Negerhollands
| Negerhollands | |
|---|---|
| Region |
U.S. Virgin Islands British Virgin Islands |
| Extinct | 1987, with the death of Alice Stevens |
|
Dutch Creole
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | nege1244 |
Negerhollands (English translation: Negro-Dutch) was a Dutch-based creole language that was once spoken in the Danish West Indies, now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands. Dutch is its superstrate language with Danish, English, French, Spanish, and African elements incorporated. Notwithstanding its name, Negerhollands draws primarily from the Zeelandic rather than the Hollandic dialect.
Negerhollands emerged around 1700 on the Virgin Islands Saint John, Saint Croix, and especially Saint Thomas, then Danish colonies. According to one of the most prevalent theories about its origin, slaves took the embryonic creole language to the island of Saint Thomas when they accompanied the Dutch planters who fled the island of Sint Eustatius after it had been raided by the English in 1666. A census on Saint Thomas from 1688 indeed shows that of the 317 European households on Saint Thomas, 66 were Dutch, 32 were English, and 20 were Danish. This also helps explain the considerable influence English and Danish had on the development of Negerhollands. On Saint John a similar observation can be made, with a 1721 census establishing that 25 of the 39 planters there were Dutchmen, and only 9 were Danes. Another theory is that the language was taken to the Caribbean by slaves from the Dutch slave forts in West Africa (e.g. the Dutch Gold Coast or Senegambia).
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