Dutch American - Dutch Language and Dutch Names in North America

Dutch Language and Dutch Names in North America

The first Dutch settlers lived in small isolated communities, and as a consequence were barely exposed to English. As the Dutch lost their own colonies in North America to the British, the Dutch settlers increasingly were exposed to other immigrants and their languages and the Dutch language gradually started to disappear.

In 1764, Dr. Archibald Laidlie preached the first English sermon to the Dutch Reformed congregation in New York City. Ten years later English was introduced in the schools. In Kingston, Dutch was used in church as late as 1808. A few years before, a traveler had reported that on Long Island and along the North River in Albany, Dutch was still the lingua franca of the elderly.

Francis Adrian van der Kemp, who came to the United States as a refugee in 1788, wrote that his wife was able to converse in Dutch with the wives of Alexander Hamilton and General George Clinton. In 1847, immigrants from the Netherlands were welcomed in Dutch by the Reverend Isaac Wyckoff upon their arrival in New York. Wyckoff himself was a descendant of one of the first settlers in Rensselaerswyck, who had learned to speak English at school.

Until recently many communities in New Jersey adhered to the tradition of a monthly church service in Dutch. As late as 1905, Dutch was still heard among the old people in the Ramapo Valley of that state. Dutch is still spoken by the elderly and their children in Western Michigan. It was not until 1910 that Roseland Christian School in Chicago switched to an English curriculum from Dutch.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Dutch language was hardly spoken in North America, with the exception of first generation Dutch immigrants. The marks of the Dutch heritage - in language, in reference to historical Dutch people (for example Stuyvesant) and in reference to Dutch places (for example Brooklyn which stems from Breukelen) - can still be seen. There are about 35 Dutch restaurants and bakeries in the United States, most of them founded in the 20th century.

New York City for example has many originally Dutch street and place names which range from Coney Island and Brooklyn to Wall Street and Broadway. And up the river in New York State Piermont, Orangeburg, Blauvelt and Haverstraw, just to name a few places. In the Hudson Valley region there are many places and waterways whose names incorporate the word -kill, Dutch for "stream" or "riverbed", including the Catskill Mountains, Peekskill, and the Kill van Kull.

There are also some words in American-English that are of Dutch origin, like "cookie" (koekje) and "boss" (baas). And in some family names a couple of Dutch characteristics still remain. Like (a) the prefix "van" (as in Martin van Buren), (b) the prefix "de"(/"der"/"des"/"den") (as in Jared DeVries), (c) a combination of the two "van de ..." (as in Robert J. Van de Graaff), or (d) "ter"/"te"("ten"), which mean respectively (a) 'of' (possessive or locative), (b) 'the' (definite article), (c) 'of the ...' and (d) 'at the' ('of the'/'in the') (locative).

Similarities between Dutch and English are abundant. Examples include the article 'the' ('de' in Dutch), the words 'book' (boek), 'house' (huis), 'pen' (pen), and, 'street' (straat), among others. Dutch and English are both part of the West Germanic language group and share several aspects. Adaptation of place names between the languages is common, as was the case of New York, where several landmarks like Conyne Eylandt became more suitable to Anglophones (Coney Island).

Contact between other languages also created various creoles with Dutch as the base language. Two examples, Jersey Dutch and Mohawk Dutch, are now extinct. This is possibly due to the ease of transition from Dutch to English, stemming from a shared linguistic genealogy.

Little Chute, Wisconsin remained a Dutch-speaking community—known locally as “speaking Hollander”—into the twentieth century. As late as 1898, church sermons and event announcements were in Dutch. Dutch newspapers continued in the area—mainly in De Pere by Catholic clergymen—were published up until World War I . The only remaining publication that is written exclusively in Dutch is Maandblad de Krant, which is published monthly in Penticton, British Columbia and mailed to subscribers throughout the United States from Oroville, Washington.

The American state of Rhode Island is a surviving example of Dutch influence in Colonial America. In 1614, was christened as "Roodt Eylandt" (Rood Eiland in modern Dutch), meaning 'Red Island', referring to the red clay found on the island.