It was also spoken in the Ramapo Mountains into the 1930's according to
- if memory serves me - "The Ramapo Mountain People" by David Steven
Cohen,

Mike

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Bob Arnold wrote:

> When I was a little boy in the early 1950's, in one of the hill towns of Albany County, there was a vigorous old farmer who still spoke Dutch, learned from his family, who were among the early 17th century settlers in New Netherlands. There are also some Dutch borrow-words peculiar to the hilltowns and Schoharie County.
>
> >>> [log in to unmask] 11/07/02 06:01PM >>>
> The message below was sent to the Mountain Top Historical Society in Haines
> Falls (Greene County, NY) and subsequently forwarded to me, requesting that I
> pass it along to someone who might be able to help this gentleman. Please
> contact him at <[log in to unmask]> if you can help. Thanks. Patricia
> Morrow, Windham Town Historian
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Delivered-To: [log in to unmask]
> From: "Marco Evenhuis" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 3 Nov 2002
>
> Hi,
>
> I am interested in the remains of the Dutch language as a language of
> colonists abroad. I visited your website and thought that maybe your society
> could help me find some more information about the linguistic heritage in the
> Catskill region.
>
> A friend of mine wrote me the following: "I used to own a house on a
> mountaintop in the Catskills and several of my neighbors who were born just
> before or after WW II told me that Dutch was spoken in their homes as a daily
> language when they were growing up."
>
> Since Dutch linguists never did any research in the area that was once the
> colony of New Netherland, they assumed and still assume that what a few local
> scholars wrote them, was correct: "The Dutch dialects of Jersey Dutch, Albany
> Dutch and Mohawk Dutch, spoken in NJ en NY State, died out around 1900. There
> are no speakers left."
>
> I find that this statement, that has been copied over and over again into all
> popular and scientific publications about the Dutch language in America, is
> incorrect and needs to be refined. Almost without any effort, I already found
> some people who claim that a family member still spoke Dutch in the 1950s and
> 60s.
>
> The reason that I write you this e-mail is to see if you can help me with the
> following question: do you have any idea untill when (colonial) Dutch was the
> home language for a significant part of Dutch descended families in the
> Catskills region and do you know if there might still be some people around
> that maybe still know (some of) the language? The latter sounds more far
> sought then it actually is given the information that my friend came up with
> as well as the fact that in 1998 I found a handful of speakers of Berbice
> Creole Dutch in Guyana, a language that was considered to have already died
> out in the 1880s or 90s.
>
> If you cannot help me answer these questions, maybe you know someone who can
> help me. I am not really interested in the help of 'professional linguists',
> because they tend to follow the general assumption the language already died
> out a century or at least half a century ago without any further research.
>
> Greetings from the Netherlands!
>
> Marco Evenhuis
>