Introduction

The Dutch loanwords in Amerindian languages have been collected from the works of Peter Bakker, Ives Goddard, Jay Miller, and J. Dyneley Prince (see bibliography at the back of this book). There must have been other Dutch loanwords in Amerindian languages: much information is sure to have been lost since the seventeenth century. In his book from 1999, Cecil Brown says that Dutch loanwords have been found in Onondonga and Oneida, but he does not give concrete examples. (On inquiry, it appeared that the data from the original study were no longer available.)

Delaware Jargon

In chapter 1.1 we already mentioned that almost immediately on arrival, the Dutch settlers made contacts with Native Americans. They carried on a brisk trade with each other; in the course of time there were some conflicts, too. In order to be able to trade and negotiate with each other, the European colonists and the Native Americans developed a simple colloquial language, a pidgin. Perhaps there were more pidgins, but we only have details about one of them, which was based on the Amerindian language Unami Delaware (see 3.2). This pidgin is nowadays called “Delaware Jargon.” The grammatical structure of this language was extremely simple, and the vocabulary, which contained only a few hundred words, was a mixture of Amerindian words and a limited number of loanwords from other languages, especially Dutch, English, and Swedish. The American linguist Buccini claims that Delaware Jargon was developed when, for practical reasons, both Native Americans and Dutchmen used simplified versions of their mother languages in their communications with each other. The point is that the Amerindian languages possess an extremely rich variety of forms and are difficult to learn for others. Realizing this, the Native Americans used a simplified form of Unami Delaware in their contacts with the Dutch; this simplified language forms the basis of Delaware Jargon. The Dutch settlers probably used a simplified form of Dutch as well, which can be inferred from the names for some animals (see 3.4 and 3.5).