The Talk of the Town: Languages in Amsterdam 1507–2007

Abstract

This paper is an impressionistic sketch of the language history of Amsterdam in the past five hundred years. To this end we discuss some of the main economic and demographic developments of the city and the political units that it has formed a part of, notably the County of Holland, the Republic of the United Netherlands and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Departing from the past and present dialect situation and processes such as dialect levelling, we also study the language contact effects of migration movements of several types, immigration from abroad and from different regions in the Netherlands. Religious refugees played an important role; this holds for e.g. Brabant Protestants from the Antwerp area around 1585, German religious refugees during the Thirty years War (1618–1648), and Huguenots (i.e. French Protestants) from 1685 onwards. Particular attention is paid to Sephardic (from 1593) and Ashkenazic Jewry (from 1618); especially the Ashkenazim and their main vernacular, Yiddish had an important role as Yiddish was the source for Jewish Dutch. It had long-lasting lexical (on Amsterdam dialects and modern colloquial Dutch) and phonetic effects (on the Amsterdam dialects). More recently, economic considerations played the main role in the immigration, as in the case of the Chinese (as of 1911), Italians, Yugoslavs and the Spaniards (after World War II). Large scale migration from Surinam started in the 1960s. The main groups among the latest arrivals include Turkish migrants (now 5.1% of the Amsterdam population) and Moroccans (8.7%). We end this paper with a brief sketch of a research project which concentrates on the relatively young ethnolects of Dutch spoken by second generation migrants of Turkish and Moroccan descent in Amsterdam as well in the city of Nijmegen (in the southeastern part of the Netherlands).