Dutch
It is often said that the use of the word Dutch by English-speaking people to refer to Germans was the result either of a confusion of identities or an attempt to pronounce the German word Deutsch, which, it is assumed, the Germans used to describe themselves.
These explanations do not hold up under scrutiny. Of course, there were cases of confusion, but in the seventeenth century, when German settlers began to arrive in substantial numbers in Britain’s North American colonies, the term Dutch still had meanings that have disappeared and are forgotten today.The terms Deutsch and Dutch are closely related cognates, but prior to the nineteenth century—and even prior to the unification of Germany in 1871—many migrants from the German states were not prone to describe themselves as Deutsch, even to strangers. They were more likely to refer to the territorial state from which they came. In some instances their sense of religious identity transcended the designation of homeland, as was often the case with Amish, Mennonites, Dunkers, Jews, and Moravians—to mention only a few. The “Pennsylvania Dutch,” the German Americans whose ancestors came mainly from the Palatinate and Lower Rhine regions and settled mostly in eastern Pennsylvania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often did not recognize the term Deutsch as applicable to themselves, even after the unification of Germany. With sarcastic wit they referred, in their German dialect, to the new arrivals as Deitschlanner (Deutschlander in standard German); that is, people who were constantly talking about Deutschland, a political entity created long after the ancestors of the Pennsylvania Germans departed for the New World.
The use of Dutch as a synonym for German antedates British settlement of North America. In the late Middle Ages and early modern period, Dutch included both Germans and Dutch.
It referred to people speaking a group of closely related Germanic languages. This usage pertained mainly to inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire and distinguished two kinds of “Dutch” people on the basis of geography, culture, and, critically, language: “High Dutch (Hochdeutschi),n or “High German” in today’s English usage; and “Low Dutch (Niederdeutsch),” or “Low German” in today’s usage. The English language did not distinguish Netherlanders from other speakers of “Low Dutch,” except by specifying the province, locality, or region.War and political change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created a strong need to distinguish Netherlanders
from other “Low Dutch.” The successful wars for independence waged by the northern provinces of the Low Countries led to the creation of the Republic of the United Provinces. Their withdrawal from the Holy Roman Empire and their independence were confirmed by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The English language responded by increasingly restricting the term Dutch to people from the Netherlands. The corresponding shift in Dutch was different. The term duytsch, or duits, the Dutch cognate of Dutch and deutsch, was restricted to Germans and no longer included Netherlan- ders or their language. The Netherlanders now referred to their own language as Ned- erlands.
The refrain of an old drinking song that I learned in college on the edge of the Pennsylvania German region expresses clearly some of the distinctions once made between various uses of Dutch.
O, the Highland Dutch, And the Lowland Dutch, The Rotterdam Dutch, And the Goddamn Dutch, Singing glorious, glorious! One keg of beer for the four of us, Thank God there are no more of us, O, glorious! O, glorious!
In this song “Highland Dutch” stands for the Austrians and South Germans. The “Lowland Dutch” are the northern Germans. And the “Rotterdam Dutch” refers to the inhabitants of the Dutch Republic or the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
English-speaking colonists and their descendants were carrying on traditional usage when they persisted in referring to Germans as Dutch in colonial America and beyond. An often overlooked reason why this label has stuck so well is that the confusion has often been useful to German Americans. For example, during both world wars the Pennsylvania Dutch seemed to many Americans to have nothing to do with Germany. General John J. Pershing, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, went a step farther when he, like some other Pennsylvania Germans, attempted to prove that his Palatine ancestors were actually French; they or their ancestors were presumably French Protestants who found a temporary haven in the Palatinate before emigrating to America.
There is still another reason why the term Pennsylvania Dutch has survived the efforts of many scholars over many decades to eradicate it. A distinctive culture developed and persisted in some parts of Pennsylvania and nearby upper southern and middle western states. Both other German Americans and other Americans have perceived of this culture, especially in its Amish and Mennonite forms, as distinctly different from any other German culture.
Walter Struve
See also German Unification (1871);
Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania German (Dutch) Language
References and Further Reading
Yoder, Don. “Palatine, Hessian, Dutchman: Drei Bezeichnungen fur Deutsche in Amerika.” Hessische Blatter fur Volks- und Kulturforschung. Neue Folge der Hessischen Blatter fur Volkskunde 17, 1985, 191—213.