We hebben een serieus probleem

Why is Dutch so funny to English speakers?

The war was close to over, and after almost six hard years the Allies were marching on Berlin. And then came the news the whole world was waiting for: HITLER DOOD. WAT NOU?

In recent months the Dutch language has become a big source of amusement to English-speaking Twitter users, many of whom are unfamiliar with a tongue that seems so weirdly familiar. In this instance the language wasn’t in fact Dutch but Afrikaans – in Dutch I believe it’s Hitler Dood. Wat Nu? - although the two are so similar as to make the joke work.

Back in January, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders tweeted that ‘We hebben een serieus probleem met de politieke ontwikkelingen mbt de dwangwet en ik hoop dat dat de komende dagen kan worden opgelost.’

It was a serious point which nonetheless attracted lots of jokes and became a meme, and ‘we hebben een serieus probleem’ entered the online English phrasebook. More recently, we all had a good chuckle when a Dutchman tweeted that ‘Ironie is dood’. Again this was a serious issue, but among all foreign languages, Dutch is the most amusing to Anglophones, occupying an uncanny valley that leads some people to describe it as ‘drunk English’.

Largely due to the huge French influence, or perhaps because we’ve just been stuck on an island too long, but English is no longer mutually intelligible with any other Germanic language, although an English speaker can read a newspaper from Holland and get the gist of the headlines.

The closest language to English is Frisian, in particular the West Frisian spoken in the north of the Netherlands, the kinship of which is recognised in the ditty Bûter, brea en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk – ‘Butter, bread and green cheese is good English and good Frisian’. Or if I wanted to introduce myself to a Frisian speaker, I think my compatriots could understand me: Goeie moarn, myn namme is Ed en ik kom út Ingelân.

But Dutch is certainly the closest national language, and on a lexical map of Europe,  English is measured as being 37 points away from Dutch, 49 from German and 56 from French, which by this estimate make English and Dutch closer than Russian and Ukrainian, or Spanish and Italian (with the closest national languages being Swedish and Norwegian).

It’s easy to see why Dutch is close enough to feel eerily familiar when one reads sentences such as this:

Appel is een fruit. 

Ik drink twee glazen bier.

Mijn vader is dokter. Hij is een goede man

It also contains many words that are amusing to English ears, such as neushoorn for rhinoceros and eekhoorn for squirrel, or stofzuiger for a vacuum cleaner. Then there is their tendency towards literal terminology: Goedkoop means cheap (literally ‘good buy’) and a seal is zeehond (‘sea dog’). Similarly a glove is handschoen - ‘hand-shoe’ - and your gums are tandvlees (‘tooth meat’). Sandwich is boterham (butter-chunk).

Lots of Dutch words also sound rude. A shop is a winkel and winkelwagen a shopping trolley. (Sexwinkel is a sex shop). Hondenfokker is a dog breeder, while whipped cream is slagroom, slag meaning to hit or beat, while hagelslag is a hailstorm, but also a snack.

Brown sugar is basterdsuiker, while diksap is their term for concentrated juice, and cooking is kok, while a chef’s hat is a koksmuts; the Dutch surname Kox means ‘cook’ and there is even a politician called Tiny Kox, which I find childishly amusing. Slagwerk is the Dutch for drumming and if you go to give blood you will do so in the prikcentra. And if you ask whether you can do something, a Dutchman will reply ‘u kunt’.

None of us need to know this, of course, because the Dutch are the more proficient non-native English speakers in the world. Even if you try to be polite and preamble your conversation with spreekt u Engels, they will look at you curiously as if you’ve asked them if they can read.

It’s a far cry from the time, many moons ago, when Dutch was an international language. In To Stand with the Nations of the World, his history of Japan’s rise to greatness, Mark Ravina noted that Admiral Enomoto Takeaki, when speaking to the British consul without a translator, would communicate in what was then something of a lingua Franca – Dutch. 

Takeaki had spent five years studying naval science in the Netherlands, which was the obvious place to go because the Dutch had been such a presence in his country, in part able to smooth their way by stoking anti-Catholic fears; a letter from Maurice of Nassau in 1610 warned his hosts that ‘the Society of Jesus, under cover of the sanctity of religion, intends to convert the Japanese to its religion, split the excellent kingdom of Japan, and lead the country to civil war’. The Dutch, they reassured them, were only interested in money (a believable argument, it has to be said).

The 19th century Japanese mission to western Europe, which was to transform that country, was inspired by Guido Verbeck, the Dutch-born adviser to the government. Yet by now Japanese scholars were surprised to learn that the Hollanders were no longer a major power, and Marius Jansen writes in The Making of Modern Japan that the country ‘had transformed into a small trading state that minded its own business as quietly as Tokugawa Japan did. Japanese students sent to Holland in the 1860s concluded with dismay that they had been studying the wrong Western language and country. Matsuki Koan, the future Terajima Munenori, spoke for them in a letter he sent in 1862. “Many scholars in England and France raised their eyebrows when they heard we read Dutch books,” he wrote: “even the Hollanders themselves all read their books in French or German… Beyond the borders no one knows Dutch. I must honestly say that the country is so small and mean as to startle one.”’

The Dutch language was formed from the dialects of the Germanic tribes who inhabited the region, the Frisians, Franks and Saxons, and the ancient term is theudisk, meaning the language of ‘the people’, as opposed to Latin, the language of the Romans and clerics. Although this is the etymological origin of Deutsch – German - the first use of this word is believed to date from 784 and refers to the language spoken in Britain, ie Old English.

The Anglo-Saxons saw the people across the water as their kin, calling them collectively the ‘Saxons overseas’, but in time we came to use the Latin term ‘German’ for those living beyond the Rhine, perhaps influenced by the popularity of Tacitus from the 16^th century.  

The people nearest to us came to call their language Nederduits, or Low German, and according to Roland Willemyns’ Dutch: Biography of a Language, while ‘Nederlands’ was first used in 1482, it didn’t become the standard term until the 19th century. 

The Netherlands is indeed small and mean, and their greatness rested on being, as Egon Friedell noted, ‘the first great commercial people of the Modern Age’. He wrote how: ‘They recall the Phoenicians in their hard matter-of-fact materialism, their crafty and unscrupulous acquisitiveness, and their turbulent decayed oligarchy. Like the Phoenicians they owed their economic supremacy to the circumstance that they were ahead of other nations in the developing of the mercantile idea.

‘There is no doubt that the cultural level was at that time higher in Holland than in the rest of Europe. The universities enjoyed an international reputation. Leyden in particular was accounted supreme in philology, political science, and natural philosophy. It was in Holland that Descartes and Spinoza lived and worked, as also the famous philologists Heinsius and Vossius, the great jurist-philosopher Grotius, and the poet Vondel, whose dramas were imitated all the world over. At a time when illiteracy was still almost universal in other lands, nearly everyone in Holland could read and write; and Dutch culture and manners were rated so high that in the higher ranks of society a man’s education was considered incomplete unless he could say that he had been finished off in Holland, “civilisé en Hollande”.’

Such was the cultural confidence that, as Willemyms notes, in 1569 Johannes Goropius Becanus claimed that Dutch was the oldest language, spoken by Adam and Eve, his argument being that the name Duyts, pronounced doutst, meant ‘the oldest’. He also suggested that Dutch was the most naturally suited to science as it had the most monosyllabic words, as well as a great richness of vocabulary – Dutch had 1,428 nouns and 742 verbs compared to Greek, which had 220 and 45 respectively, and Latin even fewer. Becanus’s work inspired a continental and English interest in the Germanic peoples which would grow in the early modern era.

Dutch is also spoken in Belgium, although we call this softer dialect Flemish, and here the language had once been discriminated against. French had been the language of the urban elite, and it wasn’t until 1898 with the Gelijkheidswet – law of equality – that Dutch and French were declared to be on a par, although Belgium’s long tradition of language-related spite remains. Yet it remained low-status even among educated Flemish speakers and Guido Gezelle, the 19th century poet, referred to the ‘half-heathen, half-Jewish language of the Hollanders’ - and it’s true that Dutch does have many Hebrew words.

Dutch influence was felt around the world because the Dutch in large part invented modernity, the combination of capitalism and liberalism which was taken up by the British and then the Americans, at the heart of which was an ultra-WEIRD tolerance for religious and ideological diversity. 

As Amy Chua observed in Day of Empire, visitors were stunned by the variety of religious sects here. Englishman Peter Munday wrote of Amsterdam in 1640: ‘The Citty is nott divided in to parishes as with us, butt every one goes to what church hee pleases, there being only 8 or 9 publicke churches besides the English, French, Lutherans, Anabaptist, etts., and Jewish Sinagogues… A Tolleration off all sects [of] religion.’

His compatriot, the lampoonist Owen Felltham, called the Dutch Republic a ‘universall quagmire’ and a ‘green cheese in a pickle’ but conceded that the Dutch were ‘in some sort Gods, for they set bounds to the Ocean and allow it to come and go as they list’.

One English propagandist asked: ‘is there a mongrel sect in Christendom which does not croak and spawn and flourish in their Sooterkin bogs?’ Another complained that ‘sometimes seven religions are found in one family’.

Even English religious refugees escaping persecution at home despised the toleration they enjoyed, one calling it the ‘Den of several Serpents’ in which ‘you may be what Devil you will so long as you push not the State with your horns’. Unhappy with this den of tolerance, some then sailed off to America.

But economist Pieter de la Court wrote in his Interest of Holland that ‘toleration was essential’ to ‘stimulate the immigration so urgently needed to sustain the economy and population of Holland’s cities’, an argument that sounds familiar. Most of the refugees were other European Protestants but there were also a sizeable number of Jews from Iberia, and even Turks and Armenians, while everyone was interested in learning here; in 1700, one-third of Leiden’s students were British. 

This capitalist tolerance enabled them to grow extremely wealth, and foreigners noted how even ‘base-born’ shopkeepers and cobblers wore velvet and owned costly linens. The sons of cheese makers lived in palaces ‘with splendid marble and alabaster columns’ and ‘floor inlaid with gold.’

Like the similarly wealthy Americans today, the Dutch were also famous for their calorie intake. English naturalist John Ray was revolted by the ‘big-boned and gross-bodied’ people who were ‘almost always eating’. In 1703 seven churchmen from Arnhem got through in one sitting ‘fourteen pounds of beef, eight pounds of veal, six fowl, stuffed cabbages, apples, pears, bread, pretzels, arrested nuts, twenty bottles of red wine, twelve bottles of white wine and coffee.’

They could do this because they were rich, and that wealth allowed them to dominate the oceans. Of 20,000 ships involved in carrying trade in the mid-seventeenth century, Chua suggests that as many as 16,000 were Dutch; by 1670 they owned more tonnage than England, France, Portugal, Spain and Prussia put together, and at its peak it was larger than the English and French fleet combined, at a time when France’s population was 10 to 20 times as large. In 1667 the  Dutch even sailed up the Medway and towed away the HMS Royal Charles, flagship of the Royal Navy. 

Yet their small size was set against them, as was geography. While their somewhat less advanced cousins were protected by the sea and able to take the Dutch liberal capitalist revolution to new lengths, the Netherlands was both small and vulnerable to the dangers of continental armies, in particular France (it also lacked Britain’s mineral wealth).

The English edged them out of North America, taking New Amsterdam in 1664, although people of Dutch descent remained something of an elite in the region, and it’s arguable that the culture of the colony had a lasting impact on the city. 

Certainly, David Hackett Fischer, author of Albion’s Seed, sees those pathways in the city’s liberal commercial traditions, writing that ‘New York City today still preserves qualities which existed in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam — and Old Amsterdam.’ In which case the greatest and most influential city of the modern age, like capitalism, is a product of the Netherlands, and while the English language became dominant, it did so with Dutch ideas. Their influence on the world has waned, but it is certainly niet dood.