Umm… the Dutch were in Nieuw Amsterdam, right? The Hudson River valley and that area. Not New England. Those names meant something originally. New England was settled by English colonists.
The semantic extensions of Yankee go in several concentric levels:
- To a foreigner, Yankee is synonymous with American.
- To a Southron, it means a northerner.
- To a northerner, it means more specifically a New Englander.
- Within New England, it tends to mean someone descended from old New England stock (typically rural), associated with cultural ideas of industriousness, ingenuity, and thrift. “Old New England,” how’s that for an oxymoron?
Eric Partridge, even though he was an Limey, came up with probably the best etymology of it in his book Origins:
I would have to agree with Partridge. The colonial Dutch called the colonial English New Englanders that, not the other way around.