Unpacking Creole Languages, Part 4: Papiamentu
Exploring the rich linguistic history of Aruba and Curaçao.
This article is part of a series on Creole languages. For part three, click here.
Bon bini na dushi Kòrsou
Welcome to sweet Curaçao
A tourist in Aruba or Curaçao will certainly take note of the local language Papiamentu (Aruban spelling: Papiamento), but few will realise what a rich and layered history this language has. Papiamentu is often described by islanders to be a “mixture” of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and African languages, but considering what we know about Creole languages, the reality is much more nuanced than just that.
Papiamentu is spoken on the ABC Islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao in the Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela. Despite the fact that most islanders also speak fluent Dutch, Spanish, and English, Papiamentu is the main language of daily life on the islands and has some 270,000 native speakers. The language developed originally among slave populations on Curaçao, eventually spreading to the other two islands. As islanders claim, Papiamentu does indeed contain elements of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, African languages, as well as English and even some Arawak vocabulary. The sheer variety of linguistic elements is unique, even among Creole languages. What is perhaps most unique about Papiamentu, though, is that the language also quickly came to be used by all strata of society, from the African slaves to the white ruling classes.
Curaçao was originally inhabited by the Arawak people but was settled by a small group of Spaniards in 1527. The Spanish held the island for about 100 years, during which time they enslaved most of the indigenous population. When they finally abandoned the island, they took most of the Arawaks with them, leaving Curaçao almost completely empty and with very few linguistic traces of any kind.
In 1634 the Netherlands took over Curaçao and Dutch settlers began to arrive. As more slaves were brought over, the seeds of Papiamentu began to reach Curaçao, which quickly became a major hub for the distribution of slaves around the Caribbean. Portuguese speaking traders, bringing shiploads of slaves speaking any number of African, Creole or pidgin languages, were followed by mostly Portuguese-speaking Sephardic Jews, and this created most of the initial primary linguistic data for the first Papiamentu speakers. Spanish speakers also frequented the island for trade, which added the influence of Spanish on the creole. The administration of government and schools by the Dutch had widespread influence on the language as well. Finally, the presence of the American oil industry and the international influence of English also left its mark on the Papiamentu of today. Papiamentu does indeed contain all the layers of heritage that ABC islanders proudly claim, but the formation of Papiamentu did not happen overnight. The was no “linguistic break” to speak of. It resulted from the gradual process of negotiation of the various linguistic profiles of individual speakers over generations. That is, Papiamentu was not made from scratch but rather emerged as a result of language change, as any other human language.
In order to understand Papiamentu’s relation to other languages, though, it is essential to take a closer look at the primary linguistic date (PLD) of the early slaves arriving to Curaçao. This poses a challenge, as records from Curaçao’s early years are scarce. However, research showing strong similarities between Papiamentu and Upper Guinea Portuguese Creoles provides some important information about where the first slaves must have come from and what other languages they may have brought with them.
The Portuguese played an instrumental role in the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade in the 15th and 16th centuries. They occupied the islands of Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Príncipe and used them as trading and “processing” posts for slaves taken from the nearby Senegambia and Sierra Leone regions. Thus their language had a presence on the islands and continent early on. Those working in the slave trade, however, were not always speakers of standard Portuguese themselves. On the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe there had arisen a ruling class of Afro-Portuguese people who spoke Portuguese-based creole languages. Cape Verde and Upper Guinea developed similar creoles. These languages were used both by the administrators of trading ports and by traders traveling back and forth along the west coast of Africa and across the ocean to the Caribbean. More importantly, Upper Guinea Creoles were also used by the slaves themselves.
When taking people captive in Africa and bringing them to these trading posts, the slave traders were careful to separate linguistic and cultural communities, so as to impede communication (and subsequent revolt) among the captives. Having been stripped of their native languages, slaves in turn had to use Portuguese-based pidgins and/or creoles to communicate with each other. As the slave trade and the Portuguese trading empire in general grew and spread throughout the world, so did these Creoles.
The admix of West African languages is a bit less clear. As stated, slaves were often separated from their own language communities and could have just as easily encountered others speaking related languages as those speaking languages from completely different families. Given information about who was brought to the ABC islands from where, we can deduce that the first to arrive would have also had knowledge of far western Niger-Congo languages from the Atlantic and Mande branches (Jacobs 2014). It is most likely that much of the influence of these languages on Papiamentu came via Upper Guinea Creoles. Later arrivals, many coming from the Gold Coast, would have been more likely to speak languages from the Volta-Congo branch (Jacobs 2009). At this point Papiamentu would have already taken form, though there could still have been lexical borrowing and even later phonological influences. The presence of lexical tone in Papiamentu is often attributed to the substrate of West African languages, though few definitive conclusions have been drawn as to when this would have developed.
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In any case, early inhabitants of Curaçao had at their disposal any number of related Portuguese-based Creoles from the Upper Guinea region, Portuguese, West African languages and possibly some Dutch (though early contact with Dutch would have been extremely limited, as the Dutch made it a practice of speaking Portuguese to slaves and reserving their own language for themselves). What they did not have was a linguistic vacuum, void of any natural, living language.
The captives on Curaçao had no shortage of primary linguistic data with which to communicate. In fact, slaves from the Upper Guinea region were specifically kept from being sold off to other islands because their linguistic skills enabled them to communicate with the prominent Portuguese speaking, Sephardic Jewish community and other merchants on Curaçao. If anything, these slaves had a surplus of PLD at their disposal. The paring down of all of this diverse information into Papiamentu was most likely a relatively gradual process of language change.
Upper Guinea Portuguese Creoles (UGPC) would have held the most currency for slaves in early Curaçao, as was also the case under captivity prior to leaving Africa. Add to that heavy influence from Spanish, due to the presence of Spanish speaking traders coming to Curaçao from the mainland and the importance of the Catholic church, and it is not difficult to see how a substantial amount of vocabulary would be borrowed into the language by different individuals and small groups. Individual knowledge of languages from West Africa would certainly also have a direct influence on phonology and to a lesser degree vocabulary as well. All of these small influences interacted and mixed on the I-language level, and eventually new trends and patterns of speech appeared. As these trends gained momentum and usage on a wider scale, the E-language of Papiamentu emerged.
Most of the Arawak or other indigenous vocabulary in Papiamentu is tied directly to the land, specifically in geographical words or plant and animal names. This is typical of language change resulting from migration and mixing of cultures, e.g. the introduction of the aboriginal word “koala” into Australian English or the indigenous word for the vegetable “squash” in American English.
Finally, the Dutch vocabulary seems mostly to have been added later, in part due to the Dutch education system. Words for things like “book”,“pen”, and “newspaper” are borrowed directly from Dutch. Today some commonly used filler words such as dus “so” and eigenlijk “actually, indeed” are taken from Dutch as well.
So what does all of this look like? What was the end result of so many different I-languages interacting and reconciling with each other? Let’s take a look at some sentences:
Hopi hende ta papia Papiamentu
many people PRES. speak Papiamentu
Many people speak Papiamentu.
In this sentence hopi comes from the Dutch hoop or its diminutive hoopje “pile, heap”, meaning “a lot” in Papiamentu. Hende is borrowed from Spanish gente “people”. Ta is taken from the Portuguese está “is”, and serves as a present tense marker used before the verb in Papiamentu. Papia, the verb of the sentence, comes from the Portuguese papear “to chat”, and is a very common way to say “to speak” in Portuguese based Creoles all over the world. You’ll notice also that this verb is the source of the name of the language Papiamentu itself.
Bo ainda no ta kla?
you still NEG. PRES. ready
You’re still not ready?
Here bo “you” comes from the Portuguese vós, via the Upper Guinea Creole bô/abó. Ainda “still” is from Portuguese. Ta, the present tense marker, when used alone also serves as the verb “to be”. Kla is borrowed from the Dutch klaar “ready”.
Pushi i kachó ta animalnan bunita.
cat and dog PRES. animal-PL. pretty
Cats and dogs are pretty animals.
In this sentence pushi is from the Dutch poesje “kitten”, and kachó, is from the word cachorro, meaning “dog” in Portuguese or “puppy” in Spanish. In animalnan we can easily recognise the first part of the word, but the ending -nan purportedly has its origins in third person plural pronouns of Atlantic-Congo languages in West Africa. In Papiamentu, nan serves as both the third person plural pronoun as well as a plural marker that can be added onto nouns.
Lo mi lesa un buki òf un korant.
FUT. I read a book or a newspaper
I will read a book or a newspaper.
In the last sentence, lo is the future tense marker and is derived from the Portuguese word logo “soon”. Lesa “to read”, buki “book”, and korant “newspaper” come from the Dutch lezen, boek, and krant, respectively.
Papiamentu is a language that truly wears its history on its sleeve. It did not spontaneously emerge out of scraps of language, as many believe, but rather it emerged gradually through migration and mixing of communities and contact with other languages. Its parent languages are not Portuguese or Spanish, but rather the Portuguese-based Creoles of the west coast of Africa. Its narrative is not one of a violent break in linguistic transmission, but rather of the reconciling of diverse and plentiful speech patterns of its earliest speakers.
Today Papiamentu is as strong as ever. The language spread to the upper classes early on, largely via Papiamentu-speaking yayas, or nannies, and it is the mother tongue of more than 95% of the population of the ABC Islands. It has widespread use on TV and in newspapers and is the main language of communication for the vast majority of ABC-islanders. The education system is using it as the medium of primary school instruction more and more, though schools are still often dependent on Dutch print materials. Much more publication (and perhaps a standard orthography for all three islands) is still needed to elevate the language’s status though. Despite its popularity it still suffers from the classic Creole stigmas of inferiority and intellectual inadequacy. I think that learning about the language’s lineage could be an important part of getting rid of such stigmas — learning that Papiamentu is not just a bastardized version of a more legitimate, European language, nor is it a linguistic orphan or anomaly. It is a language with close relatives across the Atlantic Ocean in Africa. It is the culmination of a long history of language development and growth and is as complex and nuanced as the history that shaped it.
