Ebook: The Ijo-derived lexicon of Berbice Dutch Creole

Date: 2008
Number of pages: 18That Berbice Dutch (BD) constitutes an a-typical case of African lexical influence was first established by Smith, Robertson & Williamson (1987), where it was shown that a significant number of BD words is easily traceable to a single West African source, and that many of these words are found in what is considered to be basic lexicon. In contrast, words in other Caribbean Creole languages inherited from substrate languages are usually found in culturally specialized lexicon, are frequently difficult to trace to any specific source language, having undergone formal
or semantic changes, and are not restricted to a single substrate language. We will explore all this in more detail below. The appendix provides the full list of known BD words of Eastern Ijo provenance. The BD and Eastern Ijo forms listed there are drawn from Smith et al. (1987), Kouwenberg (1994), and unpublished field notes from fieldwork which I carried out in Kalabari speaking communities during 1994.1