Trip of the Tongue Read Free Page A

cruller (from krulle , “crooked piece of pastry”), and Santa Claus (from Sinterklaas , a shortening of Sint Nikolaas ), are particular favorites of many Americans.
    One lingering trace of Dutch in the English language serves as a reminder that no matter how red-white-and-blue American something might seem, in a nation of immigrants just about everything we have has at some point been influenced by a foreign language or culture. To wit: although there have been a wide range of etymologies suggested, it seems likely that we have the Dutch to thank for the word Yankee . In his book American English , the linguist Albert H. Marckwardt writes, “The most credible [etymology] seems to be Dutch Jan Kees , ‘John Cheese,’ a term applied to the New Englanders somewhat contemptuously, or at least patronizingly. This was mistaken for a plural by the English-speaking colonists and a new singular, Yaenkee , was derived through the process of back-formation.” Though the word’s modern-day connotations are rather more complicated, it will surely please southerners and Red Sox fans alike to know it was derogatory from the start.
    To me, however, the most interesting story English has to tell about language in New York is the fact that English is spoken at all. Though Dutch was the first colonial language of New York and remained for many years an important second language, even in the very early days of the colony it was only one of several languages spoken in the area. New Netherland was home to French, Norwegians, Danes, Germans, Scots, and Irish, and by 1644 there were reportedly already eighteen languages spoken in Manhattan. Just over a century later, the city’s cosmopolitan community was large enough to require separate houses of worship. In 1748, Manhattan boasted two Dutch churches, three English churches, two German churches, one French church, and a Jewish synagogue.
    Soon enough, the floodgates opened. Between 1815 and 1915, nearly 33 million immigrants came to the United States from all over the world. Three quarters of them arrived via New York, and they brought their languages with them. Today the city is home to nearly 350 daily, weekly, and bimonthly publications representing more than 50 languages. City services are required by law to provide support for speakers of the city’s six most widely spoken languages, which are currently Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian, and Haitian Creole. If you call 311, the city’s non-emergency service line, you can request assistance in any of 192 languages. More than 150 languages are spoken in its public schools, 138 were listed on its Census forms, and as many as 800 are heard on its streets.
    And yet, despite this multiplicity of languages and dialects and cultures and homelands, if there is one thing New Yorkers have in common, it’s English. We are all, with varying degrees of necessity and success, trying to understand English or trying to make English understood. When languages other than English are spoken at home, they are spoken, overwhelmingly, by first- and second-generation immigrants. Although some new arrivals may never have the chance to learn English at all, much less fluently, the acquisition of English by later generations is inevitable, even in the relatively insular communities so casually maligned as “language ghettos.” At the end of the day, English—and English alone—is the de facto official language of New York City.
    This, ultimately, was the lesson I learned in Queens, a lesson I couldn’t have learned until I found myself in a borough where every day I encountered and interacted with Korean, Turkish, Romanian, Spanish, and Japanese. Until then I had been so consumed by my efforts to learn everybody else’s languages that I failed to notice everybody else was learning mine.
    The fact of the matter is this: outside of grammar class, we don’t often think about the whys and