A 1681 letter written by Jørgen Iversen (1638–1682), the first governor of Danish St. Thomas, unearthed from the Danish National Archives, contains a quote in incipient Virgin Islands Dutch Creole (VIDC). The quote, Mij dodte, mij loppe, in mijn lande, lit. ‘I die/dead, I go, in my country’ (free translation: ‘If/when I die, I will go back to my own country’), predates other early VIDC sources by over half a century. This finding shows that a Dutch-related contact variety was in use on St. Thomas a mere decade after the island’s colonization in 1672. Assessing historical-demographic evidence alongside the linguistic evidence, the most plausible scenario, we argue, is one in which VIDC formed locally on St. Thomas rather than having been imported before the 1680s. The quote is among the earliest fragments of a European-lexifier contact language in the Caribbean, and among the earliest in any Dutch-related contact language.

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.

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.

In our article (this volume), we outlined a new hypothesis for the formation of Berbice Dutch, proposing a two-stage genesis: a first phase between 1627 and 1712 in which a Dutch-lexified creole emerged in the Berbice colony, followed by a second phase in which the creole mixed with Eastern Ijo. This second phase started in 1713 following the arrival of ca. 300 speakers of Ijo, and would largely have been completed one or two decades later when greater numbers of slaves began to arrive in the colony. The mixing affected mainly content vocabulary, but some grammatical material (including affixes) was also introduced into the creole. This second phase is, in our view, the actual starting point of Berbice Dutch as we know it. The aim of Mufwene’s rejoinder is not to specifically rebut these two stages (though he does criticize aspects of it, see Section 5); he even acknowledges that “the presence of a creolized Dutch spoken in Berbice prior to the 1713 arrival of the Ijos […] is plausible” (this issue, p. 205). Rather, he takes issue with a number of assumptions that underlie our genesis scenario (but which are for the most part not directly related to it), more precisely: our assumptions regarding the ontological status of creoles and mixed languages.

This paper investigates the origins of Guianese French Creole. Whereas the existing literature assumes Guianese was formed in situ, we argue the creole is in fact genetically related to Lesser Antillean French Creole. We support our hypothesis by means of a range of comparative linguistic data. Furthermore, a historical framework is provided that accounts for linguistic transfer from the Lesser Antilles to French Guiana in the second half of the 17th century.

This paper deals with the question of Gbe influence on Guianese, the largest creole language of French Guiana. Recent research (Jennings and Pfander, 2015, 2018) claims that Guianese was formed in a bilingual French-Gbe situation and that most of the grammatical structure of the creole was calqued on Gbe. We argue, firstly, that the Gbe influence is (vastly) overstated. We show, amongst other things, that Guianese is not more Gbe-like than the French creoles of the Lesser Antilles, and that it is in fact noticeably less so than its direct neighbour Saramaccan. Secondly, we scrutinize certain aspects of the historical framework put forth by Jennings and Milder (2018). Finally, we address some theoretical issues such as the in our view dubious claim that Guianese formed in a strictly bilingual context.

A long-lasting debate within creole studies concerns the scarcity of Spanish-based creoles and the theoretical implications this may have. However, there is no agreement as to how many genuinely Spanish-based creoles there are in the world, and identifying the size of that group can generate controversies. Papiamentu, for instance, is canonically classified as a Spanish-based creole, even though most scholars at present seem to agree its origins are Creole Portuguese. A Portuguese lineage has on various occasions and by various authors also been claimed for Chabacano (Philippine Creole Spanish) and Palenquero (spoken in Colombia). These creoles, too, were supposedly once Portuguese-based, only to subsequently be ‘relexified’ towards Spanish. This paper argues that there is little linguistic basis for that claim. Although both creoles do indeed seem to have received some Portuguese (Creole) input, we maintain that this input was limited and substratal in nature, and thus has no bearing on the classification (whether diachronic or synchronic) of the two creoles as truly Spanish-based.

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 Fernandez (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.