Dutch is one of the many languages whose text corpora are included in Sketch Engine, a tool for discovering how language works. Sketch Engine is designed for linguists, lexicologists, lexicographers, researchers, translators, terminologists, teachers and students working with Dutch to easily discover what is typical and frequent in the language and to notice phenomena which would go unnoticed without a large sample of Dutch text.

Sketch Engine has tools to identify and analyse collocations, synonyms and antonyms, examples of use in context, keywords or terms. Frequency word lists of Dutch single-word or multi-word expressions of various types can be generated. Even users without any technical knowledge can create their own Dutch corpus using the Sketch Engine's intuitive built-in tool.

Tools to work with Dutch text corpora

To work with the Dutch language, Sketch Engine offers the following tools:

Dutch Word Sketch

Word Sketch is the easiest way to get an at-a-glance overview of a word’s behaviour. Collocations are displayed in categorized lists to identify strong and weak collocates easily. more»

Available Word Sketches for user corpora: Full-featured Sketch grammar.

Word Sketch difference will compare two word sketches and will indicate which collocates tend to combine with one word or the other. The information can be used to avoid mistakes in word choice or to study the differences between two words with a similar meaning. more»

Dutch concordance

The concordancer included in Sketch Engine can be used to display a list of examples (called concordance) of the search word or phrase as it appears in Dutch language text corpora. The search will display the keyword with some context to the right and context to the left of the keyword (KWIC concordance). more»

Dutch term extraction

Terminology extraction is a feature of Sketch Engine which automatically identifies single-word and multi-word terms in a subject-specific Dutch text by comparing it to a general Dutch corpus. The tool is aimed at translators, terminologists, ESP teachers and anyone who needs to deal with domain texts. The screen with results includes links to example sentences and Wikipedia definitions. more»

Bilingual term extraction

Parallel corpora are used to extract terms in two languages simultaneously and display a terminology list with translations into the other language. more»

Dutch thesaurus

The thesaurus is a feature that automatically generates a list of words similar in meaning to the keyword. more»

Dutch word lists

The word list feature will generate a frequency list of all words that appear in a text or corpus. A very large corpus can be used to generate a list of all words that exist in Dutch or all words that start, contain or end with specific characters. Advanced options can be used to generate lists of grammatical categories or parts of speech used in a corpus together with their frequencies. more»

N-grams in Dutch

Generating a list of N-grams contained in a text makes it possible to identify and study patterns and notice phenomena related to multi-word units (MWU) in Dutch that cannot be detected by other tools. more»

List of available Dutch corpora

  • trial – available to both trial users as well as paying subscribers
  • main – only available to paying subscribers
  • on demand – access to the corpus is subject to specific terms, click the corpus name for details
CorpusAccess policySize in words
Araneum Nederlandicum Maius [2013] main 713,417,518
DGT-Translation Memory parallel – Dutch main 50,523,892
Duch parliamentary debates (ParlaMint 2.1) trial 51,175,668
Dutch parliamentary debates (ParlaMint 2.1, CoNLL format) trial 51,156,406
Dutch Web 2014 (nlTenTen14) main 2,253,777,579
Dutch Web 2020 (nlTenTen20) trial 5,890,009,964
ELEXIS Dutch Web 2020 main 1,024,660,354
ELEXIS Dutch Web 2020 (nlTenTen20) WSD sample main 1,982,397
EUR-Lex 2/2016 parallel – Dutch trial 583,263,688
EUR-Lex judgments 12/2016 parallel – Dutch trial 40,534,071
Europarl spoken parallel – Dutch trial 54,007,722
Gutenberg Dutch 2020 main 87,390,658
Open Parallel Corpus (OPUS) – Dutch main 356,363,571
OpenSubtitles 2018 parallel – Dutch main 444,413,064
SoNaR ondemand 425,978,755
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2014-2016 Dutch trial 401,347,934
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2014-2021 Dutch main 1,390,833,141
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2021-03 Dutch main 31,428,324
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2021-04 Dutch main 23,580,058