I wrote a chapter on Dutch for a handbook on polyphthongs in the world’s languages. Below is the abstract. The manuscript is on LingBuzz
The core of the Dutch diphtong system are three diphthongs, one at each of the major places that Dutch also reserves for monophtongs: front unrounded /ɛi/, front rounded /ʏy/ and back rounded /ɑu/. In this chapter we first discuss these three core diphtongs, their historical origin and their place in the current system.
We also compare these to two other sets. The first are the so-called ‘false dipthongs’ /uj, aj, oj, iw, ew/. These differ from the ‘real’ diphthongs in that the consist of vowel parts that are at different places of articulation (whereas real diphtongs are all in one place, differing only in height), and in their syllabification properties (true dipthongs allow non-coronal consonants in the coda, but false dipthongs do not).
The second set to which true diphthongs need to be compared are the mid vowels which in (Netherlands) Dutch tend to be diphtongized at least phonetically: /ej, øj/øw and ow/. Again the syllabification properties are different and in spite of their phonetics they phonologically still seem to fit completely in the set of monophthongs.
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