"Listening to the radio on the weekend, we heard a Swedish nykkelharpe virtuoso playing a traditional Swedish dance called the polska. Leaving aside for the moment the discussion of what a nykkelharpe is, it struck us as odd that a dance named polska should be traditionally Swedish. After all, polska is Swedish for "Polish". This got us thinking about dances and how they migrate far beyond their national borders. A real Polish dance is the polonaise (French for "Polish") as are the mazurka (from Polish mazurka, "woman of the Polish province Mazovia", via French masurka), the cracovienne (French for "woman of Cracow") and the varsovienne (French for "woman of Warsaw").
Surprisingly, the polka is not Polish but Czech, the dance being Bohemian and originally called the nimra. It has been suggested that polka was a corruption of Czech pulka, "half", a characteristic feature being its short "half steps". Just to add to the confusion, when this dance was introduced to England in the 1840s, it was considered synonymous with the schottische which takes its name from the German phrase der schottische Tanz, "the Scottish dance". The schottische is not actually Scottish. Its origins are uncertain but are not within the British Isles. And the pronunciation doesn't help, either. Although most people pronounce the word shot-EESH, as though it were French, the French call a schottische a scottish. The highland (or Balmoral) schottische was a later (1880) Scottish invention and the military schottische is American.
The polka is by no means the only instance of linguistic confusion regarding dances. The word tango originally referred to a Spanish gipsy dance of Moorish origins which is completely unrelated to the Argentine tango. Speaking of Moorish dances, the traditional English morris dance is actually a "Moorish dance", probably taking its name from the Dutch Moorsche dans. The dance which is known in the U.S. as the cha-cha is known in Cuba, its country of origin, as the cha-cha-cha. This dance developed from the elegant danzón which itself originated when slaves from Africa played the Spanish contradanza in a syncopated manner. Contradanza is not originally a Spanish word, being the Spanish form of the French contre-danse. This would seem to make sense in French ("against-dance") as two rows of dancers face each other, but actually it is a corruption of the English "country dance".
In the days of slavery in the U.S., African dances introduced by the slaves were sometimes known as Congo minuets. The West Indian limbo dance, in which each dancer in turn attempts to pass under a low bar, is also thought to have been introduced from Africa. It may well have developed from a ritual dance as its name is believed to be a form of legba or legua, the name of the supreme god in certain West African religions. Another dance that has its origin in African religion is the mambo which gets its name from mamaloa, the Haitian creole word for a voudun priestess. The Haitian word for a male voudun priest is babaloa. Just as we turned the Creole word voudun into "voodoo", we also turned babaloa into babaloo. A song by this name will be familiar to all fans of Ricky Ricardo, the conga-drummer husband of Lucy in the "I Love Lucy" show. It may come as a surprise to some that the conga-drum was not so called until the 1920s. In Cuba it is called the tumba or tumbadora, depending on its pitch, and Puerto Rico has a similar, but smaller, drum called the quinto. Most Americans had seen nothing like these drums until the conga dance craze of the 1920s, hence they were all called conga-drums. But whence the term conga dance? It comes from the Spanish word conga meaning" a Congolese woman". Isn't it odd how so many dances are named "woman of [place]"? ...
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Needless to say, any comments about this article or any other listings of social dances are welcome.