Berbice-Dutch
| Berbice-Dutch | ||
|---|---|---|
| Linguistic classification |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
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| ISO 639 -2 |
crp (other creole languages) |
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| ISO 639-3 |
brc |
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Berbice-Dutch ( ndl. Berbice-Nederlands ) is a now extinct Creole language that was spoken in Guyana until about the middle of the 20th century . The name is derived from Berbice , a Dutch colony existing from 1627 to 1814 on the north coast of South America, in the east of today's Guyana, on the border with today's Suriname . With the British-Dutch Treaty of 1814 , Berbice fell to Great Britain . As a result, English gradually supplanted Dutch.
Research history
The documentation of this language is thanks to the research of Silvia Kouwenberg, who between 1986 and 1990 found only eleven people who could still remember this language through a laborious search in the most remote areas of the tropical rainforest . The oldest speakers at that time were Hennie Hartman (* 1895, † 1990) and Alberta Bell (* 1903), the youngest speaker was Hilda Adolph (* 1923), who, however, no longer fully mastered the language. During her research, Silvia Kouwenberg had to learn the language herself, because this was the only way to persuade the last people who still mastered this language to speak this dying language again. During their work, important speakers who still knew many old fairy tales and stories in this language died.
meaning
Berbice Dutch is unique in many ways and offers deep insights into the history of the Creole languages that emerged from the Atlantic slave trade . Berbice Dutch was the only Creole language that still contained so many words of a certain African language ( East Ijo , from the Niger Delta) that the region of origin of the slaves in Africa could be determined and part of their history and identity could be given back to these people .
Examples
- "An en kuliman wa yen dang, hab shi korimanyap."
- And an Indian had been there, had a lot of work belonging to him.
- "There was an Indian who had many workers."
This sentence shows how a complex sentence arises from roots of different origins, although to a person who does not speak the language it appears like an unstructured "babble" from a few recognizable Dutch-German word fragments ( een = a, kuli = coolie, Indian workers, you = man wa = was, did = have the other components come partly from other sources).
- "Eke ore drokodroko-drokodroke!"
- I deaf-deaf ears!
- "I'm already completely deaf!"
This sentence shows two noteworthy things: The personal pronoun of the first person in the singular ( eke = I) does not go back to a root “mi”, “mo” or similar like in all other Atlantean Creole languages, which shows the independence of Berbice Dutch . In addition, it shows how doubling can be used creatively. The doubling of a word often indicates an increase. Here a word, which itself arose from a doubling, namely ( drokodroko = deaf) from ( droko = dry), is doubled again to increase it .
literature
- Silvia Kouwenberg: A Grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole . Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, New York, 1994, ISBN 978-3-11-013736-1 .