Language
Janke is not a Yankee
How Dutch is American English?
In the last century English has taken over the world. But in its turn the language itself has also picked up an awful lot of things from that world. Everyone knows that French had an important influence on English after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. What is less generally known is that Dutch has left traces there too, particularly in American English, and even in other North-American languages. So much is clear from a recent study by Nicoline van der Sijs.
Van der Sijs has become one of the most eminent linguistic history experts in the Dutch language area. She publishes a new book virtually every year. The thoroughness of her approach makes all her books worth reading, and the same goes for this latest study: Cookies, Coleslaw and Stoops. The Influence of Dutch on the North-American Languages. It is the first survey of the history of Dutch in the United States. Dutch and Flemish emigrants travelled to America in two waves: in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All kinds of monographs have been written about the influence the emigration had on the language. For instance, Van der Sijs cites as one of her sources an ‘unpublished manuscript’ (an Introduction to Low Dutch Dictionary of around 1980). That is characteristic of her method of working. She does not confine herself to readily accessible sources. Poems, plays, children's books, maps, dialect maps, cartoons - Van der Sijs leaves no stone unturned in telling her tale.
In the book she tells her story in three stages. After an introduction a good hundred pages long on the history of the Dutch language in North-America, she writes about the Dutch words that have made their mark on American English. She has recorded that influence in a thematic glossary. So we can read about Dutch words in the American vocabulary in the areas of food, drink and luxury delicacies: cookie (from Dutch ‘koekje’), smear-case (from ‘smeerkaas’), waffle from (‘wafel’)); in the plant and animal world groundhog is a literal translation of the Dutch ‘aardvarken’; in the field of household goods and everyday items (bake-oven (‘bakoven’), bed-spread (‘bedsprei’), dobber (‘dobber’); in children's language: Santa Claus (Sinterklaas), a saint commemorated every year at the beginning of December. The figure the English expression refers to, dressed in red plush with a cap and sleigh who brings presents for the children around Christmas time, is called the ‘kerstman’ - Father Christmas - in Dutch), rolle bolle (‘rollebollen’), and so on. The third and final part of the book deals with the influence of Dutch on the North-American Indian languages. For example, words such as appel (apple), komkommer (cucumber), kool (cabbage) and watermeloen (watermelon) have been adopted by a number of Indian languages (Loup, Mohican, Mohegan-Pequot and Munsee), along with the names of animals such as kalkoen (turkey), kip (chicken), varken (pig) and poes (cat), and words for clothing such as broek (trousers/breeches) and
hemd (shirt).
Van der Sijs' approach has led to some fresh insights. As already stated, she is the first to provide a comprehensive survey of this subject, and that in itself is something new. But scraps of new information can also be found in the studies of individual words, which are always underpinned with references from the literature. Until now the etymological literature has stated over and over again that the word knickerbockers for ‘kniebroek’ ultimately derives (via an author's pseudonym) from the Dutch surname ‘Knickerbakker’. Van der Sijs patiently traces the trail back. From the book A History of New York published by Washington Irving in 1809 under the pseudonym of Diedrich Knickerbocker, a book in which Dutch colonists were portrayed wearing knee-length trousers, via the history of the Knickerbocker family in the United States, to the assertion that the family name derives from an old occupation. ‘Modern sources’ she writes, ‘stick to the explanation of the name of the occupation of Knickerbocker (“baker of knickers” (children's marbles)), but this is highly unlikely, because it is doubtful that someone with such a specialized occupation could make a living in the seventeenth century. What is certain, however, is that knikkerbakker, howsoever spelled, exists in Dutch neither as the name of an occupation nor as a family name.’
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