The Persistence of the Dutch Language in America
To hear Americans complain that many Spanish-speaking immigrants
are “refusing” to learn English just adds to the evidence that the “United
States of Amnesia” is an apt nickname for this country. Rarely has any
immigrant group given up its natal language in fewer than two generations. Historically,
several of America’s most significant ethnic groups held onto their “mother
tongue” for far longer. I grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, which touches
the Hudson Valley region originally settled by immigrants from the Netherlands—the
Dutch—so let me start with them.
In
1624, the Dutch established New Amsterdam at the southern end of Manhattan
Island. The English took the colony from the Netherlands in 1664. Nearly a
hundred years later, the Dutch language was still being spoken in the Hudson
Valley “fairly extensively,” according to historian John Higham. One history of New York, published in
1756, stated that "the sheriffs find it difficult to obtain persons
sufficiently acquainted with the English tongue to serve as jurors in the Courts
of law."
Before the Revolution, newspapers regularly carried advertisements
for the sale of indentured and enslaved people. Sometimes, bounties were
offered for runaway captives. These notices often indicated the
runaway’s proficiency in Dutch. In fact, the famous abolitionist Sojourner
Truth, born around 1797 as Isabella Baumfree, spoke Dutch as her first
language. Truth had
grown up on a farm in the Hudson Valley only a few miles away from Kinderhook,
the birthplace of Martin Van Buren. Born in 1782, Van Buren would become America’s eighth president.
Despite his family having lived in America for five generations, Van
Buren grew up speaking Dutch. He was our first president to
speak English as a second language, but his immediate predecessor, Andrew Jackson, was
raised in a household where Gaelic may have been spoken. Jackson’s parents were
immigrants from Ireland. In an early instance of “birtherism,” his critics slandered
Jackson as having been brought to America as an infant and not actually born
here. Had this been true, Jackson would not have been constitutionally eligible to become
president.
More than a century after the English had taken control over the colony of New York, local
communities operated schools offering instruction in Dutch, but English schools
were displacing them, prompting geographer
Jedidiah Morse to predict that the Dutch language would likely disappear “in a
few generations.” Morse was not far wrong. While English had generally
displaced Dutch by the beginning of the 1800s, visitors to the Hudson Valley were
still commenting that Dutch had “corrupted” the English spoken there, and old people in a few northern New Jersey communities
were said to speak a peculiar dialect called “Bergen Dutch.”
Of
course, “Dutch” is also what many Americans called immigrants who spoke German,
such as the “Pennsylvania Dutch” who came from Switzerland. Today, more
Americans trace their ancestry to Germany than from any other country. How German-speakers
actively sought to keep the mother tongue alive in America is perhaps the best example of immigrant language preservation and a story for another time.
Portraits of Sojourner Truth and Martin Van Buren from, respectively, the National Museum of Women's History and History.com
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