Maternity visit on St. Thomas. Demographic information on the earliest stages of Negerhollands

摘要

Negerhollands displays many linguistic elements that can be traced back to dialectal Dutch, i. e. mainly West-Flemish or Zealandic. However, these elements cannot be found in any 17th century written Dutch sources dealing with the Danish Antilles. I aim to reconstruct the lexifier language of Negerhollands by charting the origin of the first European inhabitants of the island of St. Thomas. I specifically focus on the period of settlement preceding the year 1736, when the existence of the Creole language was first mentioned. Based on the distribution of the surnames of the European colonists, and an extensive demographic analysis of census conducted on St. Thomas in 1691, I suggest that the settlers formed a multilingual society in which Zealandic/ West Flemish colored Dutch was used as a koinè.