Scandinavian Studies in Language
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss
<p>-</p>en-USudb@cc.au.dk (Ulf Dalvad Berthelsen)udb@cc.au.dk (Ulf Dalvad Berthelsen)Fri, 20 Dec 2024 09:46:18 +0100OJS 3.3.0.13http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss60Pidgins, creoles, and language contact in Danish and Dutch colonial contexts
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152267
Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Peter Bakker
Copyright (c) 2024 Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Peter Bakker
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https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152267Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100The suspicion confirmed
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152268
<p>The Danish-Dutch archaeological expedition to the US Virgin Islands in 1922 to 1923 included the Dutch anthropologist J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong. In addition to his archaeological work, he pursued a secondary aim: confirming the survival of Virgin Islands Dutch Creole (VIDC), a contact language spoken when the islands were a colony of Denmark, known as the Danish West Indies. De Josselin de Jong identified several native speakers. He recorded their narratives, later published in his 1926 volume <em>Het Huidige Negerhollandsch</em>. This collection provided a rare vernacular source, supplementing the predominantly missionary literature available at the time. In 2023, marking the centenary of the expedition, De Josselin de Jong’s daily diary entries were published in Dutch on www.diecreoltaal.com. The present article examines the diary as an egodocument and its metalinguistic insights, exploring how the notes enhance our understanding of the conditions and authenticity of the 1926 VIDC collection. Through examples of the fieldwork process and interactions with informants, this study reveals the diary’s value in affirming the reliability of De Josselin de Jong’s documentation of VIDC, and it offers a closer view of the language as spoken in the early twentieth century.</p>Cefas van Rossem
Copyright (c) 2024 Cefas van Rossem
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https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152268Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100Dora Richards Miller’s “Recollections of a West-Indian Home and Slave-Insurrection”
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152269
<p>This article presents an introduction to a diplomatic edition of a manuscript written by the Caribbean-born writer and educator Dora Richards Miller (1835–1914), finalized around 1886. The diplomatic edition is published as Miller (this issue), edited and annotated by the authors of the present introductory study. Miller’s <em>Recollections</em> contains an account of her memories of the 1848 slave uprising on St. Croix, which resulted in the emancipation of the enslaved population in the Danish West Indies (today’s US Virgin Islands). In addition to providing an overview of the life and work of Miller and contextualization of her <em>Recollections</em>, we offer a discussion of the account as a central source for Virgin Islands language history in the 19th century. The document contains a considerable number of quotations as well as the lyrics of an 1848 song in a historical form of Crucian English Creole. Miller’s <em>Recollections</em> can be considered, we argue, the earliest substantial source for the study of Anglophone sociolinguistic variation in the Virgin Islands.</p>Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Peter Bakker
Copyright (c) 2024 Kristoffer Friis Bøegh
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https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152269Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100Recollections of a West-Indian Home and Slave-Insurrection
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152270
Dora Richards Miller, Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Peter Bakker
Copyright (c) 2024 Dora Richards Miller, Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Peter Bakker
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https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152270Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100“Stutters very much” and speaks “bad English”
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152271
<p>While the young runaway Thomas spoke Dutch and English, his enslaver Bernard Watlington noted that he stuttered as well. This became public knowledge when Watlington shared all the details he thought necessary for recapturing Thomas in a short runaway slave advertisement in 1803. With this as a starting point, this article examines speech impairments and language variations among runaways on St. Croix. While often used as historical sources for various aspects of enslavement, these advertisements also provide valuable insights into the languages spoken by enslaved people, including when they deviated from the norm. Through an analysis of various runaway slave advertisements, this article establishes the contours of speech impairments and language use among enslaved individuals on St. Croix by the turn of the nineteenth century. The article aims to utilize runaway slave advertisements to explore language-related issues and, through this exploration, shed new light on linguistic aspects and the experiences of slavery in the early modern Caribbean.*</p>Aske Stick
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https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152271Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100Grammaticography of Virgin Islands Dutch Creole (Negerhollands) from the Danish West Indies
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152273
<p>The writing of grammars of creole languages started in the 18th century in the Danish colony of the Virgin Islands, where a Dutch-based creole was spoken. The grammars were written as part of the activities of the Moravian missionaries as well as by the missionaries of the Danish Lutheran church. The historian C.G.A. Oldendorp describes the Creole language on 50 pages of the manuscript of his <em>Historie der caribischen Inseln…</em> This manuscript was published in its complete form in 2000/2002. Only a very abridged version of the grammatical description had already been printed in 1777. A few years earlier, in 1770, the <em>Grammatica</em> of the Creole by the Danish colonist Magens was published in Copenhagen, in Danish. This was the first grammar of a creole language ever printed as a book. The following article will present the three early grammatical works in their historical context. It will provide a comparative study in order to show the merits as well as the weak points of the three texts.</p>Peter Stein
Copyright (c) 2024 Peter Stein
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https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152273Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100Initiating reading in Creole
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152274
<p>In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Danish and German missionaries in the Danish West Indies produced educational materials for converted enslaved adults and their children. Over nearly a century, these missionaries used the local Dutch Creole for instruction, with five printed primers, or ABC books, surviving from this period. In this article, we focus on these five primers, used to initiate reading and religious teaching, including a newly discovered primer in Creole dated 1782. This recently discovered primer is compared with two other Lutheran primers in the same language, printed in 1770, compiled by Kingo and Wold, as well as with two later, nearly identical ones (dated 1800 and 1825), produced by the Moravian Brethren and printed in Germany. The analysis begins with an exploration of the physical attributes, structure, and contents of these publications. Next, they are contextualized within the broader historical framework of catechism primers (Juska-Bacher et al. 2023), schooling and of colonial teaching (Grenby 2023a, 2023b).</p>Charlotte Appel, Peter Bakker, Joost Robbe
Copyright (c) 2024 Charlotte Appel, Peter Bakker, Joost Robbe
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https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152274Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100A grammatical and graphematic comparison of five Creole primers from the Danish West Indies (1770–1825), with a preliminary phonemic inventory
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152275
<p>This article offers a grammatical and graphematic comparison of the five known language primers (ABC books) in Virgin Islands Dutch Creole, including a newly discovered primer from 1782 (Anonymous 1782), along with a preliminary phonemic inventory based on these primers. The earliest primers are Kingo (1770) and Wold (1770), followed by the anonymous 1782 primer. Two later primers, from 1800 and 1825, are analyzed together, since they present two identical editions of the same text. The first three primers were produced by Lutheran Danish missionaries and printed either in St. Croix or Copenhagen, while the latter two were produced by the German Moravian Brethren and printed in Germany. The grammatical comparison, based on 17 selected features, aims to position the primers between Dutch, as the main lexifier of the language, and 20th-century Creole, as the final stage of its development. The findings suggest that the primers represent an intermediate stage with a closer affinity to 20th-century Creole than to Dutch. The graphematic analysis examines the primers’ alignment with 18th-century Dutch spelling conventions. The results indicate that the Lutheran primers exhibit less alignment with 18th-century Dutch orthographic norms compared to the Moravian primers, which, in turn, display more Danish influence. Finally, the preliminary inventory of the phoneme system points to a strong connection with (Zealandic) Dutch in all the primers.</p>Joost Robbe, Peter Bakker
Copyright (c) 2024 Joost Robbe, Peter Bakker
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https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152275Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100Zones of intense linguistic contact and the situation of the Southern Caribbean
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152276
<p>A number of areas on the world linguistic map show accretions of linguistic systems which have undergone intense exchange of features, including high degrees of (perforce) partial relexification, or extreme borrowing, in which preexisting features of a language are replaced by forms originating in other linguistic systems. These constitute a special kind of linguistic process, related to other language contact phenomena such as syntactic and semantic metatypy, cultural borrowing and unnecessary borrowing. Parts of the Southern Caribbean, specifically the former Netherlands Antilles, Suriname, French Guiana and Guyana, constitute area where such phenomena are common (McWhorter & Good 2012; Jacobs 2012; Parkvall & Jacobs 2023). This is a region in which contact-induced change has resulted in patterns of borrowing, some of which are quite rare, such as a form of the Core-Periphery division with a very slender core of inherited morphs (Grant 2019), and others which are simply very rarely attested elsewhere in the world. The interaction of these rare patterns of borrowing is also most unusual. Historical documentation and evidence from related languages enable us to see much of how this cluster of borrowing patterns, and the creation of this zone of intense linguistic contact, came about. Focus is on three creoles within the domain of the Dutch sphere of influence in the region: Saramaccan, Papiamentu, and Berbice Dutch, which are placed in a broader regional and global context.</p>Anthony Grant
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https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152276Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100Representation of Icelandic-Basque contacts in a Finnish novel
https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152279
<p>Finnish author Tapio Koivukari creates in his novel <em>Ariasman</em> (2011), based on a historical massacre of shipwrecked Basque whalers in Iceland in 1615, a literary representation of an extinct Icelandic Basque pidgin known from a few lists of words and phrases with roots in the seventeenth century. The brief dialogues in the book given in Basque or pidgin draw on the word lists, knowledge of the modern languages, and Koivukari’s imagination. The pidgin phrases used in the book concentrate on a few semantic fields: domestic animals, food, clothing, religion and relationships, largely corresponding to those found in the glossaries. Icelandic names are adapted to Basque phonology and given Basque diminutive endings. Multilingual word play is exploited. Koivukari supplements the vocabulary attested in the word lists with words from modern Basque and other languages known to have been part of the contact situation. This article describes how the book extrapolates from the documented glossaries to create fictional dialogues between Basque and Icelandic speakers, and more generally how it thematizes difficulties and strategies in communication, using imagination to flesh out the dynamics of the historical contact situation.</p>Kendra Willson
Copyright (c) 2024 Kendra Willson
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https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/152279Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100