A peak at death: Assessing continuity and change in an underdocumented language

Abstract

Neither historical nor linguistic records reveal exactly when the shift from Negerhollands to English and English Creole began in the Danish West Indies. In order to assess phonological continuity and change in the last stage of this moribund creole, the following discussion (1) contrasts earlier and current views of Negerhollands and sketches language contact in the Danish West Indies; (2) examines the language history and the vowel systems of the last speaker; and (3) assesses variation in a Negerhollands corpus produced by 10 elderly bilinguals. The article demonstrates how using a variety of approaches can enhance the investigation of an underdocumented language.

What's Past Is Past: Variation in the Expression of Past Time Reference in Negerhollands Narratives

“…Nevertheless, some of these speakers’ ancestors may have adjusted their speech toward Hoch Kreol or the missionaries’ Negerhollands. On the basis of the phonological structures he uses (Sabino 1990:154), and the content of his narratives (Sabino 1996:56), informant 2 can be identified as least conservative of dJdJ informants. He says that his father was an overseer on a plantation, which was probably run by Moravian missionaries (dJdJ:25–26).…”

“…Knowledge of Liturgical Creole has also been suspected in case of informant 9 on the basis of phonological characteristics and other unspecified reasons (Sabino 1996:56). One of these reasons may have been the biblical content of one of his stories.…”

“…They have written many works in the language in which they almost invariably use a past marker to mark past time reference. This variety is referred to as Liturgical Creole in Sabino 1990Sabino , 1996Sabino , 2012 The German speaking Moravian missionaries used the form a, while the Danish missionaries used ha. The only source written by a representative of the colonial society is Magens 1770 grammar containing everyday life dialogues.…”

Contact languages as “endangered” languages

“…Thus these languages are, as Trouillot (1992) has said of Caribbean societies, "inescapably historical." Their historicalness is an important part of what makes contact languages intriguing to linguistic scholars of various stripes: to a degree not possible with older lanceptions include Sabino's (1994Sabino's ( , 1996 work on Negerhollands, Kouwenberg's (2000) work on Berbice Dutch, and Hazaël-Massieux's (1999) book-length treatment of French-lexified creoles as endangered languages; see also Garrett (2000Garrett ( , 2005 for discussion of language shift and the status of Kwéyòl in St. Lucia. guages, it is possible to identify (to varying degrees of precision and certainty, to be sure) the specific time, place, and circumstances of their origins, and to trace their developmental trajectories up to the present day.…”

Theme and variation in Jamaican vowels

“…There is wide agreement that Jamaican Creole has a basic 5-vowel system, in which the high front and high back vowels are distinguished by length (for discussions of analyses that do not posit phonemic length, see Lawton, 1963;Sabino, 1996). Disagreement begins with the system of long vowels and carries through the diphthongs.…”