I told a member of my wife’s family that I was trying to learn Dutch and the encouragement I received was rather muted: “Don’t try too hard.”
Studying the Dutch language is a popular pursuit pretty much nowhere. One exception can be made for Francophone Belgium, where studying Dutch is mandatory in schools since the nation is roughly split between the two language communities. I don’t think there’s anyplace though that urges Dutch-learning as a key part of intellectual development, or a ticket to economic success. My chosen pastime is even more obscure due to my residence in America, where language-learning is less prevalent than in most countries.
Aspiring Netherlandophones face more headwind when they visit the very multilingual city of Amsterdam. Or even the university town of Leiden, or the famously intergovernmental Den Haag. The urban part of the country is almost totally given over to international culture, which, if it isn’t English-speaking, it’s ESL-friendly, the type of youth-hostel English with confident malapropisms and faulty subject-verb agreement. The Dutch people I have encountered are either fluent in Clumsy English or fluent in academic, professional English.
A third reason why Dutch is seldom studied is its linguistic relationship to English. No major language is closer to our own, making the rewards of mastery seem unearned or even redundant. A person with no familiarity with Dutch can puzzle out a phrase like “het is hier koud” (it is cold here) or even “verse vis” (fresh fish). If so much Dutch is instantly intelligible, you might think, then why knock yourself out getting familiar with the rules of a glorified dialect, swamp German or Continental English, with a mere 27 million native speakers…You might think you just have to mentally crane your neck a little to understand Dutch, but then you get hit with a word like “levensnoodzakelijk” (vital). Despite some similarities, Dutch is plenty distinct from English or German.
The truth is that underneath the singsong grunts, the language is full of richness, diversity and charm. Consider “belangrijk.” Don’t pronounce the “j.” The “i” is long, as in “dive.” Politically-minded readers probably recognize the German word “reich” and know that it means kingdom, empire, or supreme political unit. Then the first two syllables hit like the English word for ownership over something. So, “belongs to the kingdom”? In fact, “belangrijk” translates to “important.”
Getting an insight into my own (mongrel) language is my favorite reason to study foreign languages: “rug” (back) and “zak” (bag) come together to form “rugzak” (backpack), and explains why we sometimes refer to a “rucksack.” “Jongens” (boys) sounds almost exactly like “young’uns.” “Stoep” can be a flight of steps or a sidewalk, but New Yorkers know that a “stoop” is where you sit on a hot summer day and sometimes throw a ball. Once I learned that “tellen” is the word for “to count,” I had a better feeling for the T in ATM.
It is very unlikely that I will ever encounter a Dutch (or Belgian) person who will rely on me to communicate more than I will rely on him or her. On one level this makes my Dutch-learning inessential. But it also relieves me of any level of necessary attainment or utility: this is just for me.
The image at the top of this post represents some of the earliest Dutch writing, set down by a Flemish monk around 1100. Sharpening a quill during a long day of Latin text-copying, the scrivener writes a bit of a vernacular love poem:
Have all birds nests started except me and you; what wait we for, or: All birds have started making nests, except you and me, what are we waiting for?