Papiamento
Papiamento or Papiamentu is a Portuguese-based creole language spoken in the Dutch Caribbean. It is the most widely spoken language on Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao.
The language, spelled Papiamento in Aruba and Papiamentu in Bonaire and Curaçao, is largely based on Portuguese as spoken in the 15th and 16th centuries, and has been influenced considerably by Dutch and Spanish. Due to lexical similarities between Portuguese and Spanish, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of some words. Though there are different theories about its origins, most linguists now believe that Papiamento emerged from the Portuguese-based creole languages of the West African coasts, as it has many similarities with Cape Verdean Creole and Guinea-Bissau Creole.
History
There are various theories about the origin and development of the Papiamento language, and precise history has not been established. Its parent language is surely West Iberian Romance, but scholars dispute whether Papiamento was derived from Portuguese and its derived Portuguese-based creole languages or from Spanish. Historical constraints, core vocabulary, and grammatical features that Papiamento shares with Cape Verdean Creole and Guinea-Bissau Creole are far less than those shared with Spanish, even though the Spanish and Dutch influences occurred later, from the 17th century onwards. In 1978, Jacoba Bouscholte conducted a study on the various Dutch influences in Papiamento. An example of a hybrid word is verfdó, which is a combination of a Dutch root verf and the Portuguese and Spanish suffix -dor. The transformation from verver to verfdó involved changing the -dor to -dó due to a linguistic process called apocopation.The name of the language itself originates from, from Portuguese and Cape Verdean and Bissau Guinean Creole , with the addition of the noun-forming suffix.
Spain claimed dominion over the islands in the 15th century but made little use of them. Portuguese merchants had been trading extensively in the West Indies and with the Iberian Union between Portugal and Spain during 1580–1640 period, their trade extended to the Spanish West Indies. In 1634, the Dutch West India Company took possession of the islands, deporting most of the small remaining Arawak and Spanish population to the continent, and turned them into the hub of the Dutch slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean.
The first evidence of widespread use of Papiamento in Aruba and Curaçao can be seen in official documents in the early 18th century. In the 19th century, most materials in the islands were written in Papiamento including Roman Catholic school books and hymnals. In 1837, the Catecismo Corticu pa uso di catolicanan di Curaçao was printed, the first printed book in Papiamento. In 2009 the Catecismo Corticu was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World register. The first Papiamento newspaper was published in 1871 and was called Civilisadó.
Local development theory
One local development theory proposes that Papiamento developed in the Caribbean from an original Portuguese-African pidgin, with later Dutch and Spanish influences.Another theory is that Papiamento first evolved from the use in the region since 1499 of 'lenguas' and the first repopulation of the ABC Islands by the Spanish by the Cédula real decreed in November 1525 in which Juan Martinez de Ampués, factor of Hispaniola, had been granted the right to repopulate the depopulated Islas inútiles of Oroba, Islas de los Gigantes, and Buon Aire.
The evolution of Papiamento continued under the Dutch colonisation under the influence of 16th-century Dutch, Portuguese and Native American languages, with the second repopulation of the ABC islands with immigrants who arrived from the ex-Dutch Brazilian colonies.
The Judaeo-Portuguese population of the ABC islands increased substantially after 1654, when the Portuguese recovered the Dutch-held territories in Northeast Brazil, causing most Portuguese-speaking Jews and their Portuguese-speaking Dutch allies and Dutch-speaking Portuguese Brazilian allies in those lands to flee from religious persecution. The precise role of Sephardic Jews in the early development is unclear, but Jews certainly played a prominent role in the later development of Papiamento. Many early residents of Curaçao were Sephardic Jews from Portugal, Spain, Cape Verde or Portuguese Brazil. Also, after the Eighty Years' War, a group of Sephardic Jews immigrated from Amsterdam. Therefore, it can be assumed that Judaeo-Portuguese was brought to the island of Curaçao, where it gradually spread to other parts of the community. The Jewish community became the prime merchants and traders in the area and so business and everyday trading was conducted in Papiamento. While various nations owned the island, and official languages changed with ownership, Papiamento became the constant language of the residents.
When the Netherlands opened economic ties with Spanish colonies in what are now Venezuela and Colombia in the 18th century,
students on Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire were taught predominantly in Spanish, and Spanish began to influence the creole language.
Since there was a continuous Latinisation process, even the elite Dutch-Protestant settlers eventually communicated better in Spanish than in Dutch, as a wealth of local Spanish-language publications in the 19th century testify.
European and African origin theory
According to the European and African origin theory the origins of Papiamento lie in the Afro-Portuguese creoles that arose in the 16th century in the west coast of Africa and in the Portuguese Cape Verde islands. From the 16th to the late 17th centuries, most of the slaves taken to the Caribbean came from Portuguese trading posts in those regions. Around those ports, several Portuguese-African pidgin and creole languages developed, such as Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Creole, Angolar, and Forro. The sister languages bear strong resemblance with Papiamento. According to this theory, Papiamento was derived from one or more of these older creoles or their predecessors, which were brought to the ABC islands by enslaved Africans and European traders from Cape Verde and West Africa. Later becoming the lingua franca between the various ethnic and religious groups of the islands.The similarity between Papiamento and the other Afro-Portuguese creoles can be seen in the same pronouns used, mi, bo, el, nos, bos, being Portuguese-based.
Afro-Portuguese creoles often have a shift from "v" to "b" and from "o" to "u": bientu, instead of viento. In creole and also in Spanish, and are pronounced the same. In creole, it is also written as a. Just as in Portuguese, an unaccented final is pronounced as.
Guene was the name given to four languages spoken by Africans on Western Curaçaoan plantations of Kenepa, Sabaneta, Lagun and Porto Marí. The name derives from "Guinea" or "Geni", but that does not give much clear indication of African origin, because this name referred to different areas in West Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries. There were possibly hundreds of Guene work songs used to make work lighter, organize work rhythms, guide task execution through instructions, and comment on work situations. Guene influence still exists in current Papiamentu in several domains. Difficulties in understanding its relevance today lies in how to distinguish between Guene and non-Guene contributions from African languages, what role the language had in shaping non-linguistic cultural materials and how this has been re-encoded into what we know today as Papiamentu.
Linguistic and historical ties with Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole
Since the late 1990s, research has been done that shines light on the ties between Papiamento and Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole. focus specifically on the linguistic and historical relationships with the Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole, as spoken on the Santiago island of Cape Verde and in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance.In Bart Jacob's study The Upper Guinea Origins of Papiamento he defends the hypothesis that Papiamento is a relexified offshoot of an early Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole variety that was transferred from Senegambia to Curaçao in the second half of the 17th century, when the Dutch controlled the island of Gorée, a slave trading stronghold off the coast of Senegal. The Creole was used for communication among slaves and between slaves and slave holders.
On Curaçao, this variety underwent internal changes as well as contact-induced changes at all levels of the grammar, but particularly in the lexicon, due to contact with Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Dutch. Despite the changes, the morphosyntactic framework of Papiamento is still remarkably close to that of the Upper Guinea Creoles of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Parallels have also been identified between the development of Papiamento and Catholicism.
Present status
Papiamento is spoken in all aspects of society throughout Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire.File:Parke Boy Ecury, Oranjestad Aruba 2025 38.jpg|thumb|A message in Boy Ecury Park written in Aruban Papiamento, English, and Spanish
Papiamento has been an official language of Aruba since May 2003. In the former Netherlands Antilles, Papiamento was made an official language on 7 March 2007. After the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles on 10 October 2010, Papiamento's official status was confirmed in the newly formed Caribbean Netherlands.
Venezuelan Spanish and American English are constant influences today. Code-switching and lexical borrowing from Spanish, Dutch and English among native speakers is common. This is considered as a threat to the development of the language because of the loss of the authentic and Creole "feel" of Papiamento.
Many immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean choose to learn Papiamento because it is more practical in daily life on the islands. For Spanish-speakers, it is easier to learn than Dutch, because Papiamento uses many Spanish and Portuguese words.
The first opera in Papiamento, adapted by from his novel Katibu di Shon, was performed at the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam on 1 July 2013, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the ending of slavery in the Dutch Caribbean.