Schibboleth

By S.A.P. | THE HAGUE

STORIES say that during the second world war, Dutch soldiers used the name of the seaside resort Scheveningen as a shibboleth to identify German soldiers in their midst. German soldiers would pronounce the first three letters "sch" as "sh", following German sound rules. (English speakers might do the same, partly on account of our familiarity with German proper names and words like "schnapps" and "schnitzel".) Most Dutch speakers, on the other hand, read "sch" as [sχ], a run-of-the-mill "s" followed by a sound that’s akin to the Scottish "ch" in loch.* Today, Dutch civilians use Scheveningen as a shibboleth to poke fun at my gawky pronunciation now that I live just south of that beach.

In a vacuum, learning Dutch should be a relative cakewalk for English-speakers. Dutch and English are both West Germanic languages, along with German. English has absorbed a bigger glut of Romance vocabulary over the last 900 years. But it's still hard to miss the deep Germanic family ties when comparing English and Dutch. Even where spelling differs, hearing words like "huis" (house), "uit" (out) or "vergeten" (forget) spoken out loud reveals connections. While reading a sentence like Het boek is goed or De drank is warm, an English speaker might wonder whether this really another language, or merely "The book is good" and "The drink is warm" typed with elbows. Common stems often have parallels in English, so English-speakers can pick apart new words and guess at meanings with just a bit of effort. The suffix "-lijk(e)", for example, is used like "-ly", so someone might be able to figure out that koninklijke in The Hague's Koninklijke Bibliotheek means "kingly", a word that was replaced in English with the French "royal". And while Dutch pronunciation is awfully hairy, it's at least rather consistent.

There are challenges, though. Because Dutch usage is mostly limited to the Netherlands and Belgium, language learning resources aren't as developed as those for, say, French or Spanish. (I've been using Babbel, one of the very few online Dutch courses out there.) It’s no huge secret that Dutch people are excellent at English. This means that newly minted expats face little pressure to learn the local language. Practice is harder to come by. Let's speak in English and save us both the trouble, the thinking often goes. Doing otherwise is a bit like swimming upstream.

Seth Meyers, an American comedian who lived in Amsterdam in the 1990s, once told a (very funny) story centering on his near-complete ignorance of Dutch besides "nee" (no) and "uit" (out). That Mr Meyers nonetheless had a successful yearlong acting career in Amsterdam is a typical example of English's deep penetration into the Netherlands. This is good news for globally minded Dutch, of course. And it's even better news for English-speakers, who can pursue careers in big cities like Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam with little effort. Especially interesting is that Dutch seems to remain healthy despite coexisting in many spheres with English, which is often maligned as a local language killer. This sort of balanced coexistence between thriving "underwear languages" and workplace English is a familiar story all across northern Europe. It has worked well for business and diplomacy.

At the same time, English-speaking residents are often lulled into complacency by the ubiquity of English-language services all over the Netherlands. Many of them never learn Dutch aside from the most basic of pleasantries. Many English-speakers might (rather understandably) never prioritise learning Dutch because it's not pressing enough to do so. Still, it's strange to see some English-speakers who wear ignorance of the local language as a badge of pride. In many other countries, English-only expats are relegated to life in a bubble. Not here. Broad English usage in the Netherlands allows expats to integrate into most aspects of city life quickly. I wonder whether this really brings foreigners and Netherlanders together, or if it forces expats to live only parallel to the city's Dutch-speaking inhabitants—physically together, but culturally apart.

My upstream swim, for one, has just begun. I have limited time but an interest in picking up Dutch. I guess I'll have to make some language decisions myself.

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* The "ch" in Scheveningen is, in linguistics speak, a voiceless uvular fricative. It's pronounced somewhere between the throaty Parisian French "r" (a voiced uvular fricative) and the "ch" in Scottish English loch (a voiceless velar fricative). As with several Dutch sounds, the voiceless uvular fricative is not found in most English dialects.