“B van Bernhard, E van Eduard.” The moment a Dutch official asks you to spell your name, this is the game. Type it in and hear exactly how to say it — letter by letter, calm and clear.
Type your name to see how to spell it out loud in Dutch — “B van Bernhard”.
Registering, opening an account, booking your inburgering exam — every desk asks you to spell your name. Do it their way and there are no mistakes on the form.
Call-centre staff spell everything back to you in this alphabet. Recognising Anna, Bernhard, Cornelis means you actually catch what they said.
Names like Thijs or Marije hide the Dutch ij. Say IJmuiden for the pair and you sound like you have done this before.
It is the set of names Dutch speakers use to spell a word out loud so it can't be misheard — A van Anna, B van Bernhard, C van Cornelis, and so on. It is the Dutch equivalent of the NATO alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie), but it uses first names and place names instead. You will hear it any time you give your name over the phone, at the bank or at the gemeente.
Say each letter followed by van and its alphabet word. To spell Emma you say: E van Eduard, M van Maria, M van Maria, A van Anna. Dutch officials use exactly this pattern, so copying it makes you instantly clear. Type your name into the tool above to get the whole line and hear a native voice read it.
IJ is a genuine Dutch letter-combination (a digraph) that behaves like a single letter — it even gets capitalised together, as in IJsselmeer. When you spell a word with ij in it, you say IJmuiden for the pair. The tool spots ij automatically and gives you the one word instead of I plus J.
No. The NATO/ICAO alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta) is international and used in aviation and the military. The Dutch telephone alphabet uses Dutch names — Anna, Bernhard, Cornelis — and is what ordinary people and call-centre staff actually use in the Netherlands. If you are dealing with Dutch bureaucracy, this is the one you want.
Vocabulary, grammar and all five DUO sections — Reading, Listening, Writing, Speaking and KNM — in the real exam format.