Four hundred years after Henry Hudson explored the region that
would later become New York, few traces remain of the colonial
legacy of the Dutch. But one aspect of the Dutch culture
survived for centuries, against all odds: the Dutch language.
Every day, tour guides show visitors the house that once
belonged to the eighth president of the United States: Martin
Van Buren. Van Buren, elected in 1837, was the first US
president of non-English descent. As his name reveals, he was a
Dutch American. He grew up in Kinderhook, a tightly-knit Dutch
community in the Hudson Valley. In Van Buren's day, the Dutch
had already been present in America for two hundred years. The
United States was uncontestably an English-speaking nation. But
Van Buren spoke Dutch at home, as did his wife and children. And
even long after his death in 1862, Dutch lived on as a spoken
language in the former colony of New Netherlands. "One group who
spoke the language were the Ramapo Indians of New Jersey, and
they're still there. They call the