Berbice Dutch was formed without full access to its source languages

What is it about?

Berbice Dutch is a creole language formerly spoken in the Dutch-owned Berbice colony. Its lexicon received input from three linguistic sources, Dutch, Eastern Ijo, and Arawak. While Arawak is mainly a source of culturally specific borrowings, the paper shows that Dutch and Eastern Ijo are both well represented in common semantic domains of the lexicon. The paper then focuses on BD bound morphemes in the nominal and verbal domains, which are all inherited from Ijo. It presents an account for the striking absence of Dutch-origin morphology as well as for the reanalysis of substrate-origin morphology. The paper argues that creolisation proceeded without full access to the source languages.

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Why is it important?

Caribbean creole languages arose in the context of plantation societies which relied on the labour of enslaved Africans. Berbice Dutch, uniquely among these languages, was formed with substantial African input in its basic lexicon, deriving from the small Eastern Ijo cluster of languages. This would strongly suggest African agency in the creation of the language. However, the reanalysis of substrate material challenges the possibility that speakers of Eastern Ijo were involved in this process.

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