History
Berbice was settled in 1627 by the Dutchman Abraham van Peere. A few years later, Suriname was settled by Englishmen Lord Willoughby and Lawrence Hyde under a grant from the English King, Charles II. In the beginning, therefore, Suriname was a British and Berbice a Dutch possession.
On 22 April 1796 the British occupied the territory. On 27 March 1802 Berbice was restored to the Batavian Republic (the then-current name of the Netherlands). In September 1803 the British occupied the territory again. On 13 August 1814 Berbice became a British colony. The colony was formally ceded to Britain by the Netherlands on 20 November 1815.
The Berbice slaves kept speaking Creole Dutch among themselves, until the language came in decay in the 20th century. As of 1993 there were some 4 or 5 elderly speakers of the language, although other sources report tens of speakers.
Berbice Creole Dutch was, as are the also extinct Negerhollands and Skepi Creole Dutch (with a similar preservation status as Berbice Dutch), not based on Hollandic Dutch (the dialect that is closest to Standard Dutch) but on Zeelandic.
The last speakers of this language were found in the 1970s by Professor Ian Robertson of the University of the West Indies. These speakers were living on the upper reaches of the Berbice River in and around the area of the Wiruni Creek. The last known Berbice Dutch Creole speaker is Bertha Bell, who was 103 years old when last interviewed by Ian Robertson and a UWI linguistics research team in March 2004.
What is remarkable about this language is that it survived on the upper reaches of the Berbice River, the areas around which the old Dutch colony of Berbice was concentrated prior to a shift to the coast in the late 18th century. One-third of the basic words in Berbice Dutch Creole, including words for 'eat', 'know', 'speak' are of West African origin, from a single language-cluster, Eastern Ijo.
Read more about this topic: Berbice Creole Dutch
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