Monthly Archives: June 2017

Peter Bakker (Aarhus University) compares all Caribbean varieties of Dutch Creole!

Only recently John Benjamins published

This great book in which the phylogenetic approach of relations between Creole languages is extensively explores is (thank you so much, editors and publisher!)  available as open source text: http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027265739

At first sight, Peter Bakker’s contribution is most interesting for the study of Dutch Creoles., so I haven’t checked al other chapters yet….

Already in 1989 Ian Robertson compared three Caribbean Dutch Creoles and published an interesting Swadesh wordlist comparison in Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Letterkunde. In 2014 Peter Bakker published his comparison of Skepi Dutch, Berbice Dutch and Virgin Islands Dutch Creole in Journal of Germanic Linguistics in which he included new material and used a different approach. However, in his new 2017 contribution, chapter 10, Bakker uses the phylogenetic possibilities to connect the relations and linguistic distances between the Caribbean Dutch Creoles. Step by step we are able to follow his search for linguistic and historical relations between these three, extinct, languages.

Bakker, Peter. 2017. ‘Chapter 10. Dutch Creoles compared with their lexifier’, in: Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen, Eeva Sippola (eds), Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, p. 276-305.