Cynics Unlimited

On the language curricula of most high schools and universities in North America , Dutch rarely if ever appears. It was never taught, as far as I know, at any secondary school in my hometown of Windsor , Ontario . The language is furthermore not considered an international medium of communication as English, French and Spanish or, to a lesser extent, German and Portuguese are. Still, Dutch has an interesting history and has made an impact on other languages and other places besides its homeland in Northern Europe.

Dutch is, like English, a Germanic language, along with German itself, the Scandinavian languages and the now-extinct Gothic. Though most people think of Dutch as the language of the Netherlands , the reality is not so simple. Dutch is also spoken in the region of Flanders in Belgium , where it is known as Flemish. Some controversy exists as to whether Flemish is a dialect of Dutch or a language in its own right. Whether language or dialect, however, Flemish obviously differs from the French with which it has shared what is now Belgium . Legend has it that in 14th century the Flemings in the city of Bruges rose up against their French masters. It was necessary for the former to distinguish who was who between the two groups when carrying out their rebellion. Therefore they made everyone they encountered repeat the Flemish phrase “schild en vriend” (shield and friend). Since the sound “ch” (similar to the “ch” in the Scottish word “loch”) was impossible for native French speakers to pronounce properly, the rebels were able to detect their overlords and promptly slaughter them. In his autobiography Stranger in their midst, Belgian anthropologist Pierre van den Berghe, the son of a French mother and Flemish father, humorously describes his psychological unease in hearing this story told as a child in school.

In turn, not everyone in the Netherlands claims Dutch as a mother tongue. In the province of Friesland in the country’s northwest, the population speaks a separate language called Frisian. Frisian holds the title of being the modern language most closely related to English, though it must be said that Dutch itself is more like English than, say, German is. Frisian is used as well on the coasts of Germany and Denmark . An example of the connections between the above-mentioned languages: “cow” is “ko” in Frisian, “koe” in Dutch, and “kuh” in German.

Dutch spread outside its homeland with the rise of the Netherlands ’ colonial empire in the seventeenth century. Over the following 300 years the nation’s territory would encompass parts of what are now New York State, the northern part of Brazil, Surinam (formerly Dutch Guyana), the Caribbean islands of Curacao and Aruba (still under Dutch control), South Africa, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia. However, the colonizers’ success in promoting their language was variable. Dutch never took hold as a mother tongue in Asia other than among small groups of mixed-race inhabitants like the Burghers in Sri Lanka and Indos in Indonesia. This was not due to any weakness of the language itself but rather to the fact that Europeans did not immigrate to Asia in large numbers and were thus unable to influence the general population of the lands they ruled; a parallel example is Spain ’s former colony of the Philippines , where Spanish was never adopted as a native language.

The Dutch had more luck in South Africa . There the Dutch settlers (the Boers, literally “farmers”) and their descendants, including a group of racially mixed individuals known as the Coloureds, came to speak a derivative of Dutch called Afrikaans. In contrast to Flemish’s questionable status, Afrikaans is generally considered to be a separate language from Dutch. Afrikaans is currently one of South Africa ’s official languages, together with English after Britain ’s takeover of the country in 1902. Dutch is also spoken by over half the residents of Surinam . On the other hand, in Curacao and Aruba it did not succeed in replacing the Portuguese-African Creole Papiamento as a mother tongue, even though Dutch enjoys official status on both islands. (One little note: Belgium had colonies too, but the administrative language in its possessions was French, not Flemish.)

Despite its somewhat limited diffusion, Dutch has managed to add a number of words to the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. As the Netherlands has always been a seafaring nation, not surprisingly some of these borrowings have had to do with water, such as “buoy.” Other terms to make their way into English include “boss,” “trek” and “smuggle.” One of the most interesting contributions is “boor,” which originated from “boer.” Although, as I mentioned above, “boer” means “farmer” in Dutch, today a “boor” in English is an unpleasant and uncouth man regardless of his profession (farmers seem to have gotten a bad press; the word “churl,” for instance, comes from the Old English “ceorl” for a peasant). Finally, Dutch has etched its mark in New York City , formerly New Amsterdam . “Brooklyn” comes from a Dutch phrase meaning “break land,” while Harlem is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands.

One might ask why despite the Netherlands ’ role as a colonial power around the globe and, within Europe , its prominence in fields like the arts and sciences Dutch never became an international language. Part of this was bad luck. Many of the places the Netherlands ruled were basically “unWesternizable,” such as Asia, or had been previously colonized by another European country, like the Portuguese in Brazil . In addition, the Dutch are good linguists (most Dutch people I know speak English, French, and German in addition to their mother tongue), so they have tended to learn other people’s languages rather than making others learn theirs. Still, given that the Netherlands has one of the highest birth rates in Europe , it doesn’t look like Dutch is going to disappear anytime soon. So Dutch may yet constitute one of the Western world’s most widely spoken languages.

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