Languages spoken in the Netherlands

Basically everyone in the Netherlands speaks English, except for the very young children (even in the rural areas). You should be completely fine with verbal communication.

The only thing that can be a bit difficult is that not all areas have signs and directions in English. For example, some train stations will only have instructions in Dutch, but you can always ask someone and you should be able to figure out where to go despite the language barrier.

I can only agree on the above answers. Keep in mind that when you try to learn some Dutch words and address someone in Dutch, it is very likely that you get your answer in English. It is a matter of customs, not being rude or kind doing that.

Used to work for a US company where alle the native English people went to Dutch class, where everyone but tweo collaegues were dropout after five lessons: when they tried to order bread at the bakery in Dutch, the rest of the conversation was always in English.

English is de-facto second language in the Netherlands, in the sense, that practically every child 10 years or older is able to communicate in it. One of the reasons for that can be the fact that English movies and TV programs are shown with subs and never dubbed (except programs for small kids). In Amsterdam and other tourist areas chances to get lost because you don’t know Dutch are very low (except if someone would deliberately refuse talking in English to you). Outside of Amsterdam the situation can be different. Some older people might also have difficulties speaking English.

In general, comparing the level of English in the Netherlands and in Spain (from my personal experience, though I didn’t stay in Spain as long as in the Netherlands, and my Spanish is a joke, so I might be biased), if you rate the knowledge of English in Spain (on average) as 6 on 1-10 scale where 10 is the best, then the Dutch must be around 8-9.

I am going to make a bit of a controversial claim in this post, but from my experience working with a lot of expats in the Netherlands it can be considered quite true:

The amount of Dutch you should learn depends entirely on whether you’re from a ‘western’ country (western Europe, north America, Australia), or one of the countries the Dutch tend to look down on (middle and eastern Europe, Africa and nowadays more and more southern Europe as well). If you fall in the first category and know good English you should just address people in English and not care about Dutch.

On the other hand, if you fall in the second category and your English isn’t exceptionally good either you should not be surprised even if Dutch actually act as if they don’t know English. Don’t ask me why ‘we’ do it, all I know is that ‘we’ do it. We have gone from one of the most culturally open and welcoming countries to one of the countries with the worst discrimination (we recently even ended up as the most expat unfriendly country in the world in a big survey). So practically if you’re in the second category I would indeed advice you to prepend anything with “Excuse me, do you speak English?” or something along those lines and be as respectful as possible (no matter how undeserved, the Dutch are known for their bluntness (commonly known as arrogance), but they only accept that from fellow Dutch people). Now, let’s finish this of with a piece of good news, as long as you stay in the central parts of Amsterdam this is far less of an issue and you don’t need to worry about it all that much (though there are certain quarters of Amsterdam where this still applies strongly).

For a long time, Dutch TV-makers had no budget for voice-over translation, which gave many children from the ’70s and ’80s an early advantage over their counterparts in countries like Germany and Italy. That’s still noticeable, although more and more English cartoons have been translated over the past few years. It’s still very rare to find TV-shows and movies that have been translated to Dutch, commercials are the only common exception.

Furthermore, we start learning English at the age of 10, which means nearly every Dutch person you will encounter will at least be able to understand you very well. Most of them will also be able to respond. The Dutch-English accent can be thick, but it leans more towards overarticulation, which makes it easy to get into. If you want to prepare yourself for that, Louis van Gaal’s recently been appointed as the manager of Manchester United. His post-match interviews have it all.

One little piece of advice: when asking for the time or making dinner reservations, we don’t mean half past five when we say “half five”, we mean 4:30.

Update: @gerrit: Was it really about budget?

I don’t have any sources for this (I tried to find some), so let me clarify what I do know. I’ve been told by someone who worked in public TV back then (note that we didn’t have commercial TV until the late ’80s) that it was a lot cheaper to add subtitles than translating the show and hiring voice actors, which was something the Dutch channels simply couldn’t afford. I do suppose there’s a big difference between voice-overs (like in Poland) and real “dubbing”, but I remember that Germany also did voice-overs back then instead of dubbing, while they were on a significantly higher budget (including the budgets of other German speaking countries, like Austria and parts of Switzerland). I suspect that the low quality of Eastern-European voice-overs of the ’80s and early ’90s would simply not have passed any quality standard in The Netherlands, so @DavidMulder certainly has a point, of course. As for @Relaxed, I’ve been to Poland and their English is certainly worse than the Dutch’s. Portugal and Greece speak the kind of English I expect from high-tourism countries: functional, but no more.

Also, I’ve read here that apparently, most Bulgarian voice-overs of American movies, for instance, were actually shot with hand cameras in movie theaters showing the German dubbed version of the movie after which a single person did a voice-over track. I suppose you don’t need a big budget for that.

Another update

I did find a second source from a newspaper TV-critic suggesting that it was a budget issue saying:

Er was eens een Duitse filmcriticus met een origineel argument voor nasynchronisatie en tegen ondertitels: zo zag je tenminste de
voeten van de acteurs. Wijlen Richard Roud, filmhistoricus, had een
interessante theorie over de verdeling van Europa in nasynchronisatie-
en ondertitel-landen. Aan de ene kant bevinden zich Groot-Brittannië,
de Benelux, Scandinavië, Zwitserland, Oost-Europa en de helft van
Frankrijk; aan de andere kant Duitsland, Oostenrijk, Italië, Spanje en
de andere helft van Frankrijk. Die lijstjes deden Roud op de een of
andere manier aan de Tweede Wereldoorlog denken. Toen ik de Franse
ambassadeur in Nederland (je probeert eens wat conversatie) deze
Roud-theorie voorlegde, liep hij zo rood aan van woede als Louis de
Funès. Het had met iets anders te maken, met grote en kleine
taalgebieden. Want, bien sûr, nasynchroniseren is te duur in talen die
door minder dan twintig miljoen mensen gesproken worden.
Dat wij niet de voeten, maar wel de stem van Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando en George Clooney kennen, danken we dus aan een
eenvoudige economische wetmatigheid.

To summarize: He’s saying a German movie critic once said that they were doing these voice-overs so that we would be able to see the actors’ feet for a change. The French ambassador in the Netherlands contested that and said it was simply a matter of audience size, where countries with an audience size of under 20 million would simply not have the money to do it. I think the Dutch audience was way under 10 million in the ’80s.

An interesting statement in this column is that The Netherlands started flirting with dubbing in the ’90s which appears to have been lucrative enough to start doing it more, suggesting that we (and especially the younger generation) don’t detest it as much as you’d think.

I’m Dutch. A lot of people speak English but most people have a weird Dutch accent. There are also a lot of words which almost sound the same in both English as in Dutch (bier or beer). But with just English you should be able to make yourself clear to a lot of people. If you speak a bit of Dutch is nice but not required. Dutch is a very tough language to learn. At school I have better grades in English than in Dutch.

In my personal experience, you will be fine with speaking English in Amsterdam. Most people will be able to understand you. However I do suggest you learn some key phrases, not out of necessity but out of respect. I think you will find that people are more willing to help you if they can see you are trying to speak their language then when you just assume they can speak English. But I found that people in Amsterdam are mostly friendly and willing to help.

Not sure about the 90% figure but many people in the Netherlands know at least some English and they are very eager to speak it. Dutch people will often switch to English as soon as they sense you don’t understand Dutch and I have never felt any annoyance about that (not a concern for you but even civil servants, the police, etc. will happily help you in English). You should therefore have absolutely no problem whatsoever in Amsterdam.

It’s not unusual to meet someone speaking German or even French or Spanish but it’s obviously more difficult to rely on that.

On the other hand, learning a few words of Dutch and saying “thank you” (“bedankt” or “dank u”) in the local language never hurts.

English is widely spoken in Amsterdam, as well as other cities in the Netherlands, and you will have no problem navigating the city. Personally, I only know a few words of Dutch and I never had a problem in the city.

You may want to bring a phrase book to help you with greetings and simple phrases. Dutch people, like any other cultures, appreciate when you are making an effort.

The phrase book may also help you with pronunciation.

Wikitravel has a phrasebook that you may want to consult.