A Dutch creole is a creole language whose main lexifier is the Dutch language, a West Germanic language of the Low Countries. These creoles usually developed from Dutch-based pidgins or through language mixing where Dutch served as a major influence.
Most Dutch-based creoles originated in Dutch colonies in the Americas and Southeast Asia, after the 17th century expansion of Dutch maritime trade network and naval power. Almost all of them are now extinct, while two known varieties are classified as "critically endangered" and nearing extinction. The extinction has generally been attributed to a wilful cultural and generational language shift towards standard Dutch or the majority language of the area with each successive generation.
Afrikaans is considered to be a daughter language of Dutch [1] [2] and it, by contrast, is vibrant and has completely displaced Dutch in southern Africa, primarily South Africa and Namibia. Though not a majority-held position, it is considered by some linguists to be a creole because of its simplified grammar relative to Dutch. [3] [4]
The following is a list of described Dutch creoles with their locale and status:
Creole | Location | Status |
---|---|---|
Berbice [5] | Guyana | extinct [6] |
Ceylon Dutch | Sri Lanka | extinct [7] |
Skepi | Guyana | extinct [8] |
Negerhollands [9] | U.S. Virgin Islands | extinct [9] |
Petjo | Indonesia, Netherlands (immigrant population) | extinct or critically endangered |
Javindo [10] | Indonesia | critically endangered [11] |
Mohawk Dutch | United States | extinct |
Jersey Dutch (Bergen Dutch) | United States | extinct |
Dutch has also made a significant contribution to other creoles:
Despite its name, Pennsylvania Dutch is not descended from Dutch, but is a variety of West Central German. [13]
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language, spoken in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It evolved from the Dutch vernacular of South Holland spoken by the predominantly Dutch settlers and enslaved population of the Dutch Cape Colony, where it gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Sranan Tongo is an English-based creole language that is spoken as a lingua franca by approximately 519,600 people in Suriname.
A Spanish creole, or Spanish-based creole language, is a creole language for which Spanish serves as its substantial lexifier.
Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have Portuguese as their substantial lexifier. The most widely-spoken creoles influenced by Portuguese are Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Creole and Papiamento.
In addition to its classical and modern literary form, Malay had various regional dialects established after the rise of the Srivijaya empire in Sumatra, Indonesia. Also, Malay spread through interethnic contact and trade across the south East Asia Archipelago as far as the Philippines. That contact resulted in a lingua franca that was called Bazaar Malay or low Malay and in Malay Melayu Pasar. It is generally believed that Bazaar Malay was a pidgin, influenced by contact among Malay, Hokkien, Portuguese, and Dutch traders.
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelligibility is sometimes used to distinguish languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.
Saramaccan is a creole language spoken by about 58,000 people of West African descent near the Saramacca and the upper Suriname River, as well as in Paramaribo, capital of Suriname. The language also has 25,000 speakers in French Guiana and 8,000 in the Netherlands. It has three main dialects. The speakers are mostly descendants of fugitive slaves who were native to West and Central Africa; they form a group called Saamacca, also spelled Saramaka.
The Guianas, also spelled Guyanas or Guayanas, is a region in north-eastern South America. Strictly, the term refers to the three Guianas: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, formerly British, Dutch and French Guiana. Broadly it refers to the South American coast from the mouth of the Orinoco to the mouth of the Amazon.
Berbice is a region along the Berbice River in Guyana, which was between 1627 and 1792 a colony of the Dutch West India Company and between 1792 and 1815 a colony of the Dutch state. After having been ceded to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the latter year, it was merged with Demerara-Essequibo to form the colony of British Guiana in 1831. It became a county of British Guiana in 1838 till 1958. In 1966, British Guiana gained independence as Guyana and in 1970 it became a republic as the Co-operative Republic of Guyana.
Skepi is an extinct Dutch-based creole language of Guyana, spoken in the region of Essequibo. It was not mutually intelligible with Berbice Creole Dutch, also spoken in Guyana. This language has been classified as extinct since 1998.
Berbice Creole Dutch is a now extinct Dutch creole language, once spoken in Berbice, a region along the Berbice River in Guyana. It had a lexicon largely based on Dutch and Eastern Ijo varieties from southern Nigeria. In contrast to the widely known Negerhollands Dutch creole spoken in the Virgin Islands, Berbice Creole Dutch and its relative Skepi Creole Dutch were more or less unknown to the outside world until Ian Robertson first reported on the two languages in 1975. The Dutch linguist Silvia Kouwenberg subsequently investigated the creole language, publishing its grammar in 1994, and numerous other works examining its formation and uses.
Petjo, also known as Petjoh, Petjok, Pecok, Petjoek is a Dutch-based creole language that originated among the Indos, people of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry in the former Dutch East Indies. The language has influences from Dutch and then depending on the region Javanese, Malay, Sundanese and Betawi. Its speakers presently live mostly in Indonesia and the Netherlands. The language is expected to become gradually extinct by the end of the 21st century, due to Indos' shift toward Indonesian in Indonesia and Dutch in the Netherlands.
Caribbean Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by Indo-Caribbean people and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. It is a koiné language mainly based on the Bhojpuri and Awadhi dialects. These Hindustani dialects were the most spoken dialects by the Indians who came as immigrants to the Caribbean from Colonial India as indentured laborers. It is closely related to Fiji Hindi and the Bhojpuri-Hindustani spoken in Mauritius and South Africa.
Javindo, also known by the pejorative name Krontjong, is a Dutch-based creole language spoken on Java, Indonesia, such as Semarang. The name Javindo is a portmanteau of Java and Indo, the Dutch word for a person of mixed Indonesian and Dutch descent. This contact language developed from communication between Javanese-speaking mothers and Dutch-speaking fathers in Indo families. Its main speakers were Indo-Eurasian people. Its grammar was based on Javanese, and its vocabulary was based on the Dutch lexicon but pronounced in a Javanese manner. It shows simplification of morphological verb system from Javanese grammar such as merging verb class, disappearance of verbal subcategories.
Sri Lankan Malay, also known as Sri Lankan Creole Malay, bahasa Melayu, Ja basawa, or Java mozhi, is a Malay-based creole language spoken in Sri Lanka, formed as a mixture of Sinhala and Shonam, with Malay being the major lexifier. It is traditionally spoken by the Sri Lankan Malays, Javanese Sri Lankans, and among some Sinhalese in Hambantota. Today, the number of speakers of the language have dwindled considerably but it has continued to be spoken notably in the Hambantota District of Southern Sri Lanka, which has traditionally been home to many Sri Lankan Malays.
Dutch is a West Germanic language, spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language and is the third most spoken Germanic language. In Europe, Dutch is the native language of most of the population of the Netherlands and Flanders. Dutch was one of the official languages of South Africa until 1925, when it was replaced by Afrikaans, a separate but partially mutually intelligible daughter language of Dutch. Afrikaans, depending on the definition used, may be considered a sister language, spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, and evolving from Cape Dutch dialects.
There have been a number of Arabic-based pidgins and creoles throughout history, including a number of new ones emerging today. These may be broadly divided into pidgins and creoles, which share a common ancestry, and incipient immigrant pidgins. Additionally, Maridi Arabic may have been an 11th-century pidgin.
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