Berbice Dutch: a language in South America

Known to its speakers as di lanshi (= the language), Berbice Dutch was declared extinct, after the death of its last fluent speakers, Albertha Bell and Arnold King, in the early 2000s. Auntie Bertha and Uncle Arnold – as I knew them, using the usual terms of address for one’s respected elders in Guyana – were cousins who grew up together after King’s parents died in the flu pandemic of 1918 which reached even the remote tributaries of the Berbice River in Guyana, in South America; having survived that deadly flu as children, they both lived long lives, into their 90s.

Berbice Dutch: language of the Berbice colony

Like other creole languages in the Caribbean region, Berbice Dutch was once the language of a plantation colony. But Berbice was no typical colony: located on the infertile banks of the Berbice River, many plantations remained small and grew crops such as cocoa and coffee rather than sugar, or traded anatto (the seeds of the Bixa orellana, which produce a natural dye) with the local Lokono population, better known to outsiders as Arawak Indians. Planters relied heavily on friendly relations with their Arawak neighbors who provided them with food supplies, with sexual favours, and who facilitated hunting and fishing parties – and also tracked runaway slaves, a practice which has contributed to a certain level of distrust between Afro-Guyanese and Amerindian Guyanese which persists to this day.

The author interviewing Uncle Arnold (King)

Although enslaved Africans constituted the majority of the colony’s population, close relationships appear to have existed between all three groups present in the colony, Africans, Lokono (Arawak Indians), and (mostly Dutch) Europeans. Guyanese have a special term for their mixed off-spring: “bovianders”, a word which is thought to derive from Dutch “bovenlander” (= upriver dweller). In my visits to the former plantation areas of the Berbice River, I encountered many a young Berbician whose brown skin and dark curls combined with startlingly green eyes. The last speakers of Berbice Dutch, although without green eyes, were certainly of similarly mixed descent. Albertha Bell and Arnold King could identify both Arawak and Afro-Guyanese among their forebears, and reference was also made to white ancestors.

The story of Justus Gerardus Swaving

In 1806, the adventurous Dutchman Justus Gerardus Swaving met Wilhelmina Balk at a dance, where they fell in love at first sight. Wilhelmina had been sent to the Netherlands by her father, the Dutch planter A. Balk, owner of an estate in Berbice. When news came of the death of papa, the newly-weds decided to take possession of the plantation in Berbice. In his autobiography, Swaving describes his first morning in Berbice as follows:

“While sitting on the verandah at a breakfast of toasted cassava bread and boiled goat’s milk, my chore consisted in the learning of several creole words, so that I would be able, on arrival at the plantation, to greet my black mother-in-law appropriately” (1827, p. 207).

The “creole” which Swaving refers to is, of course, Berbice Dutch, of which his wife was undoubtedly a native speaker. Swaving’s sojourn in Berbice lasted only a few years: wife and baby died the next year in child-birth, Swaving’s financial affairs deteriorated steadily, and he finally left Berbice poorer than he had arrived there, having lost the plantation to his debts. But before he leaves, he attempts to introduce his mother-in-law to the Christian faith. He renders their exchange as follows:

berbice kaart 1 — Map of the Berbice River, 1798, with Balk’s plantation at #34, East Side.

SWAVING: Abadi habe enne tobbeke ‘God has a child’ (which he intended to refer to the birth of Jesus)

MOTHER-IN-LAW: Nenne, nenne, de grotte Abadi kante habe tobbekes ka ‘No, no! The great God can’t have any children!’

He intended to proceed to tell her about the Virgin Mary and what happened in Bethlehem, but she angrily walked out of the house, muttering that he was fooling her (Swaving 1827: 267–268; my translation from the Dutch original).

Having studied Kalabari (one of the Eastern Ijo languages which supplied words such as Abadi the the Berbice Dutch Creole language), her distress is understandable: Abadi has its origins in the Niger Delta belief in the ocean as a powerful spiritual domain. There is evidence that an ‘Abadi tobbeke’ could have been an albino child, considered fit to be sacrificed to appease Abadi. What happened to his black mother-in-law after Swaving’s departure is not known, but by the time I came to Berbice in 1986, the Christians had won the battle, and (Papa) Abadi indeed refered to the Christian God.

At the time of Swaving’s adventures in Berbice, that colony was well on its way to its demise. It had been battered by a slave uprising during 1763-1764, and was under continuous threat of alternating French and English attempts to take the colony (the English were ultimately successful; Guyana was ceded to the British in 1815). The colony had been established on the banks of a river whose mouth was made impassable for sea-worthy ships by sand banks – a serious drawback for an export-oriented economy. It was run by unscrupulous individuals whose unhealthy life-style moreover meant a quick succession of owners.

View along the Berbice River at the confluence of the Wiruni Creek, with broken ‘stelling’ (jetty) and dug-out canoes.

In all, the colony suffered much instability and long-term prospects were poor. Its end came when, during the nineteenth century, the Dutch engineered a water management system which made coastal lands safe for habitation and planting. The plantations on the Berbice and Canje Rivers were abandoned in favour of coastal locations, taking advantage of the fertile alluvial soil and accessibility for sea-shipping.

Reverend Dance and his flock

Around that same time, Reverend Charles Daniel Dance took up the calling to minister to the remaining folks on the Berbice River. As part of his duties in Berbice, he started a programme of education in English:

“As there was no banab [= thatched hut] yet prepared for me at Cumaka, I resided for a month with a woodcutter’s family, a few miles down the river. I opened a school here, and taught the woodcutter’s children and the children of the Indians in the neighbourhood (…) The children all talked a patois called creole Dutch, and their own Arawak tongue, and scarcely any English. A rule was made, to which they all readily agreed, that no language but English should be spoken in school. It was sometimes amusing to observe the attempts a little boy or girl would make to report a grievance, or express a wish, – importing into his speech a mixture of the three languages.” (Dance 1881 p.58).

Rev. Dance’s efforts are in no small measure responsible for the stigma which became associated with “di lanshi”. When I carried out my field work in Berbice between 1986 and 1990, I encountered a generally negative view of the traditional cultural practices of Berbicians. Animist religious practices, thatch-roofed houses, eating certain “bush meats”, and, of course, speaking a language unrelated to English, were all considered signs of backwardness. Not that these had been completely abandoned: animist beliefs were held by everyone I met, bush meats were appreciated by many, and thatched roofs have some advantages over expensive, rusting, heat-trapping zink; but the fatal blow had been dealt both to Berbice Dutch – then already almost extinct – and to the Lokono language of the Amerindian population, which was no longer learned by children.

The African, Dutch and Arawak elements in Berbice Dutch

Auntie Bertha and Uncle Arnold, proud as they were of their predominantly Arawak ancestry, would have been shocked to learn that the language of their childhood years is of special interest to linguists because of its linkages with the Eastern Ijo languages, a group of West African languages spoken in the coastal Eastern Niger Delta in Nigeria, About one-third of the Berbice Dutch lexicon originates in these languages.

Berbice Dutch words such as wari ‘house’, toko ‘child’, jefi ‘to eat’, mangi ‘to run’, kali ‘small’, bifi‘speak’, are all decidedly un-Dutch: these are words that derive from Eastern Ijo. Essentially, Dutch and Eastern Ijo appear to have competed in the composition of the Berbice Dutch lexicon. Thus, we find Dutch-derived man ‘man’ and Eastern Ijo-derived jerma ‘woman’; Dutch-derived feshi ‘fish’ and Eastern Ijo-derived feni ‘bird’; Dutch-derived grun ‘green’ or ‘unripe’ and Eastern Ijo-derived bjebje ‘yellow’ or ‘ripe’; Dutch-derived hemdu‘shirt’ and Eastern Ijo-derived bita ‘clothes’, and so on. It is clear that the Dutch speaker who expects to be able to follow a conversation in di lanshi will be disappointed.

Arnold King tells of his younger years

(The spelling has been adjusted from a more phonetic orthography.)

eke papa mete eke mama doto-te,

my father and my mother died,

an da eke grui-te mete en man,

and so it is that I grew up with a man,

pote Howard Hope, an shi jerma nam Alice Hope.

old Howard Hope, and his wife whose name was Alice Hope.

wel eke drai-te jungu man eni bara ben,

well I became a young man in their care (literally: in their hand)

an eke deki-te jerma an trou-te.

and I chose a woman and married.

Berbice Dutch mini vocabulary:

Forms of Dutch origin: an ‘and’, ben ‘inside’, da ‘be,’ ‘it is’, doto ‘die’, drai ‘become’, eke ‘I’ or ‘my’, en ‘a’ or ‘one’, grui ‘grow’, jungu ‘young’, mama ‘mother’, man ‘man’, mete ‘with’, papa ‘father’, shi ‘his’, trou ‘marry’
Forms of Eastern Ijo origin: bara ‘hand’, deki ‘take’, eni ‘they’ or ‘their’, jerma ‘woman’ or ‘wife’, pote ‘old’, -te (perfective)

Of even more interest to linguists is the grammar of this language: Berbice Dutch has incorporated elements of the grammars of both Dutch and Eastern Ijo, but is nonetheless quite different from both. The Lokono language, too, has made its contributions to the Berbice Dutch lexicon. But words such as anwanwa ‘carrion crow’, kurheli‘smoke’, sarapa ‘three-pronged arrow’, jaluku ‘ghost’ are clearly not as essential to every-day communication as those contributed by Eastern Ijo and Dutch.

Lessons from Berbice Dutch

So this language is no more spoken, and now lives only in recordings (accessible for researchers at the Meertens Instituut; see https://meertens.knaw.nl/archive/nieuw-in-de-digitale-collectie-het-berbice-dutch/), and of course many publications. Its special combination of elements from three different source languages continues to be of interest to linguists who study language contact. The Berbice Dutch case also teaches us something about language death.

Albertha Bell (right) and Hilda Adolphe. Taken in 1988, Auntie Hilda and Auntie Bertha were then the youngest and oldest speakers of *di lanshi*.

Albertha Bell and Arnold King grew up in a changing world, one where the isolation of the interior bushland of Guyana was breaking down. The outside world entered in the form of pastors, schoolteachers, and traders, and members of their community travelled to work elsewhere – and brought back money and goods, the deadly flu which killed Arnold King’s parents, and the culture and language of coastal Guyana. The integration of communities along the Berbice River with the rest of the country of Guyana provided the motivation to speak English Creole and abandon Dutch Creole. Their children, grandchildren, and neighbours had hardly ever heard di lanshi until my arrival, in the late 1980s. People have an uncanny ability to treat their language and cultural heritage as a commodity, to be discarded when it seems to be of little use to them or their children—only to regret the loss later in life. Many languages around the world are facing a similar fate. We had better hurry and record these languages before they are gone without a trace.

Supplementary information on the two maps:

IMAGE: Map of the Berbice River, 1798

Berbice cut-out of “A Chart of the Coast of Guyana, comprehending the colonies of Berbice, Demerary & Essequebo”, by Capt. Thos. Walker, 1798. The plantation of Swavings’s father-in-law A. Balk is numbered 34, East Side of Berbice River.

Source: Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Verzameling Buitenlandse Kaarten Leupe: Eerste Supplement, nummer toegang 4.VELH, inventarisnummer 661.

IMAGE: The languages of Guyana

The languages of Guyana. Amerindian languages Lokono and other Arawakan languages are in brown, Cariban languages in red and Warao grey. Creole languages include Berbice Dutch along a short stretch of the Berbice River and Skepi Dutch along a short stretch of the Essequibo River, both extinct. ‘The population of the country numbers around 830,000, and large swathes of Guyana’s 215.000 km2 are scarcely inhabited. Despite an indication of large areas where native American languages are spoken, the situation on the ground contradicts this view as the interior regions are not well populated, and children are no longer learning their heritage languages. Creolese’ (Guyanese Creole English) is the de facto national language, but lacks formal recognition as the country’s only official language is English.

Sources cited:

Chapters from a Guianese log-book, or The folk-lore and scenes of sea-coast and river life in British Guiana. Comprising sketches of Indian, Boviander, and Negro life, habits, customs, and legendary tales, with historic notes, political and natural. By Rev. Charles Daniel Dance, Curate of St. Margaret’s, Skeldon, Berbice. Georgetown, Demerara: The Royal Gazette Establishment. 1881.

Swaving’s Reizen en Lotgevallen. Door hem zelven beschreven. Eerste Deel. Justus Gerardus Swaving. Dordrecht: Blussé en Van Braam. 1827.

Silvia Kouwenberg is Professor of Linguistics at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica. This text was earlier published on Ole Stig Andersen’s Sprogmuseet’s site. The text was updated May 2025. Silvia Kouwenberg’s publications are accessible at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Silvia-Kouwenberg/research.