Dutch Accents & Quotes - Alt Codes & Unicode

Dutch uses diacritics sparingly, and the workhorse is the diaeresis, called the trema. Its job is purely mechanical: it tells the reader that a vowel starts a new syllable instead of combining with the one before it. Without it, the vowel pairs of Dutch would swallow the boundary. So coördinatie keeps the two o sounds apart, and reünie, geïnteresseerd, financiën and zeeën all rely on the trema to be readable. This is not the German umlaut, which changes a vowel's quality; the Dutch trema changes nothing about the sound of the letter it sits on, only where the syllable break falls.

The 2006 spelling revision changed where the trema appears in compound words. In a genuine compound, Dutch now uses a hyphen rather than a trema at the seam: zee-eend, auto-ongeluk, na-apen. The trema survives inside single words and in inflected forms, which is why you still write tweeëntwintig and drieëntwintig for twenty-two and twenty-three but write zee-eend with a hyphen. Older texts will show the earlier convention, so a trema in a compound is usually a sign of pre-2006 spelling rather than an error on your part.

The acute accent has a separate role: emphasis. Dutch writers mark a stressed word by accenting its vowels, so hét boek means the book, the definitive one, and één means one as a numeral rather than the article een. This is a real distinction that Dutch readers use, and it is one of the few places where an accent in Dutch carries meaning rather than pronunciation guidance. The grave accent appears mainly in loanwords from French, such as après-ski and blèren.

The table above also includes the curly quotation marks, and these matter more in Dutch than in English typography. The traditional Dutch convention places the opening quote low and the closing quote high, giving the pattern ,,zo" or the single-mark version. Modern Dutch publishing has largely moved to the English-style paired curly quotes, but you will meet the low-high style in books and older material. Straight typewriter quotes are acceptable in informal writing but look unfinished in set text.

On Windows, hold Alt with Num Lock on: ë is Alt+0235, ï Alt+0239, ö Alt+0246, ä Alt+0228, é Alt+0233 and è Alt+0232. On macOS, Option+U followed by the vowel gives the trema and Option+E followed by the vowel gives the acute. On Linux, Compose then " then the vowel. On mobile, long-press the vowel and pick the trema form. Because Dutch typing is mostly plain ASCII with occasional trema, most Dutch speakers use a US International layout rather than a dedicated Dutch one — it makes the trema and acute available as dead keys without moving any letters.