K-Dutch

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Welcome to K-Dutch, the place for anyone who wants to know anything about the Dutch language: linguistic properties, language advice, available tools and resources, etymology, dialects...

K-Dutch is a CLARIN Knowledge Centre. It is hosted by the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (Dutch Language Institute) , which is also a CLARIN-B centre and host of many resources for Dutch, which are, in general, freely available for research purposes. K-Dutch is an initiative of CLARIN-ERIC and CLARIN-BE.

The status of Dutch with respect to language technologies is described in Steurs, Vandeghinste and Daelemans (2022). Report on Dutch. Project deliverable. European Language Equality.

Linguisitic topics

Grammar

Phonology, Morphology and Syntax: Taalportaal

Many aspects of Dutch linguistics are described in the Taalportaal website

Taalportaal (or Language Portal) is an interactive knowledge base about Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans. It provides access to a comprehensive and authoritative scientific grammar for these three languages. Up to now there has been no comprehensive scientifically-based description of the grammars of Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans. This is a serious shortcoming, considering that

• language is seen as an important part of cultural identity and cultural heritage
• a large number of people learn these languages as a second language
• educated speakers frequently lack grammatical knowledge of their native language
• Dutch and Afrikaans are an important object of study in linguistic theory and related fields of research

Taalportaal fills this gap by providing a thorough description of the phonology, morphology and syntax of the three languages.

Morphosyntax

• MIMORE: Microcomparative Morphosyntax Research Tool

The MIMORE tool enables researchers to investigate morphosyntactic variation in the Dutch dialects by searching three related databases with a common on-line search engine. The search results can be visualized on geographic maps and exported for statistical analysis. The three databases involved are DynaSAND (the dynamic syntactic atlas of the Dutch dialects), DiDDD (Diversity in Dutch DP Design) and GTRP (Goeman, Taeldeman, van Reenen Project).

• MAND/FAND/GTRP-database

This site gives access to the data that was used for the Morphological Atlas of the Dutch Dialects.

Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch dialects (SAND)

The Dynamic Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch dialects (DynaSAND) is an on-line tool for dialect syntax research. DynaSAND consists of a database, a search engine, a cartographic component and a bibliography.

• Online search

Dutch descriptive grammar: e-ANS (in Dutch)

The General Dutch Grammar, or ANS (Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst), is the go-to reference grammar for the Dutch language. It is the most extensive description of the grammatical aspects of contemporary Dutch. Its target users are both native speakers and foreign speakers learning Dutch. The ANS was born out of a Belgian-Dutch cooperation and was first printed in 1984. The second and revised 1997 edition was digitized, resulting in the e-ANS.

Lately, the Dutch Language Institute (INT) has been working on a new, user-friendly website for the ANS, while work was started on the revision of its contents by the Leiden University Center for Linguistics (LUCL), Ghent University, KU Leuven and Radboud University Nijmegen.

From 2020 onwards, the further revision of the contents will also be coordinated by the INT.

• e-ANS website

Grambank

Linguistic properties of Dutch are also included in Grambank.

• Grambank website for Dutch

Lexicography

Dutch dictionaries

We provide a special page with more details about different types of dictionaries that are available for Dutch. See Dictionaries.

Elexis

ELEXIS is an acronym for European Lexicographic Infrastructure. This project is carried out as part of the Horizon 2020 programme and aims to create a durable infrastructure for e-lexicography. A large amount of high-quality semantic information is now still kept in individual lexicographic sources, spread out over Europe. ELEXIS makes it possible to link, share, distribute and save all of these different European sources on a large scale. Besides, the project helps diminish the gap between communities with great lexicographic expertise and those with little.

• Elexis project website

White Paper: The Future of Academic Lexicography

• White paper: The Future of Academic Lexicography

Terminology

The Centre of Expertise for Dutch Terminology (Expertisecentrum Nederlandstalige Terminologie or ENT) supports people and organisations involved with terminology. They can find terminological information and tools here, on the website of the Dutch Language Institute (INT). A newsletter is sent round several times a year, describing developments and events in the field of terminology.

• Centre of Expertise for Dutch Terminology

Higher Education Terminology

HOTNeV

HOTNeV is an acronym for Hoger Onderwijs Terminologie in Nederland en Vlaanderen (Higher Education Terminology in the Netherlands and Flanders). This project was prompted by a sharp increase in educational terms, generated by the EU’s education policy and implemented by the Tuning Project. HOTNeV has a dual purpose. Until now, Dutch equivalents for the English terminology were created mainly ad hoc, but this project focuses on the need to coordinate the provision of terms that have been approved by parties in the Dutch-speaking educational sector. It also wants to show the feasibility of this ambition.

• HOTNEV website

Academic Phrases

A collection of academic phrases in the Academic Phrasesbank for Dutch, made by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

• Academische uitdrukkingen

Medical Terminology: Medical Pilot

The Medical Pilot is an experimental database in which a small part of the medical vocabulary is described at various levels, from scientific to accessible to people with low literacy, and in which differences between Flemish and Dutch terms are also shown.

• MedPilot website

See also [1] for a medical dictionary.

Dutch as a scientific language

With support of the Taalunie, corpus-based terminology lists for two different scientific domains have been made available. Currently as pdfs, but a nice search interface is expected around late 2021.

• Mathematics
• Chemistry

Spelling

Woordenlijst.org (Official Dutch Word List)

The Word List of the Dutch Language is online available for free at woordenlijst.org. In 2015, the online version grew from approximately 100,000 entries to roughly 168,000 entries. All words from the previous printed edition have been retained.

The newly added words are derived from text files collected at the Dutch Language Institute, containing newspaper texts, literary texts and texts from the internet. In addition, a selection was made from all words that had been looked up in vain in the online Word List.

Since 2015, woordenlijst.org has been updated several times a year with hundreds of new words. At the end of 2019 it contained a total of 186,000 words. With all plural forms, diminutive forms, past tenses and past participles, the digital version of the Word List now contains information about approximately 680,000 word forms.

• Online version

Spelling Certification Mark

The Spelling Certification Mark ([Keurmerk Spelling]) is a guarantee given by the Union for the Dutch Language (Taalunie) that a reference work can be used to look up the official spelling.

For the automatic spell check of word lists (for example provided by dictionary suppliers), the Dutch Language Institute uses the Spelling Certification Mark, also known as the HulK. Our spelling specialists manually correct the words the HulK does not recognize and add these to our own material. From then on the words can be processed automatically.

Any word list compiled in accordance with the rules and principles of the official spelling receives the Spelling Certification Mark.

Linguistic resources: corpora and lexica

Corpora

• Newspaper corpora: corpora exclusively consisting of newspaper text
• Parliamentary corpora
• Computer-mediated communication corpora
• Corpora of academic texts
• Historical corpora
• L2 learner corpora
• Manually annotated corpora
• Multimodal corpora
• Parallel corpora
• Reference corpora
• Social media corpora
• Spoken corpora
• Sign Language corpora
• Propbanks: contains semantic role labels
• Treebanks
• Other corpora

Lexical Resources

• Lexica
• Dictionaries
• Conceptual Resources
• Wordlists
• Embeddings
• Lexica of terminology

Tools for Dutch

Normalisation

• Format conversion
• Spell checking
• TiCCLops: Text-Induced Corpus Clean-up online processing system
• Normalisation Demo

Language Learning

• Schrijfassistent
• Schrijfassistent at De Standaard
• NedBox: Online exercises to learn Dutch
• Oefenen.nl: Online exercises to learn Dutch
• Woordcombinaties: Verbs and their combination patterns
• Orient+: A serious game to enhance academic vocabulary
• Taalwinkel: Language Advice

Automatic linguistic annotation

• Basic language processing
• Deep parsing

Speech processing

• Spoken Language Recognition
• Speech recognition
• Speech synthesis

Natural Language Processing

• Language Modeling
• Machine translation
• Coreference resolution
• Compound splitting
• Word Sense Disambiguation
• Text classification
• Sentiment analysis
• Readability
• Clinical NLP

Resource querying

• Corpus querying
• Treebank querying

Machine translation engines

Publicly available machine translation engines from or to Dutch

• DeepL
• Google translate
• Bing Microsoft translator
• Reverso
• eTranslation from the European Union

Terminology extraction

• Termtreffer. Ask for login at terminologie@ivdnt.org.
• D-Terminer demo. Terminology extraction for Dutch, English, French and German. (Rigouts Terryn, A. (2021). D-TERMINE: Data-driven Term Extraction Methodologies Investigated [Doctoral thesis]. Ghent University.)

Other

• Previously unmentioned CLARIN projects at INT
• Language and Speech Tools at Radboud Nijmegen. e.g. T-scan, an analysis tool for dutch texts to assess the complexity of the text.

Helpdesk

For information about Dutch: If you cannot find the answers to your questions on this wiki, you can send your question to servicedesk@ivdnt.org . Your questions will be forwarded as soon as possible to the appropriate experts and you should receive an answer within two working days.

You can also ask us for information and assistance with the use of data and tools.

Other Services

• Best practice documents and guidelines
• Internships
• Consulting
• CLARIN for Dutch

Questions and Answers

On the Questions and Answers page we keep track of all questions we receive concerning Dutch. This will grow into a repository of K-Dutch answers to your questions.