Well, Dutch has all the usual letters of the

alphabet, plus

one.

That is: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz and ÿ (ij)

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Yep, that new letter "ÿ" is very hard to enter on a normal
QWERTY keyboard.

That's why we normally use "ij" (an "i" and an "j") in typed
documents (in handwritten documents usually the "ÿ" is used).

So "ij" actually counts as one letter in Dutch (we even have
it in Scrabble .

-

Of course, we also have the i and j as separate letters, but
I can't come up with a word in which j follows i and isn't used as an "ij".
So whenever you see "ij" in a word it's the ÿ.

For example: "hij" {he}, "IJsselmeer" (name of a lake).

The capital "ij" is written as "IJ"; so both letters are capitalized.

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The "y" is like in English, sometimes vowel, and sometimes a
consonant.

It is only used in words derived from a foreign language, like
Greek, e.g. "hypnose" {hypnosis} or "yoghurt" {yogurt}.

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As in most languages the first character of a sentence starts
with a capital (well almost all of the time).

Also names of persons, geographical names start with a capital.
Nouns don't normally start with a capital (it does so in the German language
for instance).

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Sentences end with a "."

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The Dutch language has many diphthongs (two or more vowels forming
one sound together). They are:

"aa", "aai", "au", "ee", "eeu", "ei", "eu", "ie", "ieu",
"oe", "oei", "oi", "oo", "ooi", "ou", "ui", "uu"

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Dutch also has some sorta consonant diphthongs. They are:

"ch", "ng", "sch"

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Why have two things for the same sound? In the old times (before
1920) the "g" and the "ch" sounded different, this also is valid for other letters and
diphthong, like "ij" and "ei" which have the same sound.
We call "ij" 'long' and "ei" short.

This article was used with permission from:
Introductions to the Dutch Language