Berbice Dutch from Guyana is now extinct

Berbice Dutch, a Dutch creole spoken in part of Guyana, has been declared officially extinct, according to the next Dutch edition of National Geographic.

Berbice Dutch was spoken in plantations along the River Berbice, part of Guyana which was once a private colony founded by Dutch planter Abraham van Peere from Zeeland. It is a mixture of the Zeeland dialect of Dutch, the local Arawak Indian language and Ijo, spoken by slaves from Nigeria.

Here a video of this woman, one of the last speakers of the language, gets going at about 1:00 with explanation in English.

(Links: rnw.nl, caribbeanlanguages)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 11:32 am and is filed under General, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Guyana, languages, Zeeland