Until the nineteenth century, a Dutch Creole language was spoken in the Virgin Islands. The speakers were descendants of slaves who had worked on the plantations. Linguist Cefas van Rossem conducted PhD research at Radboud University on eighteenth-century manuscripts.
In the 1980s, the German researcher Peter Stein found hundreds of pages in a Dutch Creole language in the archive of the Moravian Church in Herrnhut. That village was then still in the GDR and was not easy to visit by Western researchers. It was only after the Fall of the Wall in 1989 that they were given the opportunity to digitize these texts for computer research.
Manuscripts
The lyrics came from the Virgin Islands, which was a Danish colony until 1917. There, German missionaries, from Herrnhut, brought the word of God in the eighteenth century. They did so in the language of the local population, mostly slaves. They spoke a Dutch Creole language that arose after a large group of Dutch people from the Caribbean moved to the Virgin Islands in 1672.
The German collection of manuscripts contained all kinds of texts, but mainly Bible texts and slave letters. This is a unique collection for researchers of Creole languages. “Not only because it offers an enormous addition to the existing source material of this Dutch Creole language. But also because it comes from a period when the Creole language did not exist that long,” explains linguist Cefas van Rossem. Together with a colleague, he typed out all those hundreds of manuscripts and wrote a dissertation about them.
Researchers also call such a large collection of texts a corpus. Today, the use of large computer files or computer corpora is very common in linguistics. But not in the 1990s, the linguist explains. “We received photocopies of German microfiches. We only had access to a scanner after two years, but the manuscripts could not be transferred with it. The scanner could only read printed texts. So it was a huge typing job. But because of that, I now know the lyrics through and through.”
In 1996 Van Rossem, together with others, published a book about this corpus, the language of which is still referred to as Negerhollands. After publication he becomes a teacher of Dutch. He will not start working with the material again until 2011, when he receives a PhD grant for teachers. At that time, the term Negerhollands is under discussion, in imitation of that about the word 'negro' (see also side box). Van Rossem and his colleagues soon switched to the English name Virgin Islands Dutch Creole.
Native speakers
When he starts his PhD research, all the material is digitized. For example, he can study large amounts of text with automatic searches. And that research is urgently needed, because since the 1990s there has been quite a bit of criticism of the authenticity of the language from his corpus. After all, it is not a first-hand creole language, but it was written down by German missionaries.
In his dissertation, however, Van Rossem shows that the German missionaries knew very well how to connect with their audience, which mainly consisted of Creole speakers. Their texts may have been provided with feedback by native speakers. All kinds of changes have been systematically made to the texts, the linguist explains.
“So you can see that some words have been crossed out and replaced by other words. Such as the word 'feed' which has been replaced by 'gie jeet (give food)', or 'Savior' by 'Help man', or 'Angel' by 'Messenger'. But the German word order is also reversed about forty times to the order that is customary in the Creole language. Then you see numbers above the text that show the new order. In this way, the translator takes his audience into account.”
Reliable source
In total, Van Rossem conducted five case studies to investigate how authentic the texts are. In addition to deletions and changes in word orders, he found additions and synonyms in the text, which are written one above the other:“Then it says, for example, 'he runs after/to Jerusalem'. The reader can then choose the Dutch-like 'tot' or the Creole 'na'. He also compared different texts, such as different versions of the New Testament.
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Finally, the lyrics are accompanied by so-called 'metalinguistic commentary'. Van Rossem:“In it you will find a justification from the translator as to why he has made certain choices. I also included these to test the reliability of the texts. I conclude that the corpus is indeed a reliable source for research into Virgin Islands Dutch Creole .”
Zeeland Flemish
The linguist also looked at the ratio of Dutch and other languages in Virgin Islands Dutch Creole. “The vocabulary is almost entirely Dutch. In addition, you see Spanish, English and French influence. But you also come across African words, or Papiamento. Because these texts have the European spelling, they are very easy to read for a Dutch person. That would be different if the translators had written down the words as sound sequences. Now I could easily recognize the manuscripts in Herrnhut's archive.”
Quite a few words can be traced back to Zeeuws-West Flemish, Van Rossem discovered earlier. “Between 1993 and 1995, I conducted research at the Meertens Institute using Flemish and Zeeland dialect sources to determine the origin of those words. Later, by studying seventeenth-century Virgin Islands censuses, I was also able to determine, based on surnames, the origin of the Dutch who migrated from the Caribbean to the Virgin Islands. Many of the Dutch surnames occur only or mainly in Zeeland or Flanders. By the way, there was also a resident of Nijmegen.”
Slave registers
Incidentally, all the material that Van Rossem has collected for his dissertation goes to the Meertens Institute. There he hopes to continue his research into the authenticity of the texts as a guest researcher, alongside his job as a Dutch teacher. “For my dissertation, I searched around 3,500 pages of text for all kinds of features that were easy to find with the codes applied. But there is much more to explore. I have only now discovered a few texts and not everything has been digitized yet.”
“For example, it is interesting to associate this material with Sranan, the most widely spoken Surinamese Creole language. This language is not related to Dutch, but to English. German missionaries also translated Bible texts into this language in the 18th century. In addition, new demographic and metalinguistic material has become available. The Surinamese slave registers and the West Indies archive of the Danish government only became available digitally in 2017. I have now mainly looked at German sources, but there is also all kinds of Danish material that has never been studied.”