Dutch · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "één" in Dutch?

Q: How do you pronounce één in Dutch?

één is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /eːn/. It means “one.” AYN, one syllable, with the accents there only to tell you it means "one" and not "a."

AYN, one syllable, with the accents there only to tell you it means "one" and not "a."

één /eːn/

The accent marks exist precisely because this word is the emphatic counterpart to the unstressed article "een." Same letters, same vowel spelling, but the article reduces to a schwa /ən/ while the numeral holds its full long vowel and takes a real beat.

Listen: één

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

Sound it out

éé The long, tense Dutch e, close to the vowel in "lane" but without the upward glide English adds. The acute accents mark emphasis in writing; they change nothing about the vowel's quality.

n A firmly articulated final n, tongue tip on the ridge. It is always pronounced here, unlike the droppable n of infinitive endings.

Hear it in a sentence

Ik heb maar één tas.

I only have one bag.

Listen: Ik heb maar één tas.

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

"Ik heb maar één tas" uses "maar" as "only," and the two together do the work of English "just one." The accented spelling is essential in this sentence: without it, "ik heb maar een tas" would read as "I only have a bag," a much weaker statement.

Where English speakers slip

The commonest mistake is not phonetic but functional — reading the accents as a stress mark that changes the vowel, or ignoring them and saying the reduced article "uhn." The numeral needs its vowel long and clear. Phonetically, watch for the English glide: "ayn" in English drifts toward "ee" at the end, while Dutch keeps the tongue parked in one place.