Typesetting ij/ij in Dutch: vrijgeven or vrijgeven?

Question

Continuing Typesetting in Dutch: Dijkstra vs. Dijkstra, how do you typeset the Dutch word for release:

1. vrijgeven (with two separate glyphs i and j) or
2. vrijgeven (with a ligature ij)?

Do i and j in this word belong to two syllables or to one?

(I'm not asking about the capitalized versions VRIJGEVEN vs. VRIJGEVEN. I'm also not asking about what various typesetting programs currently do in Dutch: their authors are sometimes terribly off, and the programs sometimes do exhibit unintended behavior. I'm asking what should be the case in Dutch for the lower-case word.)

Answer 1

The 'ij' sound is a single phoneme in the Dutch language. Like many other European languages, Dutch has its share of diphthongs, and this is one of them.

Hence, regardless of whether you consider the ij to be a single letter or a combination of two existing ones, it is (almost*) always a single sound, and thus part of a single syllable. Your example would be split in syllables as vrij - ge - ven.

Never hyphenate between the i and j of an ij diphtong. Any decent automated spelling checker with an up-to-date Dutch hyphenation routine should do this correctly.

As per my answer to Typesetting in Dutch: Dijkstra vs. Dijkstra, whether you typeset it with two letters or a ligature... we don't really care.

_{* Of course there are rare exceptions, like the words 'bijoux' (a French loan) and 'bijectief' (a Latin-like construction).}