Posted by Bart Jacobs on July 8, 2011
 

Bart Jacobs is a PhD student of the University of Munich (Germany) and the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and a member of the Linguistisches Internationales Promotionsprogramm (LIPP) and the Centro de Estudos de Linguística Geral e Aplicada (CELGA).
 
 
 
Papiamentu is the official language of the Leeward Dutch Antilles, which include Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, three islands situated some 60 kilometres off the coast of Venezuela and jointly referred to as the ABC-Islands. Papiamentu currently has an estimated number of 270,000 native speakers, of which approximately 120,000 reside on Curaçao, 60,000 on Aruba and some 10,000 on Bonaire, while the Netherlands harbor the remainder.

A bit of history…
The ABC-islands were discovered in 1499 by the Spanish, who never actively colonized the islands.
The Dutch West Indian Company took Curaçao in 1634, turning it into a naval base and, from the 1650s onwards, a thriving center for slave trade. Until ca. 1700, the Dutch dominated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, purchasing slaves in West Africa and reselling these to third parties in the Caribbean area. Curaçao’s economy profited and the island’s population expanded proportionally.

It is in this booming period, extending roughly from 1650 to 1700, that Papiamentu is believed to have emerged on Curaçao as a vehicle of interethnic communication. The historical and linguistic documentation at hand furthermore suggests that in the course of the 18th century, Papiamentu had become the language of the society at large, perhaps with the exception of the Dutch ruling class.

Curaçao – Photo : Jane Shattuck (cc)

Spanish or Portuguese origins ?
While scholars agree that Papiamentu’s lexicon is predominantly Spanish-based − hence its typical designation as a Spanish-lexifier creole − the presence of a number of Portuguese-derived items in the fundamental part of its vocabulary is also widely recognized. Since Papiamentu is spoken in a Spanish-speaking area, the presence of these Portuguese words requires an explanation and lies at the heart of a century-long debate, which is far from being resolved. Finding out where the Portuguese elements come from, in turn, has important implications for the closely related question of whether Papiamentu is and never was anything but a Spanish-based creole or whether it was imported from elsewhere as an originally Portuguese-based variety, only to be subsequently relexified towards Spanish.

The latest research on the history of Papiamentu supports the latter point of view: according to Jacobs (Forthcoming. The Origins of Papiamentu: Linguistic and Historical Ties with Upper Guinea), Papiamentu is genetically related to the Portuguese-based creole varieties of Upper Guinea, spoken on the Cape Verde Islands and in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance. The linguistic transfer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao must have been carried out in the period between ca. 1650 and 1680, which is when the slave trade between the two regions was at its peak. Subsequently, Papiamentu has developed, and continues to develop, in the direction of the socially dominant European languages Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Dutch, thereby loosing much of its original Portuguese flavor.

As a consequence, mutual intelligibility between Papiamentu and the Portuguese-based creole varieties of Upper Guinea is not self-evident; however, the linguistic kinship is still clearly visible in the domains of phonology, morphology and syntax.

A thriving language
Papiamentu’s remarkable popularity and vitality at present (especially when compared to the endangered status of many other creole languages) is visible not only in the high number of native speakers but also, for instance, in the fact that newspapers and television programs are written and broadcasted in Papiamentu.

Furthermore, although inhabitants of the ABC Islands typically speak at least four languages (Papiamentu, Dutch, Spanish and English), Papiamentu is dominant in all socio-cultural domains. The current strength of Papiamentu seems to correlate with the socio-historical fact that the language served as a marker of group identity of the original slave population (with predominantly African but also Amerindian roots) vis-à-vis the Dutch colonial masters.
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Learn more about Papiamentu on our website.
Read Nicolas Quint’s article ” From West Africa to the Antilles, dynamic Portuguese Creoles”.