Limburgish Alphabet & Letters

Limburgish (Limbörgs, often just plat) is not one fixed standard but a family of closely related town and village dialects, spoken in the Dutch and Belgian provinces of Limburg. Maastricht speaks Mestreechs, Roermond calls itself Remunj, and a word can be pronounced, and spelled, a little differently from one town to the next.

What holds the writing together is the spelling recommended by the Limburg dialect association Veldeke, most recently revised in 2003. It takes Dutch spelling as its basis and uses additional vowel signs and combinations where the dialects need them. CLDR, the Unicode database of languages, has no alphabet list for Limburgish yet, so the letters on this page follow that spelling: the 26 letters A–Z, with additional vowel signs and combinations such as È è, Ó ó, Ö ö, ae, ao and äö. Local spelling choices can vary by dialect.

Limburgish spells many sounds with two letters, as Dutch does: aa, ee, oo, uu, ie, oe, ui, ei, and the very Limburgish ao for a long open o, as in jaor (year) and Vastelaovend (carnival). The sh sound is written sj and its voiced partner zj. Where Dutch writes ij, many dialects simply have an ie sound, so the Dutch IJ, and the one-character ligature IJ ij, plays a much smaller part in Limburgish writing; see the Dutch collection for those.

Limburgish letters: ä, è, ö and the accents on e and o

In Veldeke Spelling 2003, è marks a short vowel between the e and i sounds in Dutch bed and bid. It differs from the unstressed schwa usually written e, as in ’t. The short vowel of Dutch kat is written a; ä occurs as part of the spelling combination äö, not as a standalone vowel.

ö is a rounded front vowel like German ö, said with the lips rounded: Limbörg, a Limburgish form of Limburg, and Limbörgs, a name for the language. Veldeke Spelling 2003 does not include ü. It uses ó for a short vowel between Dutch o and oe; ò is not used, and é occurs only in loanwords.

In Veldeke spelling, ë can be part of a vowel combination such as ieë; it is not a standalone vowel letter marking a syllable break. Capitals keep their marks, so a town sign or carnival banner in capitals writes LIMBÖRG and WÈLKOM.

One thing the letters do not show is tone. Limburgish is one of the few tonal languages of Europe: two word melodies, called stoottoon (push tone) and sleeptoon (dragging tone) in Dutch, can tell otherwise identical words apart, in some words even singular from plural. Everyday spelling leaves the tones unmarked; speakers simply know them.

Limburgish punctuation: „ ” quotes and the apostrophe of ’t

Limburgish punctuates like Dutch. Quotations open with the low mark „ and close with ”, or use the modern pairs “ ” and ‘ ’: „Wèlkom!”.

The apostrophe ’ is busy in Limburgish, because the short article ’t (the, for neuter words) is everywhere: ’t Limbörgs, the Limburgish language. The curly ’ is the typographically correct form; the straight ' on the keyboard works too, and many word processors turn it into ’ automatically.

How to type Limburgish letters on a keyboard

Windows: hold Alt and type on the number pad: ä 0228, Ä 0196, è 0232, È 0200, ë 0235, Ë 0203, ó 0243, Ó 0211, ö 0246, Ö 0214, „ 0132, ” 0148, ‘ 0145, ’ 0146, € 0128. Most keyboards in the Netherlands use the United States-International layout, where you type a dead key and then the letter: " then a for ä (or o, e for ö ë), ' then o for ó, ` then e for è; Belgian AZERTY keyboards have è on its own key and ¨ as a dead key.

Mac: hold the letter key and pick the accent from the pop-up, or use Option + U then the vowel for ä ö ë, Option + E then the vowel for ó, and Option + ` then the vowel for è. Phones: long-press a, e or o on the keyboard and slide to the accented letter; to type „, long-press the quote key (or add Dutch as a keyboard language) and look for it among the quote marks in the pop-up, or copy it from this page.

HTML: ä ä, è è, ë ë, ó ó, ö ö, „ „ and ” ”. All of these letters are single precomposed Unicode characters, so copying them from this page gives text that searches and spell-checkers recognise.

Where Limburgish is spoken: Netherlands, Belgium and Germany

Limburgish is spoken in the province of Limburg in the south-east of the Netherlands 🇳🇱, in the province of Limburg in north-eastern Belgium 🇧🇪, and across the border in a strip of western Germany 🇩🇪. CLDR estimates around 980,000 speakers in the Netherlands alone, roughly one in every eighteen people in the country; Belgian Limburg adds many more. The Netherlands recognised Limburgish as a regional language in 1997 under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and its ISO language code is li. All three countries pay in euros, which Dutch-style writing puts before the amount: € 5.

Limburgish sits between Dutch and German, and its neighbours have their own collections here: Dutch, the standard language of school and news; the Ripuarian dialects such as Colognian, which share the word tones; German; Low German, Gronings and Zeelandic, the other regional languages of the Netherlands; and Western Frisian. For the country’s own emoji, tulips and orange, see the Netherlands and Belgium collections.