Talk:Negerhollands

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Negerhollands is not quite extinct, the language spoken in surinam called sranang tongo is quite similar. As a speaker of that language i could completely translate the 2nd text

Wiki Education assignment: ANTH474 Language Emergence - From Contact to Constructed Languages

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 2 September 2025 and 10 December 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): PS365 (article contribs).

Hello! I am the student from the ANTH 474 class identified above! I'm planning on adding Flemish next to Zealandic as one of the dialects Negerhollands primarily drew from. This is based on van Rossem 2013 "Maternity visit on St. Thomas. Demographic information on the earliest stages of Negerhollands", as well as van Rossem 2000 "Het Negerhollands, Negerzeeuws, Negervlaams?". The second text is referenced in the first as the source for this assertion; however, I do not speak Dutch, so I cannot directly verify the claim. If someone who does speak Dutch finds that the second article doesn't say what van Rossem 2013 claims it does, feel free to add additional commentary or remove it as a source!

Additionally, I plan on adding [citation needed] to two uncited claims in the second-to-last paragraph history section. These are the claim that the language survived "by the Moravian Orphanage at Nyherrenhut near Tutu well into the twentieth century"; as well as the claim regarding the WBNB broadcast. I have been unable to find sources for either of these claims.

For the first, Nyherrenhut likely refers to New Herrnhut on St Thomas, but I have found no direct reference to the language surviving at the orphanage, nor to the orphanage in general. If this claim is accurate, I suspect de Josselin de Jong's 1926 corpus of texts would contain some reference to the language surviving there; however, the only copies I could find were in Dutch, which I do not speak.

For the WBNB broadcast claim, I have found no reference to this either. Given that WBNB went out of business after going off the air in 1989 during Hurricane Hugo, it is possible specific records do not exist; however, more talented researchers than I may prove otherwise.

— Assignment last updated by PS365 (talk) 05:44, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

You are right by stating that Van Rossem claims that Flemish was a major source for the language. However, both linguistic as well as demographic evidence primarily points at Zeelandic as the main source. Nevertheless I would keep the additional commentary about Flemish, yet I would change it into West Flemish. The meaning of the word Flemish is very ambiguous, check Flemish dialects, terminology ad. 5.

In my opinion we should also do something about the name of the language. Although it is still referred to as Negerhollands by some, the more neutral and nowadays more usual name is Virgin Islands Creole Dutch (VICD).

I adjusted the text including these to revisions. Feel free to change it back of course... Mevenhuis (talk) 11:11, 20 January 2026 (UTC)