Category names in Dutch: café vs cafe

This post is meant to address an issue that the Dutch speaking local guides are struggling with - and which is therefore leading to a lot of confusion and inconsistency. @InaS can you please make sure the info is forwarded to the relevant team?

In English there are 2 categories ‘cafe’ (1) and ‘bar’ (2). Both refer to places where you can go to consume beverages. The first is typically used for places that have a focus on coffee/tea and are primarily opened during the daytime, and the second is typically used for places with more focus on soft drinks or drinks containing alcohol, opened also in the nighttime.

In Dutch, (1) is translated as ‘cafe’ (without accent) and (2) is translated as ‘café’ (with accent). As you might expect, the 2 are mixed up to a large extent in regions where Dutch is spoken (Netherlands and Flanders, the northern part of Belgium). From a grammatical point of view, only ‘café’ is a correct word in Dutch, so my suggestion is to replace ‘cafe’ in the Dutch list with ‘koffiehuis’ (coffee house if you translate it literally). I have asked around in the community of Dutch speaking local guides and the majority agreed that ‘koffiehuis’ would be a proper and suitable translation.

And let me tag @KattyGeltmeyer here, a highly active and motivated local guide from Belgium, as I have been exchanging some emails with her on this topic.

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Thanks for this post and for bringing this up. I hope maps can solve this issue soon. I also found out that “cafe” is in many pub names, but in Dutch it should be written as “café”. I for sure can change these names, but I’m not sure the search tool within google maps permits me to search for cafe without showing me “café”. You also can’t search within categories. If I e.g. search for a specific point of interest type like Bottle bank or glass bin, and a specific categorie, I also see the bottle banks or glass binns with other categories. Editing poi’s is the only way I can earn many points besides writing a review (the correct word for “review” in Dutch =recentie), so improving the search tools within maps also would be a big help. Thanks in advance.

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Thank you, @JanVanHaver , for tagging me in your post. I will forward this information to the relevant team for them to have a look at it.

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Hi @JanVanHaver ,

I wanted to share with you that the category “cafe” has been updated to “Koffiehuis” as per your suggestion. Thank you very much for bringing it to our attention.

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