Why we don't all speak Dutch: Language extinction and language survival

Presented to the Club 2005
by Martin C. Langeveld

In 1609, the Dutch ship Halve Maen, or Half Moon, searching for the Northwest passage, sailed up the Hudson River. It had been chartered by the Dutch East Indies Company, carried a mixed Dutch-English crew, and was under the command of a hired Englishman, Henry Hudson. Fifteen years later, in 1624, acting on Hudson’s reports, the Dutch established the colony of New Netherland, centered on Manhattan, with an outpost in present-day Albany. Quickly thereafter, the Dutch set up additional outposts and laid claim to territory stretching from Delaware Bay to the Connecticut River, encompassing all of present-day New York State and New Jersey, and parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware and Connecticut.

The New Amsterdam colony was, from its very beginnings, the start of the “melting pot” that American society would eventually become. Half of the residents of New Netherland were Dutch, but the rest included countrymen of most European nations as well as Africans, both free and slaves. In contrast to the New England colonies with their strict religious monoculture, the Dutch tolerated settlers from a variety of religious backgrounds, including Jews. Their society included not only upright citizens but also an underculture of “pirates, prostitutes, smugglers, and business sharks.” A multitude of languages was spoken on the island of Manhattan in those early days, just as one can experience on the streets of New York today.

The Dutch lost control of their colony in 1664, when the English took over, without firing a shot, during one of the periodic Anglo-Dutch wars of that century. However, the Dutch did not go away after the English takeover, nor did their culture fade away. In fact, despite the fact that only a tiny minority of immigrants to the New York region after 1664 came from the Netherlands, the Dutch language continued to be widely spoken in the New York region for over 200 years. Not until 1764 was English used to preach in New York’s Dutch Reformed churches. President Martin Van Buren (born in 1782 not far from here in Kinderhook and elected in 1836) spoke Dutch at home with his wife. The first 20th century president, Theodore Roosevelt, grew up hearing his grandparents speak Dutch at the dinner table in New York City in the 1860s. Sojourner Truth, the anti-slavery orator and associate of Frederick Douglass, was born as a slave in Ulster County, New York about 1797, and grew up speaking nothing but Dutch until she was eleven years old. Dutch was spoken in parts of Brooklyn into the mid 1800s and is quite likely the origin of the so-called Brooklyn accent.