{"id":135127,"date":"2026-07-25T10:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T10:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/135127\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T10:00:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T10:00:11","slug":"when-traveling-to-amsterdam-attend-to-the-locals-accents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/135127\/","title":{"rendered":"When traveling to Amsterdam, attend to the locals’ accents"},"content":{"rendered":"

I come back to Amsterdam<\/a> a lot, and every time I arrive, I feel a little sheepish about speaking Dutch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I actually know some of the language \u2014 I lived in the Netherlands<\/a> as a child, in Eindhoven, down in the south, and I learned the language the way a 10-year-old learns anything, which is on the hockey<\/a> team, from other 10-year-olds calling each other disgusting names or giggling at bodily functions and parts. So even the Dutch I remember perfectly has limited application when doing adult things like taking a taxi or ordering a bottle of wine.<\/p>\n

Still, 50 years later, what\u2019s left is rusty but functional, and I insist on using it, even though Amsterdam is a city of cosmopolitan sophisticates who all speak perfect, nearly unaccented English<\/a> and who greet my efforts with the gentle patience you\u2019d extend to a sweet, elderly Labrador that has somehow learned how to push open a door.<\/p>\n

This is the ritual: I attempt to frame an elementary Dutch sentence, I get tangled up somewhere around the second clause, and a friendly Dutch person swoops in with flawless English and rescues me. It has happened dozens of times, in shops and caf\u00e9s and train stations, and I have always assumed the problem was simple. My Dutch is bad. Their English is excellent. What else could it be?<\/p>\n

\"DamrakDamrak Street in central Amsterdam, Netherlands, on May 5, 2025. (Getty Images)<\/p>\n

I was explaining all of this to a young man in Amsterdam recently.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo no one has told you what the problem with your Dutch is?\u201d he asked with matter-of-fact bluntness.<\/p>\n

I shook my head. No one had. Fifty years of polite rescues, and not one Dutch person had ever offered a diagnosis. My new friend was happy to provide one, with what the Dutch consider honesty but the rest of us recognize as cruelty.<\/p>\n

\u201cCount for me,\u201d he ordered.<\/p>\n

So I started to count. Een, twee, drie, vier \u2014 one, two, three, four \u2014 up through tien, ten, and then eleven, which in Dutch is elf, except that\u2019s not how I say it. Not how I learned it in Eindhoven 50 years ago, the way my hockey teammates said it, the way they say it in the southern part of this tiny country.<\/p>\n

I said el-eff, with two syllables.<\/p>\n

\"TouristsTourists take a scenic boat cruise along the historic Oudezijds Voorburgwal Canal in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on May 26, 2026. (Getty Images) <\/p>\n

He winced. Up north, he explained, they say elf. One syllable, clipped, efficient. Only people from the south stretch it into two. My problem, it turns out, isn\u2019t that I speak bad Dutch. It\u2019s that I speak southern Dutch. In other words, when I speak Dutch, I sound like I\u2019m from Alabama.<\/p>\n

Of course, every region of every country has some other region \u2014 usually to the south, usually somewhere warmer, where life is a little slower, and the vowels get a little more room to breathe \u2014 and everyone from the elf region has decided that everyone from the el-eff region is just a little slow in the upstairs department.<\/p>\n

The people up north, wherever \u201cnorth\u201d happens to be, pronounce things with fewer syllables and congratulate themselves on it, as if brevity were intelligence, as if the fastest way through the word \u201celeven\u201d were a credential. Nobody can explain why a relaxed drawl signals a relaxed brain. It doesn\u2019t. But the prejudice is apparently preinstalled in humans. It\u2019s in our factory settings.<\/p>\n

THE SOUVENIRS AND MEMORIES FROM TRIPS OVERSEAS <\/a><\/p>\n

The Milanese roll their eyes at the Sicilians. The Parisians wince at Marseille. Northern Germans have opinions about Bavarians that they will share with you at length, though not in Munich, where it might lead to trouble. And the Dutch \u2014 tolerant, liberal, famously easygoing about nearly everything else \u2014 hear a man stretch elf into el-eff and quietly conclude that he probably has trouble doing basic math.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve decided I\u2019m fine with this. My accent is the one genuinely authentic thing about my Dutch. The vocabulary is mostly about body parts and insults, the grammar is guesswork, but the accent is real \u2014 earned, honestly, at age 10, from the actual children of the actual south. I\u2019m not going to fix it. I may even lean into it. Instead of saying goodbye with a cosmopolitan, sophisticated tot ziens, I plan to put a little spin on it. Tot ziens, I\u2019ll say. And then add, Tot ziens, y\u2019all.<\/p>\n

Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I come back to Amsterdam a lot, and every time I arrive, I feel a little sheepish about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[101],"tags":[199,2059,71,31619,65547,200,1411,1413,1827],"class_list":["post-135127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-amsterdam","tag-amsterdam","tag-culture","tag-europe","tag-language","tag-magazine-life-arts","tag-netherlands","tag-tourism","tag-travel","tag-world"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116980038408151639","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}