Berbice Creole Dutch
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Berbice Dutch Creole | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | Guyana | |
| Total speakers | 4 or 5 (As of 1993[update])[1] | |
| Language family | Creole language
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | crp | |
| ISO 639-3 | brc | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Berbice Dutch Creole is Dutch-based creole language of Guyana. It has a lexicon partly based on a dialect of the West African language of Ijaw.
Berbice was settled in 1627 by the Dutchman Abraham van Peere. A few years later Suriname was settled by Englishmen Lord Willoughby and Lawrence Hyde under a grant from the English King, Charles II. In the beginning, therefore, Suriname was a British and Berbice a Dutch possession.
On 22 April 1796 the British occupied the territory. On 27 March 1802 Berbice was restored to the Batavian Republic (the then-current name of the Netherlands). In September 1803 the British occupied the territory again. On 13 August 1814 Berbice became a British colony. The colony was formally ceded to Britain by the Netherlands on 20 November 1815.
The Berbice slaves kept speaking Creole Dutch among themselves, until the language came in decay in the 20th century. As of 1993 there were some 4 or 5 elderly speakers of the language, although other sources report tens of speakers.
Berbice Creole Dutch is, as are Negerhollands (extinct) and Skepi Creole Dutch (with a similar preservation status as Berbice Dutch), not based on Hollandic Dutch (the dialect that is closest to Standard Dutch) but on Zeelandic.
Contents |
[edit] Phonology
[edit] Vowels
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| High | i | u |
| Mid | e | o |
| ɛ | ||
| Low | a | |
There is a large degree of free variation in the vowels, with the range of realizations of the phonemes overlapping.
/e/ and /ɛ/ are almost in complementary distribution, and were probably allophones at an earlier stage of the language.
[edit] Consonants
| Bilabial | Labiodental | Alveolar | Palato-alveolar | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | Voiceless | p | t | k | |||
| Voiced | b | d | ɡ | ||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Fricative | Voiceless | f | s | (ʃ) | h | ||
| Voiced | (v) | (z) | |||||
| Approximant | Central | ɹ | |||||
| Lateral | l | ||||||
[ʃ] is usually in complementary distribution with [s], occurring only before /i/, but there are a handful of exceptions.
/v/ and /z/ occur only in loanwords from Guyanese Creole.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Kouwenberg: p. 233.
[edit] References
- Kouwenberg, Silvia (1994). "Berbice Dutch". in Jacques Arends, Pieter Muysken & Norval Smith. Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction. John Benjamins. pp. 233–243.
