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Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

I would be curious to get the opinion of someone Dutch on the below:

I was once chatting with a co-worker about why English is so prevalent in the Netherlands and, particularly, why Dutch people tend to speak English with American accents.

My co-workers theory: it's because American English was heavily influenced by Dutch speakers in colonial times. e.g. New York was once New Amsterdam

My theory: in the Netherlands (at least in the 1990s), American TV shows were not dubbed but had subtitles instead. This allowed teenagers who watched American shows to learn English but with an American accent.

Open to other thoughts and suggestions.

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They're also just very phonetically similar languages; as an American who visited Amsterdam, hearing other people having conversations in Dutch was incredibly disorienting, because from a distance it sounded just like American English, except that I would try to focus on their conversation and realize that I didn't understand any of the individual words they were saying!

Basically, in my (very limited) experience, a Dutch accent was bizarrely similar to an American accent.

Dutch speaker here (but without such an American accent).

Dutch people tend to speak English with American accents because they hear most of their English from American TV, movies and Netflix series. I'll leave it to the linguists to debunk any suggestion that Dutch speakers had more than a marginal influence on American English.

Yankees Jan Kees?

If you can think of another couple of examples, you'll persuade me to change the word 'marginal' to 'minimal' ;-)

Pretty easy if you look at nautical lingo: captain is taken from kapitein, also anker/anchor and lijn/line, etc. My favorite etymological explanation:

Back in the day the rudder had not yet been invented, so they used a slightly oversized oar to steer (dutch: stuur) the ship. It was not practical to fasten it exactly in the middle, so it would have to be either on the right or the left side of the ship. Because most helmsmen were right-handed, the oar usually got fastened to the right side, which was henceforth known as the stuur-boord, literally the board of the ship that the steering oar was fastened to. Because the uu-vowel doesn't do too well in English, it got turned into starboard, which is still used today. Coincidentally, because the steering oar was in the way when mooring the ship it became customary to moor the ship on the 'left' side. This then became known as the 'port' side because the port was always on that side.

presumably these are Dutch influences on English, not specifically American English? We've been interacting with our Dutch neighbours for hundreds of years, especially at sea.

Reasonable.

Jag styr min båt. Jag styr på styrbord. I steer my boat. I steer on starboard.

The Swedish styr is pretty much like the English steer but rounded instead of flat, if that makes sense, and means the same. And bord can be a board.

So, steering board.

Rather error prone but it was starboard & larboard before the Royal Navy changed larboard to port. Although larboard related to loading so your reasoning was correct.

bakkerij -> bakery (instead of bakers)

Boss, bazooka, cookie, dollar, gin, mart, Santa Claus (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Dutch..., guesstimating American Englishness)

I'm polish but I've spent a lot of time watching American tv and movies, with subtitles, from young age. I still have terrible Slavic accent

French, Spanish and italian speakers find it hard to pronounce English words as English contains sounds not present in their languages. But Flemish/Dutch languages have a superset of the English sounds. So it’s hard for an English speaker to pronounce Flemish sounds, but easy for Flemish/Dutch speakers to pronounce English words.

So they start from a position of strength, and then there is plentiful expose to English from a young age as a bonus.

The accent is really usually more of a Dutch accent than it is an American one, though I guess that's closer to the American one than to the British one [1]. I'm not sure if it's been researched, but what would seem to be the obvious reason is that we just hear a lot more spoken American English than British English, on TV, on the radio, and online.

[1] If you don't mind TikTok, this is an interesting comparison: https://www.tiktok.com/@rogierbakcomedy/video/69224330661409...

Apart from (and also emphasising) what others have already mentioned: American English (AE) is a rhotic English accent, essentially meaning that the letter 'r' is pronounced when it occurs at the end of a syllable (whereas with many British English or Southern hemisphere accents it isn't).

The Dutch 'r' phoneme sounds similar to the AE one. Hence, Dutch English speakers will naturally sound more American even if they don't have an actual American accent (which might indeed very well be the case due to said influence from American TV shows).

> The Dutch 'r' phoneme sounds similar to the AE one.

The Dutch realization of /r/ differs from dialect to dialect within the Netherlands and Flanders, and only a small minority of Dutch speakers have something like the American version. It is true that Dutch speakers often have good accents, but this is due to massive exposure to American culture, not the rhotics of Dutch themselves.

> The Dutch 'r' phoneme sounds similar to the AE one.

Only in the West.

But there it is so strong that speakers of other languages affect an "American" r when they speak Dutch thinking it is the sound used in Dutch.

It isn't, though, and by using the "American" r they end up sounding like spoiled upper class teenagers.

It's the latter.

Source: Dutch person who grew up on Ricky Lake, Jerry Springer, Dr Phil, Bevery Hills 90210 & much much more in the 90's.

I think there are two big reasons.

First, the American accent is actually how English was spoken in England until the 1800's. What you have with American English is the US retaining the older style of English while British English evolved differently.

Now, with Netherlands, England and Netherland were very closely linked throughout the late 1600's and especially the early 1700's. They were both Protestant powers, fighting various wars against Louis XIV and his Catholic France. In addition, at one point, they even shared a leader, William of Orange who became King William of England in 1688. Later in the century, they diverged.

Thus, you have the same phenomenon that you had with the United States, they both retain the old English pronunciation from the time when both were much closer to England. British English evolved differently, leaving both Dutch English and American English much closer to each other than British English.

> the American accent is actually how English was spoken in England until the 1800's

No, it isn't. American English has preserved certain archaic features once found throughout UK English (rhotacism is one), but it has also innovated heavily in other respects just as UK English has. Even within the United States, accents have evolved drastically since the advent of recording technology over a century ago. The standard introduction to this is the work of Labov et al.

Your theory jibes with my own account at the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam. I asked one of the tour guides if he was an American expat, and told me he just watched a lot of “Full House” growing up as a kid.

I'm not sure about the accent—it's not strongly American but definitely not British either (comes off a little posh around here)—but I did learn most of my English through Cartoon Network with subs.

I have a Dutch side to my family. The Netherlands has always been a very outward-looking, global, trading nation. It was a global colonial power and has large multi-national companies. My uncles told me the government always recognized that to be prosperous it needed to interact with other countries and it always encouraged multi-linguism and language education in schools. I'm sure having foreign movies without dubbing is deliberate. (And efficient too!)

Dutch here! I am not knowledgeable enough on this topic to speak for us as a whole but I do know my level of English has been influenced greatly by this, and I see it now in my little sister (who is 12), too.

It’s being taught English as an 10/11-years old and.. Watching all the Dragonball Z dubbed to English but with Dutch subtitles :)

Based off the way New Yorkers and folks from Boston talk, I don't think the 'American Accent' is close to what it was back when NY was still New Amsterdam.

While I am German, I did pick up a lot of my English when watching Star Trek (TOS) on the Dutch TV :) To that extend I can confirm your theory.

It blew my mind when I found out that the Gouda cheese is not pronounced Goo-dah but actually a throaty “How-dah”.

American English is frankly archaic! The English accents of the modern US are far closer to the English accent of the 1700s than modern en_GB.

I am a British army brat and we used to watch a fair bit of Dutch TV when stationed in West Germany back in the '70s/'80s for that reason - subtitled. Mmmm ... Vara!

The accent thing is very complicated. The US has had a lot of inputs over the last few centuries and don't forget the locals who were already there. I suggest that the Dutch accent informed the American one accents rather than the other way around. Belgium of course also contributes there. English spoken by a Belgian also sounds more left pondian than right. That said, I have met folk from both the Netherlands and Belgium who can deploy pretty convincing generic en_GB or en_US sounding accents as required. My dad's driver at our last posting in Bracht in Germany near to Roermond in the Netherlands was able to speak German, Dutch and English well enough to fool native speakers of all of them. We are still in touch nearly 40 years later 8)

It's my understanding (and if I'm wrong it looks like I'll be corrected) but Dutch English classes teach en_GB and you have to be an expat American child to have your en_US ways tolerated. So if Dutch people sound American they must not be getting it in class.

You are right. Back in the early 90ies, in primary and high school, I often got in conflict about this with my English teachers. Distinctly remember being around 10 years old, and arguing with my poor teacher, that US English would be a much more useful standard for Dutch students to learn :)

PS: So starting age 8 I learned English from adventure games and a bit later from shows like Star Trek TNG (BBC!). Starting written versus verbal (often using a dictionary to find the right words to type with those Sierra text interfaces) did mean that some of my pronunciation was totally off — I'd simply never heard most words spoken before :)

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