This article argues that the three existing varieties of Chavacano are descendents of one and the same proto-variety. While their direct relatedness used to be agreed upon, it has recently been questioned to differing extents by Lipski (e.g. 1992, 2010, 2013) and Fernández (e.g. 2006, 2011). There is a large gap in Chavacano research insofar as systematic attempts at verifying or falsifying the alleged kinship between the varieties are missing to date. This article makes a first such attempt and argues that the varieties are indeed genetically related.

This paper presents new Skepi Creole Dutch data from the late-18th century, found in the work of the German scholar Ernst Karl Rodschied. The creole data include pronominal and verbal paradigms, a short 60-word excerpt from a private letter, and around two dozen names for local flora. After briefly introducing Rodschied, we present the data and compare them to the existing Skepi corpus.

No abstract

Berbice Dutch was a creole language spoken in the Republic of Guyana in South America, a country first under Dutch, and later under British colonial rule. Owing mainly to Silvia Kouwenberg (A grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole, De Gruyter Mouton, 1994), we were blessed with a detailed synchronic documentation of Berbice Dutch before its demise. However, the formation of the language remains clouded in mystery: its grammar and (basic) lexicon display a seemingly unique mixture of Dutch (Creole) and Eastern Ijo, as a result of which the language is often portrayed as a challenge to existing contact-linguistic theory. In this paper, a scenario is proposed that, rather than challenging the said theory, is fully grounded in it: it will be argued that the language was a case of serial glottogenesis: a first stage of creolisation was later followed by language mixing. The paper furthermore presents hitherto unknown historical data pertaining to the arrival of Ijo speakers in Berbice.