American Language (123 page)

As in the case of American German, two main varieties of Dutch American are to be found in the United States. The first is a heritage from the days of the Dutch occupation of the Hudson and Delaware river regions, and the second is the speech of more recent immigrants, chiefly domiciled in Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas. The former is now virtually extinct, but in 1910, while it was still spoken by about 200 persons, it was studied by Dr. J. Dyneley Prince, then professor of Semitic languages at Columbia, and now professor of Slavonic.
¹⁵
It was originally, he said,

Contact with English wore off the original inflections, and the definite and indefinite articles,
dè
and
en
, became uniform for all genders. The case-endings nearly all disappeared, in the comparison of adjectives the superlative affix decayed from
-st
to
-s
, the person-endings in the conjugation of verbs fell off, and the pronouns were much simplified. The vocabulary showed many signs of English influence. A large number of words in daily use were borrowed bodily,
e.g., bottle, town, railroad, cider, smoke, potato, match, good-bye
. Others were borrowed with changes,
e.g., säns (since), määm (ma’m), belange (belong), boddere (bother), bääznas (business), orek
(earache). In still other cases the drag of English was apparent, as in
blaubäse
, a literal translation of
blueberry
(the standard Dutch word is
heidebes
), in
mep’lbom
(
mapletree
; D.,
ahoornboom
), and in
njeuspapier
(
newspaper
; D.,
nieuwsblad
or
courant
). A few English archaisms were preserved,
e.g.
, the use of
gentry
, strange in America, as a plural for
gentleman
. This interesting dialect now exists only in the memory of a few old persons, and in Dr. Prince’s excellent monograph.

The Dutch spoken by the more recent immigrants from Holland in the Middle West has been very extensively modified by American influences, both in vocabulary and in grammar. As in Jersey Dutch and in Afrikaans, the Dutch dialect of South Africa,
¹⁶
there has been a decay of inflections, and the neuter article
het
has been absorbed
by the masculine-feminine article
de
. Says Prof. Henry J. G. Van Andel, of the chair of Dutch history, literature and art in Calvin College at Grand Rapids: “Almost all the American names of common objects,
e.g., stove, mail, carpet, bookcase, kitchen, store, post-office, hose, dress, pantry, porch, buggy, picture, newspaper, ad, road, headline
, particularly when they differ considerably from the Dutch terms, have been taken into the everyday vocabulary. This is also true of a great many verbs and adjectives,
e.g., to move (moeven), to dig (diggen), to shop (shoppen), to drive (drijven), slow, fast, easy, pink
, etc. The religious language has remained pure, but even here purity has only a relative meaning, for the constructions employed are often English.”
¹⁷
English loan-nouns are given Dutch plural endings,
e.g., boxen
(boxes),
roaden
(roads) and
storen
(stores), English verbs go the same route,
e.g., threshen
(to thresh),
raken
(to rake) and
graden
(to grade), and Dutch prefixes are used in the past tense,
e.g., ge-cut
and
ge-mailed
.
¹⁸
Sometimes these borrowings cause a certain confusion,
e.g., drijven
(to drive) means to float in Standard Dutch.
¹⁹
There is an extensive borrowing of English idioms,
e.g.
, “What is de
troebel?
”
²⁰
A little book of sketches by Dirk Nieland, called “Yankee-Dutch”
²¹
contains some amusing examples,
e.g., piezelmietje
(pleased to meet you), and there are more in his “ ’N Fonnie Bisnis,”
²²
e.g., aan de we
(on the way),
baaienbaai
(by and by),
evverwansinnewail
(every once in a while),
goedveurnotting
(good for nothing), and
of kos
(of course). Mr. Nieland is fond of Americanisms, and introduces them in all his sketches,
e.g., bieviedies
(B.V.D.’s),
sokker
(sucker),
bokhous
(bughouse),
boonhed
(bonehead),
sonnie
(sundae),
domtom
(downtown),
draaigoeds
(dry-goods),
gesselien
(gasoline),
hoombroe
(home-brew),
jenneker
(janitor),
lemmen-paai
(lemon-pie), and
sannege
— (son of a —). In
baasie
(bossy) the American Dutch have borrowed an American adjective made from what was originally a Dutch noun.

In 1930 there were 133,142 persons in the United States whose mother-tongue was Dutch. Of these, 133,133 had been born in Holland.
In addition, there were 170,417 persons of Dutch parentage and 110,416 of partly Dutch parentage, or 413,966 in all. There are no Dutch daily newspapers in the country, but there are ten Dutch and two Flemish weeklies.
²³

The early Swedish immigrants to the United States, says Dr. George M. Stephenson,
²⁴
spoke a multitude of Swedish dialects, but they soon vanished in the melting-pot, and “everybody spoke a ludicrous combination of English and Swedish that neither an American nor a recent arrival from Sweden could understand.” To the children of the first American-born generation Swedish “was almost a dead language; it had to be kept alive artificially. Instead of using the conversational forms of the personal pronouns,
me
; and
dej
, they said
mig
and
dig
. They were so proper that they were improper.”
²⁵
The resultant jargon has been investigated at length by various Swedish-Americans of philological leanings, and especially by Mr. V. Berger, of the
Nordstjernan
(
North Star
) of New York, and by Rektor Gustav Andreen, of Rock Island, Ill.,
²⁶
and there have also been studies of it by philologians at home.
²⁷
It shows all the changes that we have just seen in German and Dutch. It takes in a multitude of American English words bodily,
e.g., ajskrim
(icecream),
baggage, bartender, bissniss
(business),
blajnpigg
(blind-pig),
bockvete
(buckwheat),
dinner, dress, dude, frilunsch
(free-lunch),
fäs
(face),
good-bye, höraka
(hay-rake),
jabb
or
jobb
(job),
jäl
(jail),
klerk
(clerk),
ledi
(lady),
license, meeting, mister, nice
,
peanut, påcketbok
(pocketbook),
saloon, supper, svetter
(sweater),
taul
(towel),
trunktject
(trunk-check),
trubbel
(trouble),
velis
(valise); it displaces many Swedish words with translations of analogous but not cognate English words,
e.g., bransoldat
(fireman) with
brandman, brefkort
(postcard) with
postkort, ekonomidirektör
(business-manager) with
affärsförståndare, hushållsgoromål
(housework) with
husarbete, husläkare
(family doctor) with
familje-medicin
; and it takes over a large number of English idioms, either by translation or by outright adoption,
e.g., bära i minne
(to bear in mind),
efter allt
(after all),
gå republikanskt
(to go Republican),
i familjen
(in the family),
Junibrud
(June bride),
kalla till ordning
(to call to order),
på tid
(on time). In forming the plurals of loan-nouns, it not infrequently adds the Swedish plural article to the English
s, e.g., träcksena
(the tracks) and
karsarne
(the cars). Sometimes the singular article is suffixed to plurals,
e.g., buggsen
(bugs) and
tingsen
(things). In other cases the English
s
is used alone,
e.g., ekers
(acres).
Kars
is used as a singular noun,
en kars
meaning one car. The suffixal singular articles,
-en
and
-et
, are, of course, often (but not always) added to loan-nouns in the singular,
e.g., trusten
(trust),
sutkäsen
(suitcase) and
homesteadet
(homestead), and the loan-verbs take the Swedish suffixes
a
or
ar, e.g., mixa
(to mix),
kicka
(to keep),
talkar
(to talk),
resa garden
(to raise a garden), and
påka funn
(to poke fun).
²⁸
There are sometimes difficulties when loan-words resemble or are identical with Swedish words. Thus,
barn
means a child in Swedish; nevertheless, it is used, and Mr. Berger says that
barn-dance
is in common use also.
Grisa
(to grease) also offers embarrassments, for it means to give birth to pigs in Swedish. So does
fitta
(to fit), which, in Swedish, signifies the female pudenda. Loan-words borrowed by American from other languages go into American-Swedish with the native terms,
e.g., bas
(boss), which is of Dutch origin;
luffa
(to loaf), which is German;
²⁹
and
vigilans
(vigilantes) which is Spanish. The Swedish-American puts his sentences together American fashion. At home he would say
Bröderna Anderson
, just as the German would say
Gebrüder Anderson
, but in America he says
Anderson Bröderna
. In Sweden
all over
is
öfverallt
; in America, following the American construction, it becomes
allt öfver. Min vän
(my friend) is Americanized
into
en vän af mina
(a friend of mine). The American verb
to take
drags its Swedish relative,
taga
, into strange places, as in
taga kallt
(to take cold),
taga nöje i
(to take pleasure in),
taga fördel af
(to take advantage of), and
taga tåget
(to take a train). The thoroughly American use of
right
is imitated by a similar use of its equivalent,
rätt
, as in
rätt av
(right off),
räti i väg
(right away) and
rätt intill
(right next to), or by the bold adoption of
rite. All right, well
and other such American counter-words are used constantly, and so are
hell
and
damn
. The Swedish-American often exiles the preposition, imitating the American vulgate, to the end of the sentence. He uses the Swedish
af
precisely as if it were the English
of
, and
i
as if it were
in
. Some instructive specimens of his speech are in “Mister Colesons Sverigeressa,” by Gabriel Carlson,
³⁰
for example:

Mr. John A. Stahlberg, of Plentywood, Mont., tells me that he once overheard the following dialogue between a farmer’s wife and her son:

There are phonetic changes in some of the loan-words taken into American-Swedish.
J
commonly becomes
y
, to accord with its pronunciation in Swedish,
e.g., yust
(just), and
th
often becomes
d, e.g., dat
(that). But these changes are common in the speech of many other kinds of immigrants. Perhaps more characteristic is the occasional change from
y
to
g, e.g., funnig
(funny) and
kresig
(crazy). The common American belief that all Swedes, in trying to speak Engish, use
been
in place of
am, is, are, was, were, had been
, etc., and pronounce it
bane
is hardly justified by the observed facts. It may be done but it is certainly not common, even on the lower levels. “I can confidently say,” says Robert Beckman, himself a Swedish-
American, “that I have never heard one utter I
bane
in ordinary conversation.… Perhaps inaccurate linguistic observers — listeners, rather — thought they heard
bane
where a trained ear would have caught something entirely different, though what, I dare not venture to state.”
³²