Spraakwater: How Dutch Rap Revived the Dutch Language

Abstract

In 2024, the Dutch music landscape is dominated by homegrown acts who sing or rap in their mother tongue. Though this has always been the case in many other European countries, it’s a fairly new phenomenon for the Netherlands where, for generations, the most successful and revered acts either wrote lyrics in English or, in the case of most electronic dance music, surpassed the need to write lyrics altogether. In a world where English has become the lingua franca of the online sphere and the Americanization of Western Europe is stronger than ever, this sudden appreciation for the mother tongue in Dutch music seems rather strange.

In “Spraakwater”, I would like to argue that the success of Dutch rap has played an essential role in popularizing the use of the Dutch language across the Dutch music industry. The most important reason for this is the fact that Dutch has been the dominant language for hip-hop in the Netherlands since its early development. So, when Dutch rap became the dominant form of popular music in the Netherlands during the 2000s and 2010s, it introduced a whole generation of musicians and fans to the idea that writing and performing music in Dutch can be commercially viable, artistically worthwhile, and above all, cool.

I will examine this development by offering a detailed analyses of the history of Dutch rap and its embrace of the Dutch language, while also discussing the genre in a broader context of popular music, Dutch-language music, Dutch identity, Americanization, and academic concepts like ‘cultural cringe’ and ‘glocalization’. This will hopefully give us a better understanding of the rich, but often neglected history of hip-hop in the Netherlands and how it relates to our current musical climate.