stumble over: "weten" is for facts and "kennen" is for people and familiarity, so "ik weet hem" is wrong where "ik ken hem" is right.