The Creolization of Dutch

Abstract

The aim of this article is a systematic investigation of certain grammatical aspects of three languages that came about as by-products of colonial expansion of the Dutch during the seventeenth century: Afrikaans, Negerhollands, and Berbice Dutch. The discussion is centered on three grammatical features that have played an important role either in creolis-tics or in theoretical linguistics: TMA-marking, adpositional phrases, and passive constructions. Since seventeenth-century Dutch is the common lexifier, this language is also taken into account in the overall comparison. It is shown that the three languages related to Dutch form a less homogeneous group than do some of the creoles related to English and French. The main conclusion is that while processes at work during creoli-zation do not have to be uniform and may have different outcomes, the social circumstances existing in the different contact situations constitute a significant factor in the development of the emerging contact languages.

Middles

“…), but also in passives seem to be more like French/Heerlen Dutch in this respect. For instance, in a number of (heavily deflected) creole languages like Negerhollands (with Dutch-based lexicon), examples like the following are possible (see Bruyn and Veenstra 1993 ): (94) Of course, as in languages with reflexive-marked passives ( ), the question here is whether such sentences are truly ambiguous between a passive and a middle. 15 At least in the case of Sranan (another such creole), it appears that sentences of this types are ambiguous and do have both a middle and a passive reading (Lilian Adamson, p.c.).…”

Three Dutch Creoles in Comparison

“…This study goes beyond Stolz 1986, Bruyn & Veenstra 1993, and Robertson 1989 in that both lexical and grammatical features are discussed from the synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Despite the considerable grammatical differences among the varieties, all three are clearly creoles; that is, the languages have acquired many new structural traits following an apparent stage of simplification, during which the bulk of Dutch morphological and syntactic properties were filtered out.…”

The formation of Afrikaans

“…Linguistically, Afrikaans appears more creolelike than metropolitan Dutch but in turn displays far fewer prototypical characteristics than Negerhollands (Virgin Islands Dutch Creole), Berbice Creole Dutch or Skepi Creole Dutch of Guyana, all three 'true' creoles (cf. Markey 1982, Ponelis 1988, Bruyn and Veenstra 1993 3.1. Afrikaans has maintained a fundamental typological feature of continental West Germanic languages (i.e., Dutch and German) that is virtually unknown in creoles; namely, underlying SOY word order with verb-second (V2) phenomena.…”