Zoutelande
by BLØF ft. Geike Arnaert
This card teaches one rule better than a grammar book can, because you can watch it happen inside the word list. Dutch adjectives take an extra -e when they stand in front of a noun, and here both forms sit side by side: gammel and gammele, warm and warme, mistroostig and mistroostige. Read the pairs, notice which member is followed by a noun, and the rule installs itself. It is the commonest small mistake learners make. The rest is a compact seaside vocabulary — strandhuis, wolken, plekken, ouders — in short sentences. A2+ is fair, and the two singers alternate, so your ear gets two different Dutch voices to work with.
How to study this song
“Zoutelande” carries 21 Dutch words, 11 adjectives and 14 verb forms — 46 study entries in all, graded A2+. Begin with kou, geld and handen: get those and most of the lines stop being guesswork. It is unusually descriptive — 11 adjectives alongside 21 everyday words — so expect colour rather than plot. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| NL | EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| kou | cold | frío | freddo | froid |
What this song teaches you
Level · A2+
- Vocabulary words
- 21
- Adjectives
- 11
- Word combos
- 12
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 14
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
“Zoutelande” is a wistful pop-rock duet by the Dutch band BLØF and the Belgian singer Geike Arnaert, released in 2017 on the album “Aan”. Named after a small seaside village in the Dutch province of Zeeland, it swaps far-flung dreams for the simple wish to be by the North Sea with the person you love.
It is a Dutch-language reworking of the German song “Frankfurt Oder” by Bosse, whose melody BLØF adapted into what became one of the biggest Dutch hits of the decade.
The song is not originally Dutch: it is a version of “Frankfurt Oder”, recorded in 2011 by the German singer Bosse with Anna Loos, rewritten around a Zeeland seaside village. It came out on 20 October 2017 as the second single from the album “Aan”.
Did you know?
The single spent ten weeks at number one on the Dutch Top 40 in 2018 — only the second chart-topper of BLØF’s long career — and lingered on the charts for well over a year.
Geike Arnaert, best known as the former voice of Hooverphonic, gives the song its haunting second melody, and the pairing turned a regional place-name into a nationwide singalong.
Charts & streaming
“Zoutelande” was certified multi-platinum in the Netherlands and became one of the most successful Dutch-language singles of its era, with tens of millions of streams.
Its runaway popularity even sparked a wave of interest in the village that gives the song its name, and it remains BLØF’s best-known international-facing hit. It stayed 82 weeks in the Dutch Single Top 100, one of the longest runs ever recorded there.