Dutch

Accented and special characters

á é í ó ú à è ë ï ö ü ij

Á É Í Ó Ú À È Ë Ï Ö Ü IJ

Accented and special character names and Unicode values

Aacute#00C1
Eacute#00C9
Iacute#00CD
Oacute#00D3
Uacute#00DA
aacute#00E1
eacute#00E9
iacute#00ED
oacute#00F3
uacute#00FA
Agrave#00C0
agrave#00E0
Egrave#00C8
egrave#00E8
Edieresis#00CB
Idieresis#00CF
Odieresis#00D6
Udieresis#00DC
edieresis#00EB
idieresis#00EF
odieresis#00F6
udieresis#00FC
IJ#0132
ij#0133

Accents used

Acute
Diaeresis / Umlaut
Grave

Acute

Dutch uses the acute accent to add emphasis to a vowel or to distinguish two possible pronunciations from each other: Á/á, É/é, Í/í, Ó/ó, Ú/ú.

You will occasionally also see an emphasis on IJ/ij, where both dots should change into acute accents. Modern fonts rarely contain an IJ/ij with a double acute, so today it's usually represented as ÍJ/íj. Fonts therefore should contain a glyph iacute_j.NLD glyph and a locl replacement such as follows:

feature locl { script latn;

language NLD exclude_dflt; # Dutch sub iacute j by iacute_j.NLD; } locl;

Grave

The grave accent is rare in Dutch. There is the word à, and in very few words, Dutch also knows È/è, denoting a different pronunciation of e: hè, blèren.

Diaeresis

Dutch differentiates between the diaeresis as trema and as umlaut.

The trema (or deelteken) is used in certain cases to denote the separated pronunciation of colliding vowels: onderzeeër, patiënt, reünie, coördinatie, coïncidentie. If the word is divided at a linebreak, the trema disappears, e.g. pati-ent.

The umlaut mainly appears in German foreign words.

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