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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.

Dutch speakers by state
StateSpeakers
Ohio15,610
Indiana9,630

The 2 states with the most Dutch speakers

  1. 1Ohio15,610
  2. 2Indiana9,630

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.

WALS 116A · Polar Questions · Interrogative word order

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”.

WALS 78A · Coding of Evidentiality · Modal morpheme

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.

States where Dutch is a top 15 non-English language

All states

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