“The last real speaker of the dialect”

Every good story has at least one villain. Fortunately for our story, but unfortunately for linguistic scholarship, the history of the Dutch language on the American East Coast also has its villain. What is more: that history ends with him. His name is Lawrence Gwyn van Loon.

Van Loon was born in New York City in 1903, and he died in the village of Gloversville, New York, in 1985. When he was a boy, his maternal grandfather, Walter Hill, taught him the tawl, the Dutch that at that time was still spoken in the Mohawk Valley. During his holidays, together with his father and his grandfather, the young Van Loon would visit a number of older people who still had some command of the tawl. That was the beginning of Van Loon's lifelong relationship with the Dutch language. But already during the days of his secondary education, as he wrote in 1980, “things got … a bit blurry … but at least skeletons remained.” While a medical student, he spent the summers of 1930 and 1932 in the Netherlands, at the Wilhelmina Hospital in Amsterdam, “where I quickly found that what I knew from Gramp and all the others was an oddity (to say the least).” Here he also met his Dutch wife-to-be, Grietje Prins, whom he married in 1932. He set up practice as a general practitioner in Reading, Pennsylvania. At home, Dutch was the language spoken with his wife and children.

The interest in the Dutch language spoken on the American East Coast that was awakened in his youth remained with Van Loon during the rest of his life. He devoted several publications to it, starting in 1938 with the book Crumbs from an Old Dutch Closet. The Dutch Dialect of Old New York. It was published by Martinus Nijhoff, a prestigious publisher in The Hague. Van Loon describes Mohawk Dutch, the dialect he had heard spoken in the Mohawk Valley in his youth. Interestingly, nowhere in the book is any account given of how the material was collected, nor of who the informants involved were; what we do find are a few quotations by a certain “Mr. and Mrs. Dewitt Link” about halfway through the work.