At the moment the study of Virgin Islands Dutch Creole gets boosts from both sides of the Atlantic. On the US Virgin Islands, Gylchris and Gilbert Sprauve (in coöperation with Peter Stein and me) work on a book with dialogues in Dutch Creole. More about it in near future.
In Europe, at the moment the University of Aarhus is the beating heart. Historian Rasmus Christensen (University of Copenhagen) and linguist/creolist Peter Bakker (Aarhus University) have discovered seven eighteenth and nineteenth century short texts which add interesting information to the history of Virgin Islands Dutch Creole, and especially to the use of the language in newspapers. Recently an article about these texts was published by Kristoffer Friis Boegh (Aarhus University), Peter Bakker (Aarhus University), Rasmus Christensen (University of Copenhagen) and me.
All texts are interesting, but the following is perhaps the most moving. In Enrique Corneiro’s 2018 book Runaway Virgins, Danish West Indian slave adds, several advertisements contain information about the enslaved people being speakers of Dutch Creole. However none of the ads is written in Creole. Rasmus Christensen found the following text (Hansteen, B. (1817, January 23). ‘Notichi’. St. Thomæ Tidende. http://hdl.handle.net/109.3.1/uuid:05863d96-89b4-4272-8dd1-7d91bf06385d)
Escaped from me a small youngster/boy named Paaty. He/she is nine years and
nine days old. Any person/people who are able to bring him/her inside the Fort
[i.e., Fort Christian in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas] to the undersigned, I will
give him/her three dollars!! I have heard that he/she is in the higher grasslands
where the mestizo-whites are keeping him/her.
(Translation by Boegh et al. 2023)
Hopefully the article will soon be widely available!
Boegh, Kristoffer Friis, Peter Bakker, Cefas van Rossem & Rasmus Christensen. 2023. “Seven newly discovered 18th and 19th century Virgin Islands Dutch Creole Texts”, in: Faraclas, N., R. Severing, E. Echteld, S. Delgado & W. Rutgers (eds) Caribbean Convivialities and Caribbean Sciences: Inclusive Approaches tot he Study of the Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Dutch Caribbean and Beyond. Willemstad: University of Curaçao. pp. 93-116.
die creol taal 
Dutch as a koine?
Aarhus Danish Atlantic 160116 Dutch as a Koine
On January 16, 2016, I presented this paper in Aarhus at the symposium The Danish Atlantic (Aarhus University). Next to papers in the field of history, anthropology, archives and museums, five had a linguistic subject. Robbert van Sluijs (Radboud University) about West-African grammatical influence on VIDC, Peter Bakker (Aarhus University) about Danish linguistic elements in West-African and Dutch Creole languages, Kristoffer Boegh (Aarhus University) about the differences between Dutch Creole lects and other Creole languages and Peter Stein (several universities, Emeritus) about Oldendorps reports on the life of enslaved people.
The Dutch language was the largest lexifier of VIDC, and to be be more precize: the influence of Western Flemish and Zeelandic dialects is obvious. However, we do not know exactly how these elements entered into the vernacular of the Danish Antilles. I already presented on this subject in Brussels (2012), which was published in Revue Belge, but in this presentation I focus on the exact variant of Dutch and not only on demographic information.
Further reading? This will be a part of my dissertation. Please feel free to send me an email about this subject.
Cefas van Rossem
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Posted in Danish sources, Historical corpora, Manuscripts, metalinguistic comments, Presentations, Uncategorized
Tagged Demography, eighteenth century, koine