Monthly Archives: October 2020

Skepi Dutch: sensational source found by Jacobs and Parkvall

No, it is not about Virgin Islands Dutch Creole, but about one of the two other Dutch related Creole Languages in the Caribbean. In 1989 Ian Robertson of University of the West Indies, Trinidad, compared the Swadesh lists of Virgin Islands Dutch Creole, Berbice Dutch and Skepi Dutch and suggested that the least known of the three, Skepi Dutch looked more like Virgin Islands Dutch Creole than to Berbice Dutch which existed along the Berbice river and Wiruni Creek, quite next to the Essequibo river where Skepi was once the contact language.

In Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 35 (2020), 2, p.360-380 Bart Jacobs and Mikael Parkvall present a formerly unknown source of the mysterious Skepi Dutch language which doubles the vocabulary of Skepi Dutch and which adds about 120 sentences to the corpus.

On Neerlandistiek.nl I wrote an introduction to this important article. It is in Dutch, and you can find it here:

https://www.neerlandistiek.nl/2020/10/sensationele-nieuwe-bron-van-het-skepi-dutch/#more-122399

An English translation will be published soon.