I come back to Amsterdam a lot, and every time I arrive, I feel a little sheepish about speaking Dutch.
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I actually know some of the language — I lived in the Netherlands as a child, in Eindhoven, down in the south, and I learned the language the way a 10-year-old learns anything, which is on the hockey team, from other 10-year-olds calling each other disgusting names or giggling at bodily functions and parts. So even the Dutch I remember perfectly has limited application when doing adult things like taking a taxi or ordering a bottle of wine.
Still, 50 years later, what’s left is rusty but functional, and I insist on using it, even though Amsterdam is a city of cosmopolitan sophisticates who all speak perfect, nearly unaccented English and who greet my efforts with the gentle patience you’d extend to a sweet, elderly Labrador that has somehow learned how to push open a door.
This is the ritual: I attempt to frame an elementary Dutch sentence, I get tangled up somewhere around the second clause, and a friendly Dutch person swoops in with flawless English and rescues me. It has happened dozens of times, in shops and cafés and train stations, and I have always assumed the problem was simple. My Dutch is bad. Their English is excellent. What else could it be?
I was explaining all of this to a young man in Amsterdam recently.
“So no one has told you what the problem with your Dutch is?” he asked with matter-of-fact bluntness.
I shook my head. No one had. Fifty years of polite rescues, and not one Dutch person had ever offered a diagnosis. My new friend was happy to provide one, with what the Dutch consider honesty but the rest of us recognize as cruelty.
“Count for me,” he ordered.
So I started to count. Een, twee, drie, vier — one, two, three, four — up through tien, ten, and then eleven, which in Dutch is elf, except that’s not how I say it. Not how I learned it in Eindhoven 50 years ago, the way my hockey teammates said it, the way they say it in the southern part of this tiny country.
I said el-eff, with two syllables.
He winced. Up north, he explained, they say elf. One syllable, clipped, efficient. Only people from the south stretch it into two. My problem, it turns out, isn’t that I speak bad Dutch. It’s that I speak southern Dutch. In other words, when I speak Dutch, I sound like I’m from Alabama.
Of course, every region of every country has some other region — usually to the south, usually somewhere warmer, where life is a little slower, and the vowels get a little more room to breathe — and everyone from the elf region has decided that everyone from the el-eff region is just a little slow in the upstairs department.
The people up north, wherever “north” happens to be, pronounce things with fewer syllables and congratulate themselves on it, as if brevity were intelligence, as if the fastest way through the word “eleven” were a credential. Nobody can explain why a relaxed drawl signals a relaxed brain. It doesn’t. But the prejudice is apparently preinstalled in humans. It’s in our factory settings.
THE SOUVENIRS AND MEMORIES FROM TRIPS OVERSEAS
The Milanese roll their eyes at the Sicilians. The Parisians wince at Marseille. Northern Germans have opinions about Bavarians that they will share with you at length, though not in Munich, where it might lead to trouble. And the Dutch — tolerant, liberal, famously easygoing about nearly everything else — hear a man stretch elf into el-eff and quietly conclude that he probably has trouble doing basic math.
I’ve decided I’m fine with this. My accent is the one genuinely authentic thing about my Dutch. The vocabulary is mostly about body parts and insults, the grammar is guesswork, but the accent is real — earned, honestly, at age 10, from the actual children of the actual south. I’m not going to fix it. I may even lean into it. Instead of saying goodbye with a cosmopolitan, sophisticated tot ziens, I plan to put a little spin on it. Tot ziens, I’ll say. And then add, Tot ziens, y’all.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
