Returning a maverick creole to the fold: the Berbice Dutch enigma revisited
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 exist... Mehr ...
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Dokumenttyp: | Artikel |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2022 |
Reihe/Periodikum: | Folia Linguistica ; volume 57, issue 1, page 177-203 ; ISSN 0165-4004 1614-7308 |
Verlag/Hrsg.: |
Walter de Gruyter GmbH
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Schlagwörter: | Linguistics and Language / Language and Linguistics |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27012924 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/flin-2022-2051 |
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.