Creole languages are languages that have developed in most cases as a consequence of European colonization, often on islands. They have typically inherited the words (lexicon) of a colonial language (such as Dutch, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese), but the grammatical system was developed locally, often by enslaved people. Quantitative measures point to some 80 % innovations in the grammar of creoles (Murawaki 2016).
The project aims to solve a long-standing controversy about creole languages: how did creoles emerge, and how did they subsequently develop? Scholars have investigated the weight of the European languages (lexifier) and those of the enslaved populations (substrate) in the grammar of a creole. Some scholars see the process of creolization as a gradual development away from the lexifier to the creole, occurring over a period of perhaps a century, e.g. Robert Chaudenson, Salikoko Mufwene and Jacques Arends. On the other side, there are scholars who argue that creoles develop and stabilize quickly, within a few decades at most, e.g. Derek Bickerton, Philip Baker and John McWhorter. Some scholars have claimed that early written documents are not representative of the speech of the enslaved, but rather reflect the language of the colonials, who used a more europeanized version of the creole. The project intends to contribute to a resolution of these essential questions.
This project constitutes the strongest case ever, shedding light on the controversies of gradual versus sudden genesis, on the influences of the original languages of the enslaved and enslavers, on the diachronic developments and on the link between demography and creolization.
The situation on the then Danish West Indian islands is unique. First, unusually detailed information is available on the demography of the earliest European and African populations – and most Danish West Indian materials have been digitized. Second, the quantity of linguistic material is exceptionally high, spanning a broad time frame covering a period of 250 years, so that the development of the language can be studied thoroughly. Third, several religious texts have been translated into the local creole by competing religious groups on the islands, enabling triangulation of language change through these data. Between 1765 and 1834, the Moravians and Lutherans printed approximately 5,400 pages of religious and educational material in Virgin Island Dutch Creole (also known as Carriols). Secular texts are also available, offering a special insight in the mind of the enslaved populations. There is a corpus of 150 unpublished letters written by converted enslaved Africans, from as early as the 1730s, approximately 50 years after the initial establishment of the St. Thomas colony, which gives a rare insight into native creole speakers’ use of the language. Linguists have focused on 20th century creole grammar, on language documentation, but not on diachronic aspects, with a few exceptions like works by Thomas Stolz and Pieter Muysken. New computational techniques make it now possible to track changes in the language and study its origin with the various datasets available.
This project represents the first comprehensive study of the genesis and development over time of a new language, the creole of the former Danish West Indies (now US Virgin Islands). Computational techniques now make it possible to reconstruct the genesis and development of the creole language that emerged in the former Danish West Indies (today’s US Virgin Islands). Making use of a range of digital methods, the project will synthesize demographic data with diachronic linguistic data to investigate the formation of the new language. The project defines a new agenda for the study of language emergence and subsequent development. This endeavour is made possible thanks to a unique richness of demographic, social and linguistic data on the Island of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.
The project consists of three parts.
A careful selection of language features, preferably stable ones, are used for the purpose of comparing the three sources. Many features for dozens of relevant African languages have already been collected, and used in earlier publications by Kristoffer Friis Bøegh and colleagues, and by Aymeric Daval-Markussen.
Data on these creole features have been gathered for the entire period from the 1730s until the 1920s, with fragments from the 1980s. Demographic data and linguistic data, with texts from different times, cover the later developments of the creole language under the influence of new cohorts of enslaved and settlers followed by missionaries.Thus, the linguistic history of Carriols can be tracked back virtually from its inception to the final stages of its development, attesting for instance the loss and introduction of speech sounds, fluctuating ordering principles and word formation mechanisms.
Thus, this project represents the most ambitious empirical endeavour in this realm ever, where actual demographic data rather than estimated simulations are correlated with language features, which in turn are also tracked through time thanks to the uniquely available documentation.
