Houdoe
Encyclopedia
Houdoe is a Brabantic greeting
Greeting
Greeting is an act of communication in which human beings intentionally make their presence known to each other, to show attention to, and to suggest a type of relationship or social status between individuals or groups of people coming in contact with each other...

 which originated in the Dutch province North Brabant
North Brabant
North Brabant , sometimes called Brabant, is a province of the Netherlands, located in the south of the country, bordered by Belgium in the south, the Meuse River in the north, Limburg in the east and Zeeland in the west.- History :...

 and is widely used there, but has spread to Limburg
Limburg (Netherlands)
Limburg is the southernmost of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands. It is located in the southeastern part of the country and bordered by the province of Gelderland to the north, Germany to the east, Belgium to the south and part of the west, andthe Dutch province of North Brabant partly to...

, the south of Gelderland
Gelderland
Gelderland is the largest province of the Netherlands, located in the central eastern part of the country. The capital city is Arnhem. The two other major cities, Nijmegen and Apeldoorn have more inhabitants. Other major regional centers in Gelderland are Ede, Doetinchem, Zutphen, Tiel, Wijchen,...

 and even to parts of Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

. It is a misunderstanding that it has been derived from the English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 short sentence How do you do?. Houdoe has been derived from the Brabantic sentence Houd oe eige goed. This sentence can be translated to Take care of yourself, which is often shortened to Take care. Thus Houdoe is the Dutch equivalent of Take care and as such is used in the same manner, i.e. given when saying goodbye to someone to wish them well.

In parts of North-Brabant people don't pronounce the H, there people say oudoe instead of houdoe. This phenomenon is called H-deletion and is most prevalent in the western part of North-Brabant.

There are a few theories that claim an alternative origin of the word houdoe. The first one being that the word comes from the French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 word adieu. Al lot of French words, from the time that the Netherlands were ruled by France, have remained in the Brabantic dialect, thus it is possible that the French word A-Dieu has bastardized over time to form the greeting (h)oudoe. The other possible theory that explains the origins of the word houdoe is that it is a remnant of time of the Spanish Netherlands
Southern Netherlands
Southern Netherlands were a part of the Low Countries controlled by Spain , Austria and annexed by France...

. In this case it would be the Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 greeting adíos that might have transformed to (h)oudoe.

The word houdoe also bears resemblance to the Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

 greeting to say goodbye: hej då .

There are a few (mostly local) variations to houdoe, like hoedoe and haje, but houdoe is the prominently used one. In Antwerp the full term oudoe go (from hou je goed) is frequently used, often followed by en tot zings (from en tot weerziens, which roughly means and until I see you again).

In 2005 the newspapers Brabants Dagblad
Brabants Dagblad
Brabants Dagblad is a daily Dutch newspaper. It is distributed in parts of North Brabant, especially in 's-Hertogenbosch and Tilburg and their surrounding regions. The paper's office is in 's-Hertogenbosch. The paper is owned by the Wegener conglomerate, which owns a number of regional Dutch...

, Eindhovens Dagblad and BN/De Stem organized an election for the most beautiful Brabantic word, which was won by the word Houdoe.
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