A curious case of language death: How one man killed off Amager Dutch

For a Danish translation of this article, click here. Updated Oct. 14.

As Lingoblog celebrates UN German Language Day, Joost Robbe examines the unique history of Amager Dutch (a Dutch-Low German dialect), used on the Danish island of Amager, near Copenhagen, between the early sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. He explains how, having survived for centuries, the fate of this minority language rested on the choices — and linguistic inadequacies — of a single person.

How often can the death of a language be traced back to a single person? Almost never. But the case of Amager Dutch – once spoken in Store Magleby outside Copenhagen – is different. For centuries, the community combined Dutch speech with a strong Low German literacy tradition. Yet in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, one pastor, Friderich Carl Schmitto (1757–1833), disrupted this fragile balance so profoundly that the language never recovered.

Store Magleby 1808 1887 — The Danish Agency for Climate Data, via Wikimedia Commons

Dutch farmers and Low German clergy

Around 1520, King Christian II (1513–1523) invited Dutch farmers from Hoorn (north of Amsterdam) to settle on the Danish island of Amager, so that they could supply produce for the Copenhagen court and market. Danish tenant farmers were displaced from Store Magleby, and 24 Dutch families took over the land, complete with arable fields, meadows and access to common pasture. In addition to these farms, they received significant privileges: the right to their own jurisdiction, their own church services, and control over their own education. For nearly three centuries, Store Magleby — also known as “Hollanderdorp” — remained a semi-autonomous Dutch settlement, until it was fully integrated into the established Danish church in 1811 and into the Danish juridical and educational systems in 1817.

For centuries after the Dutch settlers arrived, the education of rural communities in Denmark was almost entirely in the hands of the clergy. When they first came to Denmark, the Dutch settlers brought with them priests from Holland. But after the Danish Reformation of 1536, this practice was forced to end. Their pastors no longer came from the Netherlands – where Calvinism had taken hold – but instead from Schleswig and Holstein. These pastors were Lutherans and, crucially, native speakers of Low German.

This had a significant impact. Low German had long been the written medium of trade and administration in Denmark, and on Amager it soon became the natural language of schooling and religious instruction. The written tradition on Amager was largely the work of two men: pastor Georg Harder (1608–1682) from Dithmarschen, and his son, pastor Thomas Harder (1645–1691). They produced catechisms and schoolbooks that shaped literacy for generations.

Children learned to read and write in Low German, while Dutch continued as the spoken language of home and village life. The result was a distinctive contact ecology: Dutch speech intertwined with a robust Low German literacy tradition that persisted well into the eighteenth century.

A fatal choice

In 1786, when the serving pastor on Amager died, the congregation began searching for a suitable successor who possessed not only pastoral competence but also the necessary linguistic skills. They eventually accepted Friderich Carl Schmitto — a decision that was based on deception, and one that would prove disastrous. Schmitto had pretended he could speak Dutch – a claim that was patently untrue.

But who exactly was Schmitto? Schmitto had grown up in Danish-speaking northern Schleswig, attended grammar school in Kiel, and later studied theology in Jena and Copenhagen. Diary entries from visitors to Store Magleby reveal vital details about his language: he spoke fluent Danish and High German, but his Low German was limited and inconsistent. In 1804, the Dutch scholar Johan Meerman (1753–1815) – celebrated in Dutch literary circles for his translations of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s poetry – attended one of Schmitto’s sermons and described his language as “a peculiar, self-made system that did not seem bound by any rules.”
To preserve his credibility, Schmitto claimed he was from Holstein, thereby linking himself to the Low German background of his predecessors. But he wasn’t at all. His time in Kiel may have provided him with a passing familiarity with the dialect — and perhaps acquaintances who could be relied upon when linguistic emergencies arose. But that was as far as his Low German connection went.

If this deception weren’t enough, Schmitto sought to cement his authority in yet another way. In 1788, he produced a new catechism, Ordnung des Heils, the main schoolbook for children in Store Magleby.

Ordnung des Heils: Excellent Low German – was Schmitto really the author?

Skaermbillede 2025 09 11 182035 — Ordnung des Heils catechism

Unlike Schmitto’s sermons, Ordnung des Heils is linguistically solid. Its linguistic execution received high-level approval: vetted by Zealand bishop Nicolai Edinger Balle (1744–1816) and endorsed by rural dean Johann Christian Schönheyder (1742–1803), a university-trained theologian educated in Leipzig and Göttingen, who found it suitable for instruction.

So how do we reconcile Schmitto’s documented poor Low German from the pulpit with his excellent Low German in the catechism? The most plausible answer lies in Kiel. Schmitto likely drafted the catechism in High German and had it translated into Low German by someone in his network.

Breaking the linguistic tradition

Regardless of whether he wrote it, by making the catechism a central school text, Schmitto certainly disrupted the continuity of linguistic education in Store Magleby. The new catechism ruptured the Dutch–Low German literacy tradition the community had cultivated since the Harder priests in the mid-seventeenth century. It introduced a different variety of written Low German, detached from Amager’s established practices. For the children, this meant the link to their parents’ and grandparents’ written tradition was broken.

Later testimony confirms this break in continuity. In 1846, the German travel writer Johann Georg Kohl (1808–1878) published the words of a respected member of the Amager community (most likely bailiff Gerdt Corneliussen Bacher, 1776–1858):

“The misfortune was that this false Dutchman remained in office for 47 years. He brought the Dutch language entirely into decline, since he could not teach the youth in it.”

It seems that the community itself blamed Schmitto for the demise of its language.

Schmitto’s legacy

In 1811, Schmitto wrote in the parish book that, after 296 years, “German” (meaning Dutch and Low German) preaching and instruction had been abolished and Danish was to take over in both church and school. Contrary to later belief, he most likely made this entry with a sigh of relief rather than nostalgic longing. Yet in 1915, on the 400th anniversary of the Dutch settlement, the very man who had presided over the demise of Amager Dutch was honored with a memorial stone in the churchyard — inscribed, with unintended irony: “Han var den sidste præst der talte Guds ord på det hollandske sprog” (“He was the last priest who spoke God’s word in Dutch”).

Language death traced to one individual

It is rare for linguists to attribute the death of a language to one individual rather than broader social and political forces. But in small and fragile communities, single actors can tip the balance. On Amager, the written tradition was established by two men, father and son; and it was dissolved by one man, a “false Dutchman”. A curious case of language death indeed.

Further Reading

Winge, Vibeke (1995). Laat Deen en Noor met Erbied u begroeten. Niederländer und Niederländisch in Dänemark. Ein Überblick. In: Lingua Theodisca. Beiträge zur Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft. Jan Goossens zum 65. Geburtstag, Niederlande-Studien 16, 299–307.

Kohl, Johann Georg (1846). Reisen in Dänemark und den Herzogthümern Schleswig und Holstein. Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus.

Meerman, Johan (1804). Eenige berichten omtrent het noorden en noord-oosten van Europa, vol. 1. Den Haag: Erven Isaac van Cleef.

Joost Robbe is a linguist and historical philologist at Aarhus University. His research focuses on language contact, literacy traditions and the history of Dutch in Denmark, with a particular emphasis on the Dutch community of Amager and its transition from Dutch and Low German to Danish. He has published widely on graphematic analysis, language death, contact languages and the cultural history of minority languages – and is currently publishing a book on the eighteenth-century writing tradition of the Dutch community on the Danish island of Amager.