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When Martin Van Buren was born, the New York Dutch community had already been bilingual for at least a couple of generations. Van Buren was born in 1782, and his baptism was recorded in the Kinderhook Dutch Reformed Church record book in the Dutch language.

But for the thirty-odd years before Van Buren was born, the Dutch Reformed Church in America had been engaged in a protracted schism over the future direction the church should take, resulting in two sides among the congregants, called the Coetus and the Conferentie. One of the principle disagreements was over whether or not to allow church services to be held in the church in the English language. As Dutch New Yorkers intermarried with their English neighbors, the Dutch church was seeing their congregants leave for their spouse's church (particularly the Presbyterian Church) since, generally, English New Yorkers couldn't understand the Dutch language, but Dutch New Yorkers could understand and speak English. The Coetus were for the change, and the Conferentie were against it. Shortly before the Revolution, the Conferentie won out, and church services remained in Dutch, but the Revolution essentially reignited the argument, and after the war was over, there was a pro-American movement among the Dutch, as a lot of the Conferentie had been British Loyalists, and left for Canada at the end of the war. With the Conferentie deflated, the Coetus were able to finally get duel services in most congregations starting in the 1780s-90s, one held in Dutch and the other held in English (typically, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon). Many of the churches had never really stopped doing this since the schism had erupted back in the mid-1700s, and so in relatively short order, by the 1810s, the Dutch church had dropped the Dutch language from their services altogether in favor of English sermons only. Though there may have been some holdouts, there weren't enough congregants for the Dutch services to make it a priority anymore.

However, at that time, Kinderhook may have been a more isolated Dutch community than most in the Hudson Valley. Rev. Isaac Labagh was the minister at the Kinderhook Dutch Church through the entirety of Martin Van Buren's youth, and while at some point he very probably was holding separate Dutch and English services, seeing as he was a native New Yorker, his wife was born in Amsterdam and wrote to their son in the Dutch language. Yet, when Labagh left the congregation in 1801, he was replaced by Columbia University-educated Rev. Jacob Sickles who was a "master" of "several of the modern languages, and the German and French particularly he could read with nearly as much ease as the English". Sickles was notably born in Tappan, New York, in rural Rockland County, a decade before Van Buren was born.

Still, Kinderhook did not erect their first non-Dutch church (a Lutheran church) until 1826, followed by their first Presbyterian church in 1833, two miles up the road in the town of Valatie. Notably, though, that Presbyterian church was founded as the Second Reformed Dutch Church of Kinderhook, but then a year later, the congregation voted to become Presbyterian. The Presbyterian Church had always been an English language church in America (with its roots as the Church of Scotland in America), and the church Elders of the congregation, likely all about Van Buren's age or older, wouldn't have been willing to make such a change if they weren't comfortable being preached to in English.

Moreover, about twelve miles down the road from Kinderhook, there had been a Presbyterian Church in the town of Hudson founded in 1785 with the church building being erected in 1792. Twelve miles isn't exactly close by 18th Century standards, but close enough that there no doubt were English neighbors not far away from where the Van Burens lived that would trek down there on Easter and Christmas and for the baptisms of their children. While Kinderhook was predominantly Dutch, there was a sizable English community in the town itself, and in the surrounding Columbia county.

And to that point, Martin Van Buren's childhood circumstances were a little bit different from his Kinderhook peers, because his father operated an inn/tavern. In fact, Martin Van Buren was born in that tavern, and he spent his youth working for his father in the family business. In this line of work, Martin's father Abraham would have needed to be able to host both English and Dutch guests, when they stayed overnight, and when they stopped in for a drink or at the "ordinary" hours for dinner. Kinderhook is about twenty miles south of Albany, and several sources (1, 2, 3, for a start) point out that the town was an overnight stop on the stage-coach connecting Albany to New York in those pre-railroad days. As such, the town quite regularly played host to English speakers, many of whom would have elected to stay the night at the inn operated by Abraham Van Buren.

And there is direct evidence that Abraham Van Buren had been playing host to English-language guests for several decades before Martin was born. A British military engineer named James Gabriel Montresor came to New York in connection with his military duties in the 1750s, and wrote very briefly of staying the night at Abraham Van Buren's inn on December 18, 1759:

"Tuesday--18th Set out from Albany at 12 o'clock in 4 Sleighs. Lay at Kinderhook at Van Buren's."

Mentresor may have also had breakfast there a couple years earlier, though he doesn't name the innkeeper in the June 5, 1757, entry:

"Sunday 5th Breakfasted at Kinderhook. Calm, went on board at 11 o'clock in the morning, and anchored within four miles of Albany there not being water enough on the Overslaw."

Abraham Van Buren's tavern served as more than just a tavern, in fact. According to an account published in 1841, "the town meetings of former days were held within its walls" and in the well-researched 1984 book Martin Van Buren and the American Political System by Donald B. Cole, the author writes that the tavern was used as a local polling place, too. Cole calls the tavern "a favorite stopping-off point on the road from New York City to Albany" which "introduced Martin to a wide variety of people":

"Years of living at close quarters not only with his family but also with strangers conditioned Van Buren to seek ways of adjusting to others, sometimes accommodating himself to them, at other times manipulating them to gain his wishes. In short he learned the art of compromising for which he later became famous. As amiable and political as his father, Martin developed into a pleasant, outgoing person who got on well with people."

More than one source makes the claim that the tavern was a gathering place for politicians. Direct evidence of this may be lacking, but in a small town with only two or three taverns in operation at the time, it's not unlikely. Abraham Van Buren had risen to the rank of Captain in the 7th Regiment of the New York Militia during the Revolutionary War, under the command of Col. Abraham Van Alstyne (1, 2), and after the war, he parlayed this into something of a local political career, serving for at least ten years as town clerk--"at least" because the town records only go back to 1787, at which time Abraham Van Buren was already serving in that capacity. And while the earliest town records were written in Dutch, at some point they did switch to English, though I don't have a source as to when. An 1846 biography of Martin Van Buren claimed his father was illiterate, a claim that has since been repeated in other biographies, but as Cole says, "[I]t is difficult to understand how an illiterate could have been town clerk, as Abraham was". More likely, he was not well-educated in the English language, but nonetheless possessed enough of an education to read and write the documents he would have had to prepare and sign in carrying out the duties of his public office.

Being an innkeeper and a holder of public office, Abraham Van Buren was described during Martin's lifetime as "quiet, peaceful and good natured". Martin Van Buren himself backs this characterization up in his autobiography, calling his father, "an unassuming amiable man who was never known to have an enemy". His mother was described elsewhere in similar terms.