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
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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