Did you know… Why St. Maarten Speaks English?
1. Demise of the Dutch
Who visits St. Maarten notices that neither Dutch nor French is the most spoken language on island, but English. If you wonder why, three reasons are of key importance.
First of all, geopolitics of the 17th and 18th century played a role. Whereas at the time of the Treaty of Concordia the Dutch Republic was a global hegemon, over time the British would gradually take over in importance in the Caribbean. Amongst others, the Dutch were massacred and chased away from the Virgin Islands, resulting in the islands becoming British and Danish during the 17th century. Next to the British Virgin Islands, nearby Anguilla, St. Christopher and Nevis were close neighbors to St. Maarten; so with the exception of St. Barths, Saba and St. Eustatius, one could say the island was surrounded by English colonies.
2. The Sugar Boom of the 1700s
This became the more relevant at the point the sugar boom of the 18th century set in. Great Britain alone consumed 500% more sugar in 1770 than in 1710. Sugar became a household product, added to tea, chocolate and cookies. The boom attracted quite some ambitious Brits to the region. A notable example was the father of Alexander Hamilton starting a sugar plantation on Nevis in the 1740s, where the founding father of the United States would be born.
With Scottish entrepreneur and commander in Dutch service John Philips St. Maarten received its own ambitious Brit as a leader. Knowing the need for sugar and cotton in the European economies, the name giver to Philipsburg supported local farms to cultivate these crops. More importantly, he encouraged new plantation owners to come to the island start growing these. Within his slightly over ten years tenure, the island population grew fourfold to 2000 citizens in 1746. 400 Of those were white, whereas 1500 enslaved people of color did the arduous work on the plantation. Amongst the new plantation owners were not just British immigrants, but also relatives of colonial families of the surrounding (often British) islands or the French side, which also had its fair share of British Plantation owners. Historian Daniela Jeffry once pointed out that the fact that the majority of planters on the French side was of British origin, also perpetuated English as “lingua franca” on that part of the island. When the Dutch side invaded the French side in 1793, French side councilmen Richard Richardson and Benjamin Gumbs refused to sign a loyalty pledge to the Dutch because of their rank as colonel in the British army – indicative of the influence of the United Kingdom by that time.
3. Tourism!
The steep economic and population growth brought by tourism in the 20th century further brought large minorities of Americans, Canadians, Jamaicans, Guyanese and Kittitians to the island. The first two also making up the vast majority of tourists further solidified English as main island language.
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