Category Archives: Dutch related contact languages

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.

In 1989 Ian Robertson published his article ‘Berbice and Skepi Dutch, a lexical comparison’ in Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde. As far as I know it is the best source for the lexicon of Skepi Dutch, the Dutch related Creole of which we know so little.

In this article the lexicon of these two Guyanese Creole languages are also compared to that of Virgin Islands Dutch Creole. A Zeelandic lexifier has already been linked to all three languages, however Skepi Dutch and Virgin Islands Dutch Creole seem to be closer related than Berbice and Skepi Dutch. The past years especially Peter Bakker (Aarhus University, Denmark) studied the links between these languages.

The article is digitally available on the so-called Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren. You can find the link it here: Robertson 1989