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- Title
Returning a maverick creole to the fold: the Berbice Dutch enigma revisited.
- Authors
Parkvall, Mikael; Jacobs, Bart
- Abstract
Berbice Dutch was a creole language spoken in the Republic of Guyana in South America, a country first under Dutch, and later under British colonial rule. Owing mainly to Silvia Kouwenberg (A grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole, De Gruyter Mouton, 1994), we were blessed with a detailed synchronic documentation of Berbice Dutch before its demise. However, the formation of the language remains clouded in mystery: its grammar and (basic) lexicon display a seemingly unique mixture of Dutch (Creole) and Eastern Ijo, as a result of which the language is often portrayed as a challenge to existing contact-linguistic theory. In this paper, a scenario is proposed that, rather than challenging the said theory, is fully grounded in it: it will be argued that the language was a case of serial glottogenesis: a first stage of creolisation was later followed by language mixing. The paper furthermore presents hitherto unknown historical data pertaining to the arrival of Ijo speakers in Berbice.
- Subjects
BERBICE River (Guyana); GUYANA; CREOLE dialects; LANGUAGE &; languages; KOUWENBERG, Silvia; SYNCHRONIC linguistics; DUTCH language; MIXED languages
- Publication
Folia Linguistica, 2023, Vol 57, Issue 1, p177
- ISSN
0165-4004
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/flin-2022-2051