Brabant
by Guus Meeuwis
Two words here have no clean English equivalent, and they are the reason to study the card. heimwee is not quite homesickness: it is longing for a place rather than for people, and Dutch reaches for it constantly. ijskoud shows the other habit, intensifying an adjective by welding a noun to the front of it — ice plus cold — a pattern productive enough that spotting it once lets you decode dozens more. The remaining vocabulary is a small town after dark: kroeg, muts, kraag, huissleutel, dorpscafé. Meeuwis sings in a southern accent with the soft g the region is known for, which makes this the easiest card here for tuning your ear to regional Dutch.
How to study this song
Learning “Brabant” means 60 entries at A2- — 32 Dutch words, 11 adjectives and 17 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Work through the glossary first: muts, hoofd and kraag are the words you will lean on most. It is unusually descriptive — 11 adjectives alongside 32 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| muts | cap | gorro | berretto | bonnet |
What this song teaches you
Level · A2-
- Vocabulary words
- 32
- Adjectives
- 11
- Word combos
- 11
- Expressions
- 11
- Verb forms
- 17
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
“Brabant” is a heartfelt ode to home by the Dutch singer Guus Meeuwis, released as a single in 2003.
Meeuwis wrote it while far away in Moscow, and that distance shapes the whole song: from a cold, unfamiliar city where it gets dark early and people keep to themselves, he aches for the warmth and openness of his native province of North Brabant in the southern Netherlands.
The tender, swelling melody turns a personal homesickness into a shared regional anthem. Meeuwis wrote it with the pianist Jan-Willem Rozenboom, who years later realised where the chords came from: he had been working on Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the time, and said the classical elements had slipped in unnoticed.
Did you know?
The song became a beloved unofficial anthem of Brabant and a centrepiece of Meeuwis’s huge annual “Groots met een zachte G” concerts in the Eindhoven football stadium, where tens of thousands of fans sing it back to him.
Its very local subject — pride in a specific Dutch province — is a big part of why audiences there embraced it so completely.
Charts & streaming
“Brabant” was a strong chart success in the Netherlands and has proved remarkably durable, remaining one of Guus Meeuwis’s best-known and most-streamed songs. As the emotional high point of his stadium shows, it continues to draw steady airplay and singalong devotion two decades after its release.
Released on 15 February 2003, it was no chart sensation — it stopped at 24 in the Dutch Top 40 — and its status was built afterwards, by the stadium concerts and by repeated listener votes.