In American usage the name Dutch is somewhat confusing, because it may refer to the language and the people either of Holland or of Germany. Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialectal variety of German, Dutch toys come from Nürnberg, a Dutch treat is a form of entertainment that is totally unknown in Holland, and most of the Dutch butchers on American Main Streets never spoke a syllable of Holland Dutch. One has to dig deep into the past to find the cause of this vagueness in connotation.
The Netherlands did not always form a distinct political entity. In the Middle Ages they were a part of the German Empire, and the people then inhabiting the eastern provinces of present-day Holland were not conscious of being nationally different from their German neighbors on the east. The political frontier between Holland and Germany separates people whose medieval ancestors did not look upon each other as foreigners. They all belonged to the Dutch race and spoke varieties of the Dutch language.
The name Dutch has a curious history. It is derived from an ancient Teuton noun meaning “people,” but its first use to denote the language of the Germanic tribes of northwestern Europe occurred, not in the speech of these tribes, but in the written Latin reports of AngloSaxon missionaries who brought Christianity to those unreclaimed regions. They were the first to call the language of their prospective converts lingua theodisca, deriving the Latin adjective from the Old English theod, that is “people.”
The plural of this noun was used in Old English in the sense of “the heathen,” just as the Latin plural gentes was used to denote the pagan races. Lingua theodisca, in the reports of the missionaries, doubtless meant the language of the heathen. The new coinage soon found its way from the correspondence of the missions into the chancelleries of Charlemagne’s empire, but it took more than a century for the word to be adopted by the people themselves. At the end of the eleventh century Duutsch was a common term in the vernacular.
Since by that time Christianity had ousted paganism, officially at any rate, from all German lands, it is not likely that the new converts would have called their own speech “the language of the heathen.” Being aware of its derivation from the native word for “people,” they accepted the name, not in the sense that St. Boniface and his fellow missionaries had given it, but in that of “the popular, the people’s own, language,” as distinct from Latin, the language of the Church. Previously, the Franks, the Saxons, the Bavarians, the Alemans, had called the vernacular after their own tribal names, but after the eleventh century it was possible to express by the name Dutch the relationship of Franconian, Saxon, Bavarian, and Alemanic. The term thus became a symbol of the linguistic unity among the various West Germanic tribes of the Continent.
Within the limited area of the Low Countries the name served a similar useful purpose. There was, and still is, a rich variety of dialects, but Dutch was the family name that proclaimed them all sisters. At the same time it proclaimed them sisters of all the dialects that were spoken in Germany. In the Middle Ages this was not felt to be misleading, as the Netherlands had not yet developed into a closely knit political unit distinct from the rest of the Dutch-speaking Continent. When Chaucer in The House of Fame mentions “pypers of the Duche tonge,” one cannot tell whether he refers to pipers from the Netherlands or from Germany.
His English contemporaries could not tell either; nor did they care, for to them there was slight difference between the inhabitants of Germany and the Low Countries. The more discriminating among them possessed the means in their language to express that difference, Germany being known as Almaine and the speech of the Netherlands as Flemish, but the average Englishman of Chaucer’s time did not trouble about such fine distinctions. Neither did the poet of a folksong of much later date, to whom all people from Continental cities whose names ended in dam, whether these were situated near Berlin or by the North Sea, were damned Dutchmen:
When you hear the beat of the big bass drum,
Then you will know that the Dutchmen have come,
The Amsterdam Dutch, the Rotterdam Dutch,
The Potsdam Dutch and all the damned Dutch.
Dutch must mean “German” there, for Hollanders never felt the urge nor the need to follow the drum as hirelings of a foreign monarch. The song may be a reminiscence of the Hessians who took the King’s shilling to fight the American rebels. By that time the Hollanders had ceased to call themselves Dutchmen.
