Dutch medical interpreters
Real-time Dutch medical interpretation for healthcare teams, on phones, tablets, and computers.
137,000 people in the U.S. speak Dutch at home.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Darker states have more Dutch speakers; shading is logarithmic, relative to the state with the most speakers.
| State | Speakers |
|---|---|
| Ohio | 15,610 |
| Indiana | 9,630 |
The 2 states with the most Dutch speakers
State counts reflect the 15 most reported non-English languages in each state’s ACS table. States where Dutch falls outside the top 15 are shown without shading; the national total includes every state.
24,160
speakers of Dutch speak English less than “very well”: the federal threshold for needing language assistance.
18%
of Dutch speakers in the U.S. meet that limited-English definition.
15,610
people speak Dutch at home in Ohio alone.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Meet Opalite.
Real-time AI medical interpretation in 150+ languages and dialects, connecting providers and patients in seconds.
- Works on the devices care teams already carry: phones, tablets, computers, and telehealth platforms
- Integrates with all EHRs
- Built for HIPAA-compliant healthcare
- SOC 2 Type II attested security controls
What to know when interpreting Dutch
Every language has grammar that an interpreter must handle correctly. These are the Dutch features that the fewest other languages in the world share, according to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS).
Indo-European · Germanic · Eurasia
1.4%
of the world’s languages share this trait
Dutch turns a statement into a yes-or-no question by reordering the words or raising the voice alone, so an interpreter who misses the tone misses the question.
1.7%
of the world’s languages share this trait
Dutch marks how a speaker knows something with a verb ending also used for “must” or “might”, so an interpreter must separate “the patient reportedly has pain” from “the patient must have pain”.
1.7%
of the world’s languages share this trait
Dutch has two different ways of placing “not” around the verb, so an interpreter must recognize both patterns to keep a denial from being lost.
WALS 143A · Order of Negative Morpheme and Verb · Type 1 / Type 2
How Dutch is structured
- Word ordersubject, object and verb
- No dominant order
- Adpositionsprepositions or postpositions
- Prepositions
- Adjectivebefore or after the noun
- Adjective-Noun
- Demonstrativethis and that, before or after
- Demonstrative-Noun
- Numeralnumber before or after the noun
- Numeral-Noun
- Genitivepossessor before or after
- Noun-Genitive
- Relative clausebefore or after the noun
- Noun-Relative clause
- Morphologyprefixing or suffixing
- Strongly suffixing
- Tonewhether pitch changes meaning
- Not coded
- Casesnumber of noun cases
- No morphological case-marking
- Gendersnumber of noun genders
- Not coded
- Classifierscounting words for nouns
- Not coded
Source: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. WALS Online, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Dutch entry: wals.info DUT. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Values are reproduced as WALS codes them; each links to its datapoint. The clinical readings are Opalite’s own inferences and are not part of WALS.
FAQs about Dutch medical interpreters
Ohio holds 11% of the nation’s Dutch speakers, and Dutch appears in the published top-15 tables of just 2 states.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Opalite uses the same underlying interpretation techniques for Dutch as it does for Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese. In Opalite’s published validation study, those three languages were evaluated in clinical conversations, with over 90% fewer errors than certified medical interpreters across the conversations studied.
Try Dutch medical interpretation.
See a live conversation interpreted. Ask about setup and pricing.


