Returning a maverick creole to the fold : the Berbice Dutch enigma revisited

Berbice Dutch was a creole language spoken in the Republic of Guyana in South America, a country first under Dutch, and later under British colonial rule. Owing mainly to Silvia Kouwenberg (A grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole, De Gruyter Mouton, 1994), we were blessed with a detailed synchronic documentation of Berbice Dutch before its demise. However, the formation of the language remains clouded in mystery: its grammar and (basic) lexicon display a seemingly unique mixture of Dutch (Creole) and Eastern Ijo, as a result of which the language is often portrayed as a challenge to existing contact-linguistic theory. In this paper, a scenario is proposed that, rather than challenging the said theory, is fully grounded in it: it will be argued that the language was a case of serial glottogenesis: a first stage of creolisation was later followed by language mixing. The paper furthermore presents hitherto unknown historical data pertaining to the arrival of Ijo speakers in Berbice

The Lesser Antillean origins of Guianese

This paper investigates the origins of Guianese French Creole. Whereas the existing literature assumes Guianese was formed in situ, we argue the creole is in fact genetically related to Lesser Antillean French Creole. We support our hypothesis by means of a range of comparative linguistic data. Furthermore, a historical framework is provided that accounts for linguistic transfer from the Lesser Antilles to French Guiana in the second half of the 17th century

Nordisk och finländsk språkpolitik i ett globalt perspektiv

Diskussioner av nordisk språkpolitik innehåller ofta globala jämförelser i ganska ringa utsträckning. Syftet med denna artikel är att sätta i synnerhet finländsk språkpolitik i ett internationellt perspektiv, för att därigenom belysa dess ovanliga karaktär