For the first nine or ten years of her life, the 18th-century abolitionist Sojourner Truth spoke only Dutch. She later used her accent to great effect in her stirring speeches. As Jeroen Dewulf, director of Dutch Studies at University of California, Berkeley, points out in an article in American Speech, as late as the mid-18th century, there were so many Dutch slaveholders in New York and New Jersey meant that up to 20 percent of enslaved Africans in those states spoke Dutch. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Dutch Language in America”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Sojourner Truth was born around 1797 near Kingston, New York, and she became a powerful orator and advocate for racial equality and women’s rights.
What a lot of people don’t know about her, Grant, is the fact that for the first nine or ten years of her life, she spoke only Dutch.
Dutch.
And in fact, as late as the mid-18th century in New York and New Jersey, as many as 20% of enslaved Africans there spoke Dutch because they were in these little communities of Dutch people.
And that was all they knew.
It’s a great example of language reflecting settlement patterns, the kinds of things that we talk about on the show all the time.
In the case of Sojourner Truth, she was well aware that a lot of people thought her accent was funny.
And so she would disarm her audiences by exaggerating it a little bit at first and kind of putting audiences at ease because they were all laughing.
And then at the end, she would come in with these terrific rhetorical zingers.
She really used it to her advantage.
I learned about this and a whole lot more in a fantastic article in the May issue of American Speech.
It’s by Jeroen DeWolf, who is the head of Dutch studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
And among other things, the article raises the question as to whether there are some words in English that may have been popularized by Africans who spoke Dutch.
It’s possible that enslaved Africans in those areas were using the term boss, having picked it up from Dutch.
We know that Bas comes from Dutch, and we know that it originally showed up in the Americas, but it may be that African slaves living in those areas helped to move that word along into the English language.
That’s incredible.
And so this is in the Journal of American Speech.
Yes.
And the article is called?
A Strong Barbaric Accent, America’s Dutch-speaking Black Community from 17th-century New Netherland to 19th-century New York and New Jersey.
And the strong barbaric accent is actually the phrase that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who met with Sojourner Truth, used to describe her accent.
Like it was this exotic African accent.
When in fact she grew up speaking Dutch.
That’s awesome.
That’s a new depth to the woman.
I had no idea.
This is amazing.
Yeah, it’s a terrific article.
I highly recommend it.
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