Yesterday evening, Gylchris Sprauve, Peter Stein and I were discussing the contents of a book about Virgin Islands Dutch Creole during our weekly ZOOM meeting. Among these people, including Gilbert Sprauve who is also almost always present during these meetings, it is hard to stay focused on the matter; we tend to discuss all kinds of aspects of the language Virgin Islands Dutch Creole, special sources, its history and all related researchers.
When I showed Peter Stein and Gylchris Sprauve the use of the Dutch Delpher website, in which a bulk of books, magazines, journals et cetera from the seventeenth century until present can be searched, I thought the name Sprauve would be a nice entrance to search for.
The name Sprauve only appears a few times in Dutch related newspapers. IIn a few cases it refers to the last name of weightlifter Liston Sprauve who became twelfth in the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico. However, suprise struck us, when we saw the Curaçao newspaper Amigoe dedicated an article to the research by Gilbert Sprauve, whom we know as the one who found out Virgin Islands Dutch Creole was still spoken in the 1960s.
In his article Taalonderzoek in West-Indië (‘Language research in the West Indies’, November 15, 1968) J. van Zanthen presents Gilbert Sprauve, who was working in the College of the US Virgin Islands and his linguistic research on the Creole languages of St. Lucia and Dominica. He writes the study will last for a year and will be financed by Fulbright-Hayes. Sprauve will focus on the pronunciation of the languages and the composition of them. Next to that Van Zanthen presents a short overview of Sprauve’s study and his day to day job in the College of the US Virgin Islands: education of modern languages (French and Spanish, as I know now).
The most important aspect of this article is probably that someone from the West Indies is going to study Caribbean Creole languages. It is compared to the situation of Papiamentu and Sranan on which also linguists from respectively the Antilles and Surinam worked. In the case of Sranan, dr. (Hein) Eersel is mentioned. He was my teacher in the Dutch department of the Institute for the Education of Teachers (I.O.L., Paramaribo, Surinam) which I attended in 1984-1985, and who recently passed away shortly after his 100th birthday.
Your will find the article HERE.
During our ZOOM meetings Gilbert Sprauve refered to this research on Creole languages in Guinea and Sierra Leone, but also St. Lucia and Dominica a few times, not only because of the Creole language, but because the beautiful encounter shortly after his return. His research has been noted in the Daily News in St. Thomas, and when he was walking through the main street of Cruz Bay, St. John, a voice shouted at him in a language he did not understand. It became the start of the study of living Virgin Islands Dutch Creole, by Gilbert Sprauve, Anne Adams and Robin Sabino, and their students.
The entire story will appear in the above mentioned book!
‘That is why we wanted to draw attention to the work of Gilbert A. Sprauve.’
die creol taal 