Trip of the Tongue (2 page)

The Lenape's most lasting contribution to the English language is undoubtedly the name of the island they sold to the Dutch for sixty guilders. Although there is no firm consensus on the meaning of the name
Manhattan
—or
manna-hata
, as it was first recorded by Henry Hudson's crew—the widely accepted translation is “hilly island.” This translation assumes the name is a combination of
mannah
, a Munsee word for “island,” and an Algonquin suffix indicating hills or mountains. “Hilly island” is only one of many suggested translations, however. Other suggestions range from the similar if slightly more poetic “place of many hills” to the entirely dissimilar “good place to collect bow wood.”

The second-most-common translation of
Manhattan
may have less linguistic support, but it is undoubtedly my sentimental favorite. In the course of his study of the customs of the Lenape, a Moravian missionary named John Heckewelder was told an interesting story about the origin of
Manhattan
, which Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace relate in a footnote of
Gotham
, their great first volume of New York City history:

The Lenape gave a Pennsylvania missionary their version of what happened when the first white men landed on Manhattan: they sighted a “large canoe or house” moving across the water and decided that it belonged to the Supreme Being, “the great Manitto,” who then appeared before them dressed entirely in red. After a preliminary exchange of courtesies, he offered them a toast and they all got happily drunk—whence the site came to be known as Mannahattanink, “the island or place of general intoxication.”

When Heckewelder passed this information along, he remarked, “Facts are all I aim at, and, from my knowledge of the Indians, I do not believe every one's story. The enclosed account is, I believe, as authentic as any thing of the kind can be obtained.” I would love to be able to take his word for it.

The other Munsee word we all know a version of came to English less directly. In 1886 a coffee broker named James Potter was invited to an estate of the Prince of Wales. When Potter inquired about appropriate attire, he was directed to His Royal Highness's Savile Row tailor, where he was fitted with a tailless dinner jacket. That fall Potter wore this same jacket to a ball at his club back in the United States. The jacket was widely remarked upon, and the style was later named for Tuxedo Park, the town where it had first been seen. The word
tuxedo
itself, meanwhile, most probably came from the Munsee word
p'tuck-sepo
, or “crooked river.”

Then there are the European languages of New York. The first European we know of to visit New York City stayed just long enough to merit having his name, centuries later, assigned to a bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island.
*
It wasn't until Henry Hudson sailed the
Halve Maen
into Lower New York Bay in 1609 that a new language gained a foothold in the area.

By the time the British took over New Amsterdam and the rest of the colony in 1664, Dutch was a language of considerable influence in the area. In fact, Dutch remained the official school language in New York until nearly the nineteenth century, and as of 1756 there was still a sizable enough Dutch-speaking population to cause bureaucratic complications. William Smith, a local historian, observed at the time that “English is the most prevailing Language amongst us, but not a little corrupted by the Dutch Dialect, which is still so much used in some Counties, that the Sheriffs find it difficult to obtain Persons sufficiently acquainted with the English Tongue, to serve as Jurors in the Courts of Law.”

Though many of the words Dutch loaned to English have fallen out of use, plenty remain to bear witness to the important—if brief—role the Dutch played in early American history. Some of these words are New York City–specific.
Stoop
, for instance, is an anglicization of
stoep
, “a small porch with seats or benches.” The Dutch also contributed place names such as Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx, as well as topographical terms such as
kill
(creek) and
hook
(angle).
Bowery
—which in modern New York is for reasons I have been unable to uncover always preceded with a definite article—originated from a Dutch word for “farm.” Dutch words used outside the five boroughs include
cole slaw
,
waffle
,
caboose
,
snoop
, and
spook
. Some of these words, such as
cookie
(from
koekje
, “little cake”),
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 wherefores of our native languages. If you grow up in an English-speaking family and in an English-speaking community, it is easy to underestimate the number of men, women, and children throughout the country who are busy supplementing their native or traditional languages with English. It is even easier to overlook the fact that this has been the case since the very earliest days of United States history.

Whenever I find myself forgetting this, I try to think of the 1910 Census. If you look at the reports from Schenectady, New York, you will find, in a long list of handwritten names with suspect spellings, the names Martin and Franziska Lupka. A laborer and a housewife, respectively, they came to the United States in 1889 with their son Franz and settled in New York City before eventually moving up to Schenectady. According to their Census data, twenty years later they still spoke Polish. At the same time, halfway across the country in North Dakota, Edvard and Mina Knain were raising their seven children on a farm just outside Northwood. Though they had emigrated from Norway in 1884, by 1910 Mina still spoke only Norwegian.

Meanwhile, Franz and his siblings and Edvard and his children already all spoke English.

Martin and Franziska and Edvard and Mina are my great-great-grandparents, and they serve as a reminder to me that, throughout history, men and women in America have experienced language in two radically different ways. While I use English with rarely a second thought, just a hundred years ago my ancestors were struggling—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—to adapt not just to a new way of living but also to a new way of speaking.

The diversity of Queens, the artifacts of language contact, the persistence of English. Individually these may seem like ordinary observations. But taken together, they led me to think seriously for the first time about what it has meant to be a minority-language-speaker in the United States. What was it like to learn a new language before Berlitz or Pimsleur, much less Rosetta Stone or Google Translate? What challenges did these men and women face from the English-speaking community? Why do some languages last while others fade away? And did speakers of languages in the former group feel less American than speakers of those in the latter? How, ultimately, has the language experience affected the American experience?

Queens may have led me to these questions, but the answers, I knew, could only be found outside its borders. So I culled through books, blogs, magazines, and Census data for information on language communities past and present, thriving and extinct. I looked for languages that had died out and been reclaimed; languages that had somehow managed to remain mostly the same, despite the entropy born of adaptation and assimilation; languages that were clinging to survival solely through the efforts of communities determined not to lose touch with the past. I looked for European languages, American languages, African languages, Asian languages. I looked for languages that had been here for centuries and languages that had been here for months.

But most of all, I looked for languages that would be able to tell me something about why language communities in the United States have, again and again and again, eventually yielded to the seemingly implacable preeminence of English. I didn't just want to better understand language in America; I wanted to better understand the language experience in America.

Then I printed out some maps, packed up my Subaru, and hit the road.

Over the course of the next two years, I drove more than 25,000 miles, traveling through every continental state save Vermont and Rhode Island. I stayed in hotels and motels, in cabins and on couches. A few of my trips were quick jaunts down the coast or up to New England. A few were cross-country marathons. Along the way, I lost four tires, three windshields, and my favorite pair of pants. But I found Norwegian in North Dakota, Spanish in the Southwest, and creoles in Louisiana and Georgia. I learned about Crow, Navajo, and Makah. I picked up my first words of Haitian Creole on the streets of Miami, and I struggled with Basque spelling in a dusty corner of Nevada.

This book is not a comprehensive outline of the history of language in America or an exhaustive catalog of the country's heritage-language communities. It isn't even an unabridged record of my travels. The fact is, despite my preparation and enthusiasm, my expeditions weren't always successful. Sometimes I'd visit a city or a town and find only the vaguest hint of the language in question. Sometimes there wasn't anything to see or do. Sometimes no one would talk to me. On one occasion my plans were foiled by severe winter weather and on another by my friend Damian, who kept finding ways to convince me to go out drinking. But, in the end, I learned far more than I'd anticipated.

What follows are my accounts of the people, places, and languages that were the most interesting, the most revealing, and the most surprising. Together they tell a story of conflict and kinship, marginalization and assimilation, and, ultimately, one part of what it means to be American.

*
The Lenape are also frequently referred to as the Delaware Indians.

*
Eagle-eyed New Yorkers may have wondered why the official spelling of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge has one fewer
z
than its namesake. This is not exactly a misspelling, but a choice: Giovanni da Verrazzano was born, lived, and died in France, and accordingly he adopted and used in public the French version of his name, Jean de Verrazano.