Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Feb 06/02) - Ask anyone who grew up with multi-lingual parents: the biggest incentive to learn a language you don't understand when you're a kid is so you can understand the secrets your parents whisper.

Andreas Tesfaye shows off the celebration cake for the Dutch royal wedding. Inset: Nothing shows Dutch pride like a soccer T-shirt. - Nathan VanderKlippe/NNSL photo

For me, the language of secrecy was Dutch. Growing up, my parents reverted to Dutch whenever they had to talk finances or discuss Christmas presents. At family reunions, my parents and grandparents always spoke in Dutch. My mother didn't called us "dear" - it was always "schatje." We didn't have a clothes hamper, we had a wasmand."

Both of my parents speak fluent Dutch. But like so many homes of Dutch extraction, Dutch was always a peripheral language.

That's typical, since the Dutch seem to assimilate quickly wherever they go, and most speak fluent English. Many immigrant children grew up with parents who banned the mother tongue from the house. That mandate was an act of love, issued by parents who wanted the best for their children.

But it also quickly extinguished that most real link to a culture: language.

Even so, something happens in second or third-generation immigrant children. Maybe it's a trip to Holland, maybe it's a recognition that grandparents are dying -- and with them, the stories, the language and the culture of the mother country. But somehow, an interest is rekindled.

That's what has happened to Andreas Tesfaye. He grew up in the Netherlands, but moved to Canada when he was nine. Decades later, he is learning to read Dutch with his mother's help.

I met Andreas last Saturday at Imperial Opticians. He had set up a table with speculaas (windmill cookies), klompen (wooden clogs) and the red, white and blue Dutch flag. It was to be a celebration of the wedding between Dutch Crown Prince Willem- Alexander and his Argentine fiancee Maxima Zorreguieta in Amsterdam.

It wasn't, really. Instead, it was a chance to meet over a common bond, a chance for a few Dutch people to joke about the Dutch work ethic, about their miserliness and meticulousness, and exchange a few words in the language.

I couldn't stay long, but somehow in that meeting of similar heritages, there was a connection to the past, made real by language.

And that, as the Dutch might say, was gezellig -- a word that means something like "nice" or "cozy," but which really describes this kind of meeting as it is best depicted: in its mother tongue.