Ceylon Dutch
| Dutch daughter languages | ||
|---|---|---|
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Spoken in |
Ceylon | |
| speaker | extinct | |
| Linguistic classification |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
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| ISO 639 -2 |
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| ISO 639-3 |
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Ceylon Dutch ( ndl. Ceylons-Nederlands ) is the English name for an extinct Creolized daughter language of Dutch, which was mainly spoken between the 17th and 19th centuries on what was then Ceylon . This language is occasionally referred to in older German studies .
history
Between 1658 and 1795, large parts of Ceylon were ruled by the Dutch United East India Company ( Dutch Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie , VOC for short). Many Dutch people also settled on the island. The Dutch language of Ceylon apparently quickly took on completely independent features that removed it from the European mother tongue.
In 1795 Ceylon was conquered by Great Britain and the existing VOC branches (ndl. VOC-Factorijen ) were replaced by English trading posts. In 1801, English became the official language on Ceylon. Many Dutch people, and with them numerous Ceylon-Portuguese , adopted English as their main colloquial language from 1840 onwards. The Dutch and Portuguese were referred to by the new English administration as the Burgher Community and " Burgher " became the new name for the Ceylon Dutch and Portuguese, who later also included Asian parts of the population.
Nonetheless, Dutch (in its high-level and creolized form) remained alive on Ceylon for a long time. For example as the church language of the Reformed congregation in Colombo .
In 1897 the Dutch company Het Hollandsch Gezelschapp van Ceylon was founded by bilingual Dutch people .
In 1907, the Dutch Burgher Union of Ceylon was founded by now purely English-speaking Burghers . Since only six to eight people in Ceylon spoke standard Dutch at that time, the new union replaced the old Dutch society.
Many Burgher Ceylons left the island in the following years and settled in other parts of the English sphere of influence. Ceylon Dutch was replaced as the church language by English in 1930, and a large number of Burghers left Ceylon between 1930 and 1950.
In the 1980s, the number of Burgher on Ceylon was about 34,000.
particularities
In the older German literature has often been claimed that the Dutch Ceylon many similarities with that in Africa -based Afrikaans have exhibited. The thesis was put forward that the Ceylon Dutch had gone through almost the same changes as the Afrikaans (for example the dismantling of forms in the grammatical structure of the language and numerous other simplifications).
The Dutch neo-Greekist and linguist Dirk Christiaan Hesseling was able to prove these (coincidental) similarities between Afrikaans and Ceylon Dutch in a study he carried out in 1905.
Later it was often pointed out that in 1925 a Reformed pastor, Abraham Jacob de Klerk, had been brought from Cape Town to Colombo because he had been able to preach there in his mother tongue. But according to today's understanding, this claim can be relegated to the realm of legends, since de Klerk most likely preached in English.
literature
- Heinz Kloss: The development of new Germanic cultural languages since 1800 , Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, Düsseldorf 1978, ISBN 3-590-15637-6