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Virgin Islands Creole, or Virgin Islands Creole English, is an English-based creole consisting of several varieties spoken in the Virgin Islands and the nearby SSS islands of Saba, Saint Martin and Sint Eustatius, where it is known as Saban English, Saint Martin English, and Statian English, respectively.
Though the Danish controlled the present-day U.S. Virgin Islands for many years, the very dominant language has been the Virgin Islands Creole, a creole that is English-based, since the 19th century, and the islands remain much more receptive to English-language popular culture than any other. The Dutch, the French, and the Danish also ...
Negerhollands emerged around 1700 on the Virgin Islands Saint Thomas and Saint John, then Danish colonies. [1] According to one of the most prevalent theories about its origin, slaves took the embryonic creole language to the island of Saint Thomas when they accompanied the Dutch planters who fled the island of Sint Eustatius after it had been ...
The main languages are English and Virgin Islands Creole in the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, and Spanish in the Puerto Rican territory. St. Thomas is the most populous island, with St. Croix close behind (51,634 and 50,601, respectively).
The creole emerged on plantations in the late 17th century or early 18th century; but its prevalence began to decline in the early-mid 19th century as the usage of English and Virgin Islands Creole English increased. [123] [124] The last speaker of Negerhollands died in 1987, and the language is now considered extinct.
It is disputed to what extent the various English-based creoles of the world share a common origin. The monogenesis hypothesis [2] [3] posits that a single language, commonly called proto–Pidgin English, spoken along the West African coast in the early sixteenth century, was ancestral to most or all of the Atlantic creoles (the English creoles of both West Africa and the Americas).
The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage further includes the dialects of Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Virgin Islands, the Netherlands Antilles, Suriname, and the Turks and Caicos. [7] Caribbean English-based creole languages are commonly (in popular literature) or sometimes (in scholarly literature) considered dialects of Caribbean English.
Antillean Creole is a language spoken primarily in the francophone (and some of the anglophone) Lesser Antilles, such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, Îles des Saintes, Dominica, St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago and many other smaller islands.