BABEL IN REVERSE
by Ross Perlin

The expulsion and dispossession of Lenape people began a process that ultimately, by a tragic irony, would make the city into a haven for peoples fleeing other parts of the world. Lenapehoking was Lenape, but New Amsterdam would only ever partially be Dutch. New York would never be completely English. Nor is NYC exactly American.

The early port of New Amsterdam brought together Native American, African, and European peoples from the beginning—as encapsulated by a figure like Jan Rodrigues. Officially under the Dutch West India Company starting in 1624, the new entrepôt served as a secondary satellite in a network of coastal trading posts stretched between Brazil, Suriname, Curaçao, Ghana, and Benin, among other places.

Headquarters itself was in Amsterdam, center of the newly indpendent Dutch Republic and itself a magnet for refugees and immigrants from across Europe, given its relative religious tolerance and economic dynamism. New Amsterdam beckoned to many of the Republic’s newest arrivals.

The first permanent European settlers arrived in New Amsterdam in May 1624: 32 Walloon families who had fled the Catholic takeover of Valenciennes and Roubaix in today’s France (near Belgium) and resettled in Leiden. They were both a religious and linguistic minority, speaking Walloon, a language related to but distinct from French. In 1625 it was Walloon refugee Pierre Minuit, on behalf of the West India Company, who made the famous “purchase” of Manhattan.

Though Virginia and Massachusetts were essentially monolingual English colonies in this period, New Amsterdam stood out for its linguistic diversity, which was inseparable from its commercial opportunities and basic spirit of grudging religious tolerance. Approximately half of the population was (diversely) Dutch, and this count likely includes a variety of disproportionately numerous Walloon, Frisian, and Flemish speakers.

The other half of New Amsterdam’s population consisted of enslaved Africans, northern Europeans from around the North Sea littoral, and English-speaking religious refugees like Anne Hutchinson and Lady Deborah Moody, who came down from New England and clustered in outlying areas like Long Island and Westchester. A few individuals from elsewhere added a particularly multilingual and cosmopolitan character to the port, such as Pietro Cesare Alberti from Venice and Anthony Janszoon van Salee, the Muslim “Turk” whose mother was a Moor from Spain and whose father was a Dutch pirate in what is now Morocco.

“On the island of Manhate, and in its environs,” wrote the French Jesuit priest Isaac Jogues in 1643, “there may well be four or five hundred men of different sects and nations: the Director General told me that there were men of eighteen different languages.” He himself was passing through town to perform the city’s first Catholic mass for an Irish man and a Portuguese woman. Though neither Jogues nor anyone else attempted to specify the 18 languages, it must included many of what are considered today to be minority languages. If anything, it was likely an underestimate, leaving out several African and Native languages that New Amsterdammers carried with them to the new port.

Hundreds of African people were enslaved and forcibly brought to the city during the Dutch period, and thousands more after that—and they highly multilingual. To the extent that they have recorded, their first names tended to be Portuguese, while surnames pointed to geographic origins: men like Paulo d’Angola and Simon Congo were among the first, in 1625. This reflected the Portuguese role during this period both in the slave trade and in the Kingdom of Kongo and Northern Angola, where many of the enslaved come from. Others came via Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Caribbean ports where Portuguese and Spanish creoles were likely spoken. All must have faced intense pressure to give up their native African languages, so it’s likely that Portuguese or a Portuguese-based creole was important at first, followed by a shift to Dutch.

The evidence is indirect, largely from personal names and group names used by slave traders and owners themselves, but it is likely that many were speakers of Kikongo, Ndongo, or Kimbundu. There are records of bilingual court cases involving the city’s African community, both enslaved and free, where it seems that there may have been interpretation between Dutch and either Kikongo or Kimbundu, but otherwise questions about African language use in New Amsterdam and early New York remain unanswered — though it must have been almost impossible to maintain mother tongues under the circumstances of enslavement.

Patterns would change soon after during the English period, with an accelerating slave trade trafficking likely Akan speakers (known as Coromantees at the time) from today’s Ghana, Gbe language speakers from Benin (known as Popo), and apparently some Malagasy speakers from Madagascar during a brief period in the late 17th century. As time went on, most of the enslaved came not directly from Africa but from Jamaica or Barbados, where English-based creoles were likely already being spoken.

Lenape continued to be spoken in New Amsterdam throughout the Dutch period and much longer in the surrounding area — not only by Native peoples but also by some of the colonists who learned it when young and went on to serve as interpreters. Even more commom was the reverse: Lenape speakers learning Dutch out of necessity and borrowing a substantial number of words. Nor was Lenape the only Native language spoken, as visiting speakers of Mohawks, Mahican, and Susquehannock arrived, especially for trade. Not to mention the visits of Long Island relatives speaking what are known today as Unkechaug, Montaukett, or Matinecock.

Though the English took control after 1664, Dutch for some time remained pre-eminent and multilingual settlers from all over continued to arrive. For one English observer several decades later, the new “New York” was still “too great a mixture of nations and English the least part.” Soon after, Reverend Justus Flackner wrote that his Lutheran flock included not only Dutch speakers but “High-Germans, also Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Poles, Lithuanians, Transylvanians, and other nationalities.”

Besides Dutch and English, the city’s third language by the late 17th century was indisputably French. The first wave was a group of Waldensian religious refugees who came to Staten Island in the 1650s, but a more substantial one three decades later brought Huguenots, Protestant refugees driven out of France.

The early importance of Portuguese was perhaps only reinforced by the arrival in 1654 of soldiers and colonists fleeing the fall of Recife in Dutch Brazil, which included the first significant group of Jewish settlers — Portuguese- (perhaps Judeo-Portuguese?) speaking Sephardim who had originally fled Portugal because of the Inquisition. Like Van Salee and other religious dissidents in town, they were grudgingly tolerated—and in time they would come to be outnumbered by Ashkenazi Jews, speaking Yiddish, German, Polish, and other languages — though Hebrew could serve as a shared liturgical language.

English may have started to dominate across the span of the 18th century, with a new local style fast developing on the streets, but two major new immigrant waves soon transformed the linguistic landscape. Most Irish New Yorkers were initially Anglo-Irish Protestants who spoke English or Scots-Irish speaking English or Scots (related to the English varieties of northern England), or even “German Irish” refugees with roots in southwest Germany, who came to County Limerick in 1709 and later New York.

Increasingly over time there were clearly Irish speakers too, mostly Catholics from western Ireland, where the Irish language was still holding its ground against the colonial onslaught of English. The language was rarely written at the time, so evidence is hard to come by, but ads posted for runaway servants that mention knowledge of the language or an accent—for many early Irish speakers in New York were likely indentured servants. Others seem to have been political exiles, like those rebelled against English domination in 1798, culminating in the Battle of Vinegar Hill which later gave the Brooklyn neighborhood its name.

The Famine changed everything, driving an estimated 200,000 Irish speakers between 1845 and 1855 to flee southern and western parts of Ireland, the areas most affected, for North America. Most entered via New York, and by 1860 there may have been an estimated 73,000 Irish speakers in Manhattan and Brooklyn, which is nearly as many as native speakers as there are in the entire world today.

During the very same period, political instability and privation in what would soon become Germany were driving speakers of diverse forms of “German” to come en masse to the city — some 800,000 staying or passing through in the 1850s alone. New York quickly became the third-largest Germanic-language city in the world after Berlin and Vienna, and the Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) centered on Avenue B (German Broadway) and Tompkins Square Park in today’s East Village comprised hundreds of blocks. Arguably this was the first time any U.S. city had had a major, “institutionally complete” immigrant neighborhood where daily life in all its forms could carry on in a language other than English.

Nor was Kleindeutschland a simple “German-speaking” monolith, but rather a dynamic and complex patchwork of at least half a dozen related Germanic languages somehow navigated day in an day out, including large groups of Prussians, Bavarians, Palatines, Swabians, Hessians, Wurttembergers, Hanoverians, and many others from Austria, Switzerland, the North Sea coast, and elsewhere. Each group to some extent was concentrated on different blocks in different wards, and to some extent in different professions as well: Hanoverian grocers, shoemakers from Baden, Prussian tailors.

In 1850, some 28 “German”-language newspapers were based largely in the neighborhood, and there were still a dozen dailies left in 1890, including in regional languages like the Plattdeutsche Post (in Low German) and Schwabbisches Wochenblatt (in Swabian). Numerous other Central and Eastern European communities speaking different languages would soon grow up and take root nearby.

From these beginnings, virtually every European language and dialect would come to New York by the early-mid 20th century. Not even in any single city in Europe itself would the continent’s linguistic diversity would be represented to such a degree — not only the newly standardized national languages but the dozens of oral, minority, and endangered languages, like Basque (spoken by the East River ports), Arumanian (in a small area in the Bronx), and Maltese (centered in Astoria among speakers of Italian, Greek, and Arabic varieties just as in the central Mediterranean).

Even people assumed to speak national languages often spoke something quite different among themselves. For instance, many of the Spanish New Yorkers who founded the “Little Spain” near the Hudson River piers (today’s West Village/Chelsea area) were in fact Galicians, whose mother tongue is closer to Portuguese, and who later established their Casa Galicia in Queens.

Little Spain became home not only to Galicians and Castilians but also Catalans, Basques, and Asturians, and later Cuban and Puerto Rican political refugees and cigar makers who would come to form the core of Nueva York, a Spanish-speaking city where an unprecedented diversity of Spanish varieties are spoken today.

Likewise with French New Yorkers, who in the first half of the 20th century disproportionately hailed from a linguistic minority on their country’s Atlantic fringe, speaking the Celtic language Breton. The same is true of those usually described as Russian and Ukrainian New Yorkers, who in fact considered themselves Rusyn, speaking a particular continuum of Slavic dialects from the Carpathian region in what is now Slovakia, Poland, and Ukraine.

Living near the Rusyns in Williamsburg and themselves seen as “Russians” or “Turks” were the Lipka Tatars, who came from what is now Poland and Belarus. They spoke either their variety of the Turkic language Tatar, or by then perhaps more likely Polish or Belarusian dialects, which the community has written in the Arabic script. Their Powers Street mosque, built in 1931, was the first in the city and stands today as one of the oldest in North America, still used on holy days like Kurban Bayrami (Eid al-Adha).

In an even more consequential case, New York has long been one of the largest Italian cities in the world, giving a home to almost all of the Italo-Romance languages spoken in the country. For the most part, however, the national language Italian (a literary variety originally based on central Tuscan) was little spoken. In fact, most of the four million Italian immigrants who came to the U.S. between 1880 and 1924, mostly through New York, knew hundreds of related but distinctive village-based dialetti (dialects), largely from Sicily, Campania, Calabria, Puglia, Abruzzo and Molise, Basilicata, and Lazio. Local identities, as captured by the word campanilismo (the togetherness of those born within earshot of the village campanile, or bell tower), have remained at the core of many Italian communities.

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©2022 Text by Ross Perlin