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Embedding Papiamentu in
the mixed language debate*
Bart Jacobs
Universität Konstanz & Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
This paper takes as a point of departure the hypothesis that Papiamentu

descends from Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole (a term covering the sister vari-
eties of the Cape Verde Islands and Guinea-Bissau and Casamance), speakers of
which arrived on Curaçao in the second half of the 17th century, subsequently
shifted their basic content vocabulary towards Spanish, but maintained the origi-
nal morphosyntax. This scenario raises the question of whether, in addition to
being a creole, Papiamentu can be analyzed as a so-called mixed (or intertwined)
language. The present paper positively answers this question by drawing parallels
between (the emergence of) Papiamentu and recognized mixed languages.
Keywords: Papiamentu, Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole, Spanish, mixed

languages, relexification, grammar–lexicon split, contact scenarios
1. Introduction
The status of Papiamentu as a creole language is quite uncontroversial. However, it

has also been noted regularly that, unlike most creoles, Papiamentu is character-
ized by a mixture of two major source languages: (Afro-)Portuguese and Spanish
(e.g. Schuchardt 1882, Lenz 1928, Holm 1988: 315, Smith 1995: 373, McWhorter
2000: 14–17, inter alia). This raises the question of whether, in addition to (or in-
stead of) being a creole, Papiamentu can (or should) be analyzed as a so-called
mixed (or intertwined) language. The present paper elaborates on and positively
answers this question by drawing parallels between (the emergence of) Papiamentu
and recognized mixed languages.
1.1 Creoles and mixed languages
Creoles and mixed languages (alternatively referred to in the literature as ‘bilin-

gual mixed languages’ [particularly Thomason 1997] or ‘intertwiners’ [e.g. Bakker
Journal of Historical Linguistics 2:1 (2012), 52–82. doi 10.1075/jhl.2.1.05jac

issn 2210–2116 / e-issn 2210-2124 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
Embedding Papiamentu in the mixed language debate 53
1997]) can be grouped together in as far as both are contact languages that “neces-
sarily involve some disruption in the natural transmission of language from parent
to child” (Comrie 2011: 599, 600). However, two language-structural characteris-
tics crucially distinguish creoles from mixed languages. First, the formation of cre-
oles involves significant morphosyntactic reduction, while language mixing does
not (see also Thomason 2003: 31, 32, Noonan 2010: 61). Second, as their label sug-
gests, mixed languages consist of more than one (typically two) clearly identifiable
source languages, whereas the typical creole has one dominant source language,
also known as the lexifier language.1
A small number of languages, however, appear to straddle the line between
creole and mixed language: while their status as creole is unquestioned, their core
vocabulary shows an etymological split, atypical of creoles (cf. Goyette & Parkvall
forthcoming, who list these as exceptional):
– Berbice Dutch Creole (Guyana). Its core vocabulary derives from Dutch and
Eastern Ijo (Smith, Robertson & Williamson 1987, Kouwenberg 1994)
– Saramaccan (Surinam). The core vocabulary of this maroon creole consists of
Early Sranan and (a possibly already restructured variety of) Portuguese (cf.,
e.g., Bakker et al. 1995: 168, Muysken 2008: 198–201, Good 2009: 926, 927)
– Angolar. This is a maroon variety of São Tomense Portuguese Creole. Around
one third of its core vocabulary has a Kimbundu origin (Parkvall 2000: 133,
134)
The present paper is concerned with a fourth such anomalous case: Papiamentu,
the language of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao. While the Papiamentu lexicon is
predominantly Spanish-derived, Schuchardt (1882: 895) had already noticed that
its grammar contains several (Afro-)Portuguese words and features.2 This mixed
vocabulary has been the source of major controversy on whether Papiamentu is
an originally Spanish-based creole formed in situ, or whether it is a descendant of
some imported variety of restructured Portuguese that was subsequently relexi-
fied by or towards Spanish. This paper adopts the latter view and thereby assumes
that the imported variety of restructured Portugese was in fact Upper Guinea
Portugese Creole.
1.2 Papiamentu and Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole
Based on the linguistic and historical evidence presented in Martinus (1996), Quint
(2000) and Jacobs (2008, 2009a–b, 2010, 2011a–c), this paper takes as a point of
departure the view that Papiamentu descends from Upper Guinea Portuguese
Creole (Upper Guinea PC), a term covering the closely related varieties spoken
on the Cape Verde Islands, in Guinea-Bissau and in the Senegalese province of

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54 Bart Jacobs
Casamance. Overwhelming linguistic evidence for this view is found mainly in the
morpho-syntax: the phonological, semantic and syntactic correspondences be-
tween the functional categories of Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC are of such
an idiosyncratic and paradigmatic nature that chance cannot plausibly account
for them (see Section 3). The claim of relatedness between Papiamentu and Upper
Guinea PC is gradually finding acceptance in the literature (Baptista 2009, 2011,
Hagemeijer 2009, Hagemeijer & Alexandre 2010, Green 2009, 2011, McWhorter
2010, Schwegler 2010, Mark & Horta 2011, Clements 2012).
1.3 Papiamentu: A mixed language?
Undeniably, the (basic) content vocabulary of present-day Papiamentu is predom-

inantly Spanish-derived. If Papiamentu descends from Upper Guinea PC, which
the evidence unambiguously suggests (Section 3), we must necessarily assume
that Upper Guinea PC, in becoming Papiamentu, underwent a thorough process
of lexical shift or relexification from Portuguese to Spanish. This raises the ques-
tion of whether, in addition to or instead of being a creole, Papiamentu can be ana-
lyzed as a mixed (or intertwined) language (Bakker & Mous 1994, Bakker 1997,
Thomason 1997, Matras 2000, Bakker & Matras 2003a, Siemund & Kintana 2008)
composed of an Upper Guinea PC morphosyntactic matrix and a Spanish-derived
embedded lexicon. The present paper will positively answer this question by draw-
ing parallels between Papiamentu and recognized cases of language mixing.
As will become clear, the benefits of analyzing Papiamentu as a mixed language
are manifold. In general, it allows us to disassociate the very notion of relexifica-
tion from the field of creole studies, where it is met with skepticism owing to its
firm association with the now largely moribund monogenesis school of thought as
well as with Lefebvre’s Extreme Relexification Hypothesis. In particular, it will fur-
ther our understanding of certain aspects of the relexification of Upper Guinea PC
towards Spanish, such as the time span and the socio-linguistic setting in which it
was carried out.
1.4 Overview
Section 2 sketches how Papiamentu and the notion of relexification became inex-
tricably bound up with conventional monogenesis, and how this correlates with
the fact that the view of Papiamentu as an originally Portuguese-based creole has
been disregarded in recent scholarship. In Section 3, I briefly outline the nature of
the correspondences between Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC. Following this,
Section 4 explains why the lexical shift of Upper Guinea PC towards Spanish, from
which Papiamentu resulted, should indeed be analyzed as a case of relexification

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and not of heavy lexical borrowing. I then examine whether and to what extent
the definition of ‘mixed language’ is applicable to Papiamentu by drawing par-
allels with recognized cases of language mixing (Section 5). In the final section
(Section 6), the possible source(s) of the Spanish elements in Papiamentu are in-
vestigated, including a critical discussion of several contact scenarios in which the
relexification towards Spanish may have occurred.
2. Papiamentu, monogenesis, and the notion of relexification in creole

studies
Drawing mainly on Schuchardt (1882), Lenz (1928) was the first to explicitly pos-
tulate that Papiamentu was imported from elsewhere as an originally Portuguese-
based variety, only to subsequently shift its lexicon towards Spanish. This claim
was based on the observation that, although the Papiamentu lexicon has a pro-
nounced Spanish character, its morpho-syntax resembles that of the Portuguese-
based creoles of West Africa (Lenz 1928: 323). Furthermore, with the whole of
Schuchardt’s oeuvre at his disposal, Lenz (1928) firmly speculated about mono-
genesis, i.e. the view that all creoles descend from one Portuguese-based proto-
variety spoken along the coast of West Africa. Allegedly, after, or even during,
their journeys across the Atlantic, speakers of this proto-variety would shift their
lexicon towards whatever the European language it was that prevailed in the place
of destination (Lenz 1928: 41, 80, 323, 326). He thus formulated the process of
linguistic change that supporters of creole monogenesis would come to call relexi-
fication and used Papiamentu as his case in point.
Much owing to Lenz (1928), starting in the mid-20th century, Papiamentu
indeed became firmly embedded in the monogenesis framework and was put for-
ward as a prime example of the diffusion and subsequent relexification of a West
African Portuguese-based proto-pidgin in the Caribbean.3 Some examples from
forerunners of monogenesis:
– According to Thompson (1961: 112), “Papiamentu is […] a development of
the West African slavers’ jargon. This jargon […] may have been the pattern
for all the West Indian Creoles.”
– Whinnom (1965: 527) believed that “a process of relexification, from
Portuguese to Spanish, explained completely and satisfactorily the Portuguese
elements in Papiamento.”
– Cassidy (1971: 207) claimed that “The Pg [Portuguese] element in JC [Jamaican
Creole] could have entered as a part of PgP [Portuguese Pidgin] spoken in the
Caribbean: it formed the basis of Papiamento.”

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56 Bart Jacobs
– Hancock (1971: 513) classified Papiamentu as a “Spanish creole derived from

an earlier Portuguese pidgin.”
These claims were based on quite plausible arguments. After all, as Lenz (1928)
had already pointed out, the Portuguese elements cluster in the grammatical cat-
egories of Papiamentu, whereas the Spanish material is predominant in the (basic)
content vocabulary (see also Kramer 2004: 104, 113). In light of the relative sta-
bility of functional categories as opposed to content words (see, e.g., Thomason
& Kaufmann 1988: 14, Muysken & Smith 1990: 883, Comrie 2000: 39, Bickerton
2001: 1104, Tadmor 2009: 59), this particular distribution suggests quite clear-
ly that the Spanish content vocabulary was embedded into an already existing
Portuguese-based grammar. Moreover, the claim that (a precursor of) Papiamentu
was imported from elsewhere also provides an answer to what Kramer (2004: 136)
refers to as Curaçao’s ‘Paradoxon’, i.e. the fact that a Dutch-based creole never
emerged on Curaçao in spite of the fact that (a) the Dutch were at all times the
dominant slave keeping power on the island and (b) Dutch creoles did emerge in
other Dutch colonies (Holm 1988: 322–352).
In sum, the hypothesis that Papiamentu resulted from the relexification to-
wards Spanish of an imported Afro-Portuguese proto-variety provides a plausible
and straightforward account for the particular distribution of Portuguese- vs.
Spanish-derived material as well as for the fact that a Dutch-based creole nev-
er emerged on Curaçao. One may now legitimately wonder why this hypothesis
has hardly been taken seriously in the past three decades or so. Two exceptions
are Martinus (1996) and Quint (2000), particularly the latter providing compel-
ling linguistic evidence that Papiamentu is genetically related to Upper Guinea
PC (see Section 3). However, there is a remarkable absence of references to these
two works in subsequent scholarship. An important reason for this negligence
seems to be exactly the strong association between the Papiamentu-relexification
hypothesis and conventional monogenesis.
Conventional monogenesis gradually but inevitably lost support from the
1980s onwards due to the fact that other, more satisfactory and arguably less
far-fetched — traditional monogenesis went as far as to propose that relexifica-
tion towards Dutch of the Portuguese-based proto-variety had given birth to the
semi-creole Afrikaans — theoretical models of creole genesis emerged. In fact,
from the 1980s onwards, the similarities among creoles world-wide were increas-
ingly explained as a result of either shared substrate languages (e.g. Alleyne 1980,
Boretzky 1983) or universal faculties of language creation and acquisition (e.g.
Bickerton [1974]1980, 1975, 1981, 1984). Simultaneously, the various pan-creole
correspondences that had nourished the emergence of monogenesis in the first
place were now met with a growing scholarly awareness of significant typological

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discrepancies between creoles owing to increasing access to comparative data

(see, for instance, Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 195). Due to these developments,
the monogenesis hypothesis finds little to no support in present-day creole stud-
ies (McWhorter 2005: 379, but see, e.g., Portilla 2008). To be sure, McWhorter
(2005: 379) wrote “an official obituary for the grand old monogenesis hypothesis.”
The popularity of monogenesis thus drastically plummeted from the 1980s
onwards and it may not be a coincidence that, also since the 1980s, the view of
Papiamentu as a relexified offshoot of an imported Portuguese-based variety is no
longer subscribed to either. Claiming a relexification scheme for Papiamentu had
become intrinsically associated with supporting monogenesis and it is as if the de-
mise of monogenesis thus dragged the Papiamentu-relexification hypothesis along
in its downfall, preventing this scenario — including the paradigmatic and rela-
tively straightforward linguistic ties with Upper Guinea PC — from being stud-
ied with scrutiny in recent scholarship. The before-mentioned works of Martinus
(1996) and Quint (2000) are exceptions, but then again, these studies have hardly
been received in Papiamentu-related literature.
In the 1990s, the term ‘relexification’ was shortly revived by Lumsden (e.g.
1991) and particularly Lefebvre (1986 and beyond) who developed what is
known as the Extreme (or Strict) Relexification Hypothesis. This polygenesis
model for creole formation views creole languages as the complete (or at least ex-
treme) relexification of one of their African substrate languages by the dominant
European language. According to this hypothesis, the near-complete relexification
of mainly Fongbe by French resulted in Haitian Creole. Todd (2004: 23) strikingly
describes Lefebvre’s Extreme Relexification Hypothesis as the “rewriting [of] the
relexification theory, making an African substratum rather than a Portuguese pid-
gin the syntactic base of today’s pidgins and creoles.” As far as I am aware, like
monogenesis, Lefebvre’s Extreme Relexification Hypothesis enjoys little support
among creolists today (for particular objections to Lefebvre’s relexification model,
see, e.g., Thomason 2001: 179, 180, DeGraff 2002).
Consider now the following comment by Todd (2004: 23) in describing the
demise of relexification schemes for Caribbean creoles: “Paradoxically, the relexi-
fication theory would probably be more acceptable if it had been less successful; if
it had, in other words, left larger traces of the original pidgin, particularly in terms
of core vocabulary.” While Todd is spot-on for most Caribbean creoles in as far as
these show no or hardly any tangible traces of relexification, Papiamentu in fact
continues to offer quite straightforward linguistic arguments — the wholesale cor-
respondence of its morpho-syntax with that of Upper Guinea PC (see Section 3)
— in support of a scenario of relexification of an originally Portuguese-based
creole. Consider also the following comment by DeBose (1975: 77), in his mono-
graph on the history of Papiamentu, who finds that the Papiamentu-relexification

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58 Bart Jacobs
hypothesis has to be “viewed with suspicion since relexification is a rather unusual

thing for a language to do, even so remarkable a language as a creole.” DeBose’s
claim is of course not incorrect — relexification is indeed an extraordinary pro-
cess. However, recent insights from the mixed language debate have shown that
we need not be suspicious of it either: given the right social conditions, migration
scenarios may be accompanied by thorough and complex processes of language
mixing, including relexification.
What the discussion provided above shows is that, in order to lend credibility
to the hypothesis that Papiamentu results from the relexification of Upper Guinea
PC by Spanish, it is necessary to revisit the notion of relexification, disassociate it
from creole studies, and place it in the wider context of contact linguistics.
3. From Upper Guinea PC to Papiamentu: Identifying the inherited

component
Building on work by Martinus (1996), Quint (2000) proposed to link Papiamentu

exclusively to Upper Guinea PC, providing compelling linguistic evidence in favor
of the claim that they descend from a common ancestor creole. Quint attributed
the dominance of Spanish-derived vocabulary in Papiamentu to a process of (par-
tial) relexification towards Spanish, though without proposing a historical con-
tact scenario. To be sure, Quint’s account, to which I subscribe (see Jacobs 2008
and beyond) and which underlies the present paper, coincides with monogenesis
only in as far as both rely on the notion of relexification. It differs crucially from
monogenesis in that the scheme of diffusion exclusively entails the language trans-
fer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao. Moreover, whereas traditional monogenesis
was unfalsifiable, the claim that Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC are related
can be tested empirically by means of straightforward language comparison (see
Martinus 1996, Quint 2000, Jacobs 2008, 2009a–b, 2010, 2011a–c). The principal
evidence in favor of the hypothesis that Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC are
historically related is outlined in Martinus (1996), Quint (2000) and Jacobs (2008,
2009a–b, 2010, 2011a–c). As noted in Section 1.2, the hypothesis is currently find-
ing broad acceptance among specialists. This is not to say that the hypothesis is
uncontroversial (cf. Maurer 2009), however.
Historical research done by the present author (2009a, forthcoming) suggests
that the slave trade between Upper Guinea and Curaçao started in 1659 and quite
abruptly came to a halt in the late 1670s, when the Dutch were forced to abandon
nearly all their forts and factories in the Upper Guinea region. Thus, we may esti-
mate the cut-off point between Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC at around 1680.
This, in turn, means that there are over three centuries separating the two creoles.

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In spite of this time-depth and the distinct socio-cultural and linguistic settings
in which they have since developed, their shared kinship is still clearly visible,
and particularly so in the domain of the morpho-syntax. In the remainder of this
paper, by the terms ‘inherited’ or ‘native’ I refer to those Papiamentu features that
are traceable back to Upper Guinea PC while the term ‘borrowed’ refers to those
features derived from Spanish. Below is a brief summary of the inherited domains
of the Papiamentu grammar based on Martinus (1996), Quint (2000) and Jacobs
(2008, 2009a–b, 2010, 2011a–c):
– Derivational and inflectional morphology
– Rules for word order and clause combining
– Functional categories
– Pronouns
– personal pronouns (emphatic and oblique)
– reflexive pronouns
– Basic prepositions
– Basic interrogatives
– Basic conjunctions (coordinate and subordinate)
– Verbal system
– Tense and aspect markers
– Auxiliary verbs
As this summary shows, the original Upper Guinea PC morphosyntactic skeleton
has been retained almost in its entirety. Of course, synchronically, there are some
important morphosyntactic differences between Papiamentu and Upper Guinea
PC such as the overt perfective marker a (Papiamentu) vs. Ø (Upper Guinea PC)
or nan (= 3pl pronoun and nominal pluralizer in Papiamentu), which has no
equivalent in Upper Guinea PC. Crucially, however, none of these distinctive fea-
tures results from the substitution of native material; instead, they are analyzable
as relatively straightforward cases of gap filling as defined by, e.g., Heine & Kuteva
(2005: 128). (A diachronic discussion of Papiamentu a and nan is provided in
Jacobs 2010 and 2009b respectively.) Perhaps the only noteworthy exception is the
substitution of the Upper Guinea PC negator ka (< Portugese nunca) by Spanish
no (that is assuming that ka was the original negator in the ancestor variety). Note,
however, that the syntactic negation patterns of Papiamentu still coincide neatly
with those of Upper Guinea PC.
In addition to the morphosyntax, the phonology of Papiamentu is also large-
ly inherited, although the phonological correspondence with Upper Guinea PC
is somewhat clouded by the introduction into Papiamentu of several new pho-
nemes found mainly in borrowed Dutch and Spanish lexical material (cf. Quint
2000: 127).

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60 Bart Jacobs
Could the correspondences between Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC in the

above mentioned categories have resulted from independent processes of creoliza-
tion, that is, could they be due to mere chance? The nature of the correspondences
is such that the answer must be in the negative. There is no space to repeat the
linguistic evidence provided elsewhere (Martinus 1996, Quint 2000, Jacobs 2008,
2009a–b, 2010, 2011a–c). A brief discussion of the prepositional paradigm will
suffice here, as it allows for some basic points to be made.
Both Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC have a paradigm of six basic (mono-
morphemic) prepositions. These are identical in the two creoles: na ‘in, on, to’ (<
Port. na ≠ Sp. en + la), te ‘until’ (< Port. até ≠ Sp. hasta), di ‘of ’ (< Sp./Port. de), ku
‘with’ (< Sp. con / Port. com), pa ‘for, to’ (< Sp./Port. para), and riba ‘on, over’ (<
Sp./Port. arriba) (cf. Quint 2000: 140). That these are unlikely to be chance cor-
respondences becomes clear in light of the following:
– For Papiamentu, the prepositions na and te are of clear Portuguese origin.
The remaining four could be either Portuguese- or Spanish-derived. In oth-
er words, Portuguese etyma predominate in the prepositional paradigm of
Papiamentu. Note, however, that if Portuguese was ever spoken on Curaçao in
the first place, it probably ceased to be vital on the island in the mid-18th cen-
tury. Therefore, if not by way of Upper Guinea PC, it is unclear how such basic
and highly frequent Portuguese-derived items could have been incorporated
in the Papiamentu grammar.
– It is rather unlikely that two creoles, independently of one another, would so
consistently choose identical paths of grammaticalization. For instance, unlike
the respective etyma, (1) Papiamentu/Upper Guinea PC na has lost its defi-
niteness; (2) Papiamentu/Upper Guinea PC te has been decategorialized, func-
tioning only as a preposition, not as an adverb; (3) Papiamentu/Upper Guinea
PC ku means not only ‘with’ but also ‘and’; (4) Papiamentu/Upper Guinea PC
pa serves as a complementizer after verbs of volition; (5) Papiamentu/Upper
Guinea PC riba is used as a preposition, not as an adverb; (6) Papiamentu/
Upper Guinea PC di is used in the formation of ordinal numbers. In other
words, each of the six prepositions coincide in Papiamentu and Upper Guinea
PC in terms of phonetic shape, semantic scope and syntactic behavior, while
differing in one or more of these respects from the Iberian etyma.
– This prepositional paradigm is unlike anything found in other Atlantic cre-
oles. Most Atlantic creoles show a drastic reduction of the prepositional par-
adigm, using other syntactic devices to express prepositional relations. For
instance, in the Portuguese-based creole Sãotomense, nouns and verbs as-
sume the role of prepositions (Hagemeijer 2007: 86) and in the Spanish-based

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creole Palenquero, mostly the locative adverbs akí, aká, aí and ayá take on a
prepositional function (Schwegler & Green 2007: 302).
– Despite the relative wealth of prepositions in Papiamentu and Upper Guinea
PC, both lack reflexes of the Iberian high-frequency prepositions por ‘by, for,
through’, a ‘to’ and sobre ‘on, over’. One of the reasons why a cognate of Iberian
a was not integrated in Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC is that in both cre-
oles, verbs of movement occur without a preposition when followed by an
indication of place. The functions of Iberian sobre and por have been taken by
Papiamentu/Upper Guinea PC riba and pa respectively.
This discussion of prepositions is but a fraction of the body of linguistic evidence
that links Papiamentu to Upper Guinea PC; similar, more detailed, analyses can be
made for each of the grammatical categories listed previously.
In spite of the structural morphosyntactic correspondence, mutual intelligibil-
ity between uneducated speakers of Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC is likely to
be complicated if not impossible, due to far-reaching differences not only in the
periphery but also in the fundamental parts of the content vocabulary. As should
be abundantly clear by now, I believe these differences are attributable to a process
of relexification of Upper Guinea PC by and towards Spanish.
4. From Upper Guinea PC to Papiamentu: Relexification rather than

(heavy) lexical borrowing
The term ‘relexification’ is not seldom used in the literature in too broad a sense to
designate more or less regular processes of lexical borrowing (as pointed out also
by Bakker 1997: 23). In the current field of contact linguistics, however, there is
a need to clearly distinguish between the two processes (relexification vs. lexical
borrowing) in order to better understand and analyze the development of lan-
guages such as Media Lengua (Muysken 1981), Michif (Bakker 1997), Saramaccan
(Good 2009) and others that do not conform to the common rules and patterns
of ordinary lexical borrowing (cf. Tadmor 2009: 61). I will make the distinction
here as well, as I believe it is necessary also to understand the development of
Papiamentu out of Upper Guinea PC. This distinction, then, is primarily a matter
of (a) degree — relexification affects the most basic parts of the vocabulary; ‘regu-
lar’ lexical borrowing only sporadically affects the basic vocabulary, and (b) rate
— relexification is an abrupt process; ‘regular’ borrowing is a much more gradual
process (see Muysken 2006: 316–319 for similar remarks).
Below, I discuss two arguments for why the present case should indeed be
regarded as a case of relexification by (or towards), rather than heavy borrowing

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62 Bart Jacobs
from, Spanish. The first argument is that the degree of lexical shift was much
more far-reaching than the degree witnessed in normal cases of heavy borrowing
(Section 4.1); the second argument is that this shift occurred abruptly, rather than
gradually (Section 4.2).
4.1 Replacement of basic content vocabulary
Lexical borrowing, even when heavy or massive, does not significantly affect the
most basic parts of the vocabulary and rather manifests itself primarily in the more
peripheral domains. In the words of Greenberg ([1971] 2005: 16, 17), lexical bor-
rowing “tends to cluster in nonfundamental vocabulary and makes only rare and
sporadic inroads into basic vocabulary” and Muysken (2006: 316) speaks of “se-
mantic restrictions” on heavy lexical borrowing. By contrast, there are no such con-
straints or semantic restrictions on relexification, which by definition involves the
substitution of native lexical items in all areas of the lexicon including, and promi-
nently, in the most fundamental parts of the vocabulary (see also Tadmor 2009: 59).
Accordingly, French influence on the English lexicon, for instance, does not
qualify as relexification: though English borrowed heavily from French, Thomason
& Kaufman (1988: 308) note that this borrowing process was “no more extreme
than the kinds found in many other normal cases in history” (cf. Holm 1988: 437
for similar remarks). Indeed, it was already pointed out by Bennett & Smithers
(1968, in Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 314) that “one can compose a piece of
English conversation without using a single French word; and one can often hear
or take part in conversations containing very few”. Furthermore, the number of
French loans in English is inversely proportional to the basicness of the vocab-
ulary; that is, the more basic the vocabulary, the smaller the number of French
loans (Bakker 2003: 121, Grant 2009: 375). This can be seen in the fact that on the
English Swadesh-100 list (still commonly used as a yard stick for identifying basic
vocabulary) no more than six or seven items have a French etymology (Thomason
& Kaufman 1988: 329, Parkvall 2006: 325). Similar observations apply to the cases
of Italian borrowings in Maltese, Spanish in Chamorro (see Stolz 2003 for both),
German in Danish (Bakker 2003: 120) or Arabic in Swahili (Schadeberg 2009: 88).
All these recipient languages show a much greater percentage of borrowings in the
periphery of the lexicon than in the basic vocabulary, so that the term ‘relexifica-
tion’ is not called for (Bakker 2003: 121).
The Spanish contribution to the Papiamentu lexicon is quite a different matter
all together and differs significantly from the above mentioned cases. By this, I am
not referring to the fact that Spanish-derived items predominate in the periphery
of the Papiamentu lexicon, or that a number of adverbs and peripheral preposi-
tions and conjunctions are derived from Spanish; though these are facts, this could

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in principle all be the result of normal to ‘heavy borrowing’. The lable ‘relexifica-
tion’ is rather justified by the fact that the most essential part of the original ba-
sic content vocabulary of Upper Guinea PC has been replaced by Spanish-derived
lexemes. Unfortunately, unlike in the case of French influence on English, a per-
centage count of the Spanish contribution to the Papiamentu Swadesh-100 list is
bound to be inaccurate, due to the fact that roughly half of the items on it can be
attributed to either Spanish or Upper Guinea PC with equal likelihood (including
a few loanblends). Still, however, a look at the remaining 50% of the Papiamentu
Swadesh-100 list is quite revealing: while only 10% is native (i.e. inherited from
Upper Guinea PC), no less than 40% is clearly borrowed (i.e. Spanish-derived).
Among that 40% borrowed share, we find the Papiamentu words for the most
basic concepts, such as man, woman, child, person, bird, tree, skin, blood, bone,
hair, tooth, foot, hand, breast, to see, moon, star, water, stone, night, warm and
name, all of which are of clear Spanish origin and etymologically unrelated to the
corresponding lexemes of Upper Guinea PC. To be complete, two items on the
Papiamentu Swadesh-100 list are derived from Dutch, and two others can be ei-
ther English or Dutch loans.
As a consequence of the predominance of Spanish-derived basic vocabulary,
conversing in Papiamentu without taking recourse to borrowed Spanish lexical
items is pretty much impossible, which is why so many linguists have classified
and continue to classify Papiamentu as a Spanish-lexified creole without hesita-
tion. Also, as noted, in heavy-borrowing languages such as English, Chamorro
or Maltese, the number of loanwords is high in the peripheral vocabulary, but
diminishes as we approach the basic vocabulary. This is clearly not the case here:
Spanish loans are predominant both in the periphery and in the fundamental part
of the Papiamentu lexicon; to my knowledge, even languages such as Romanian
or Swahili do not display the borrowing of such an extensive subset of the most
basic vocabulary items.4 In sum, the degree (quality and quantity) of the borrowed
Spanish component in Papiamentu is such that it warrants the label ‘relexification’
rather than ‘heavy borrowing’.5
One might argue that, if the cultural pressure from Spanish were sufficient, the
three centuries separating Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC would have sufficed
for the original Portuguese-based basic content lexicon to be replaced through
‘normal’ processes of contact-induced change, say, scale five on Thomason &
Kaufman’s (1988) borrowing scale. However, if this were the case, we would
have expected the variety of Upper Guinea PC that arrived on Curaçao to not
only replace its basic content vocabulary, but to also substitute basic morpho-
syntactic categories causing a (significant) alteration of the original typological
profile (Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 75). As pointed out in Section 3, however,
this has not happened in the transition from Upper Guinea PC to Papiamentu:

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64 Bart Jacobs
unambiguously Portuguese-derived functional morphemes such as the previously

mentioned prepositions na and te (Section 3) have not been replaced by Spanish
equivalents (Sp. en and hasta). Rather, the morphosyntax is almost completely
inherited and, as a consequence, the typological make-up of Papiamentu still con-
forms more to Upper Guinea PC than to any other language.
What is more, for scale-5-borrowing to occur, strong cultural-linguistic pres-
sure over a prolonged period of time is required (Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 94).
Crucially, however, the available historical and linguistic clues suggest that the
lexical shift towards Spanish had already been completed by the turn of the 18th
century, on which more will follow below.
4.2 Abrupt lexical shift
Another property that distinguishes relexification from more normal processes

of lexical borrowing is the rate at which the lexical shift occurs. While relexifi-
cation is considered to be an abrupt process that may take no more than a few
decades (more on this in Section 5), processes of (heavy) lexical borrowing (e.g.,
the massive integration of Chinese loans into Classical Japanese [cf., e.g., Schmidt
2009: 549] or of French into English [cf., e.g., Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 326])
will usually take much longer (cf. also Golovko 2003: 191, Haspelmath 2009: 41
and Muysken 2006: 318 on the gradualness of ‘regular’ lexical borrowing). As
shown below, also in this respect the development of Papiamentu out of Upper
Guinea PC is classifiable as a case of relexification by, rather than as heavy borrow-
ing from, Spanish.
In order to understand the time span in which the original Upper Guinea PC
lexicon was relexified towards Spanish to form Papiamentu, one should recall that
the first Upper Guinean slaves probably arrived on Curaçao in 1659 (and stopped
arriving after ca. 1680). We may thus take 1659 as a terminus post quem. Now, if one
analyzes the first written attestation of Papiamentu, a 1775 love letter written by a
Sephardic Jew to his mistress, it is easy to see that this Early Papiamentu document
shows roughly the same quantity of Spanish-derived lexical material as modern-
day Papiamentu does.6 Clearly, this suggests that the most important lexical shift
towards Spanish had already been completed by that time, which leaves us with a
time span of some 115 years or less for the relexification towards Spanish to have
occurred. A second historical-linguistic clue, however, allows us to significantly re-
duce the terminus ante quem: as early as 1704, the polyglot Father Alexius Schabel
reported in his travel account that what the slaves of Curaçao spoke sounded much
like ‘broken Spanish’. Provided that the Father’s assessment is reliable (i.e., that he
was capable of distinguishing Spanish from Portuguese, more on this in Section 5),
we may assume that a far-reaching lexical shift towards Spanish had already been

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accomplished by the turn of the 18th century. Thus, we are left with a space of
time of some four and a half decades (1659–1704) or less for this lexical shift to
have been carried out. If these calculations are correct, this remarkably short time
interval provides another argument in favor of labeling the mentioned lexical shift
as ‘relexification’ rather than as ‘heavy lexical borrowing’. (In Section 5, I will show
in more detail that this short time interval is indeed perfectly reconcilable with
recognized cases of language mixing including relexification.)
Based on the above, we can now make a rough time-based division between
the earliest, most decisive lexical shift from Upper Guinea PC towards Spanish —
the actual process of relexification completed by the turn of 18th century — and all
changes that occurred afterwards up to present (cf. Holm 1988: 315 for a similar,
albeit largely intuitive assessment of the diachronic development of Papiamentu).
This division implies, for instance, that several replacements of native lexical as
well as structural material by Spanish borrowings (which can be observed quite
neatly in 19th/20th-century Papiamentu texts) are not the result of the early pro-
cess of relexification, but rather of regular processes of borrowing from Spanish.
For instance, Early Papiamentu texts testify to the use of the modal verb fika ‘to
stay, remain, become’ (= Upper Guinea PC fika) which came to be replaced by the
Spanish-derived form keda (< Sp. quedar) or of the Early Papiamentu derivational
suffix -dadi (= Upper Guinea PC -dadi) which is -dat (< Sp. -dad) in present-day
Papiamentu. The same observations apply to the significant contributions made
to Papiamentu by Kwa and Bantu languages (cf. Maurer 1987, 1989, 1991, 1994),
Dutch (cf. Wood 1970, 1972b, Kramer 2004) and, to a lesser extent, English (cf.
Wood 1971); these contributions also result not from relexification but from nor-
mal contact-induced language change.
5. Analyzing Papiamentu as a mixed language
If Papiamentu results from the relexification of Upper Guinea PC towards Spanish,

this logically brings up parallels with the class of mixed languages, relexification —
a term whose use in the mixed language debate owes much to Muysken’s (1981)
account of Media Lengua — being one of the principal mechanisms involved in
the formation of mixed languages.
An uncontroversial definition of a mixed language would be Comrie’s
(2008: 21): a mixed language is “one which reflects […] the combination of dif-
ferent major components from different historical sources.” We can translate
this to the case of Papiamentu and grosso modo distinguish between two major
components, a functional and a purely lexical, and two corresponding historical
sources: an Upper Guinea PC morphosyntactic matrix and Spanish embedded

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66 Bart Jacobs
lexicon. One classical, but more controversial, definition of a mixed language is

that of a language showing a grammar–lexicon (or functional–lexical) split, with
one source language providing the grammatical categories and another providing
the lexicon. Specialists agree, however, that this definition is idealistic and that, in
reality, an ideal grammar–lexicon split seldom occurs and that the type and nature
of the split differs from one mixed language to the other. Evidence from a sample
of seven mixed languages allowed Matras (2003) to redefine the split: according to
him, a language is a mixed language if the bulk of its basic content vocabulary is
from one source, while the verbal system and the rules for word order and clause
combining are from another source (Matras 2003: 155–156). Papiamentu indeed
also meets these criteria, so that, at least from a language-structural point of view,
it seems warranted to classify Papiamentu as a mixed language.
A recognized mixed language that seems appropriate for comparison is Media
Lengua. It is spoken in Central Ecuador and shows a split comparable (though
not identical) to that of Papiamentu. While Media Lengua’s morphosyntactic
framework is Quechua, Spanish relexified 90% of the Quechua lexicon (adapted to
Quechua phonology), except affixes, which are still Quechua (cf. Muysken 1981,
1997, Dikker 2008). Media Lengua was formed within a group of Quechua speak-
ers temporarily residing in Quito (Muysken 1997: 373–376). An important differ-
ence between Media Lengua and Papiamentu is that the lexical roots of the func-
tion words were replaced by Spanish roots in the case of Media Lengua, but not
in the case of Papiamentu. The lexical closeness between Spanish and Portuguese
could have been one reason why in the case of Papiamentu the original function
words were not replaced by Spanish roots (Mikael Parkvall p.c.).
5.1 More on the rate of relexification
The parallel between the case of Papiamentu and other recognized cases of abrupt
relexification/mixing gains significance in the context of the long-lasting debate on
the Spanish vs. Portuguese origins of Papiamentu. Interestingly, Father Schabel’s pre-
viously mentioned description of Papiamentu as ‘broken Spanish’, already in 1704,
had been put forward by several proponents of the Spanish origins of Papiamentu
as a decisive argument against the creole’s alleged Afro-Portuguese roots (e.g.
Maduro 1965: 5): if in 1704 Papiamentu was already Spanish-based, Papiamentu
had presumably always been Spanish-based. If Papiamentu had originally been a
Portuguese-based creole, surely the polyglot Schabel would have noticed. Scholars
defending the Papiamentu-relexification hypothesis could only counter Schabel’s
observation by claiming that the Portuguese language may not have been part of his
otherwise formidable linguistic repertoire, supposedly preventing him from rec-
ognizing the Portuguese character of Early Papiamentu (e.g. van Wijk 1958: 169).

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New insights from the mixed language debate, however, show that language
mixing (such as relexification) is in fact a remarkably rapid process that can be
brought to completion in a single generation’s space of time. For instance, the
formation of Media Lengua (i.e., the relexification of 90% of the original Quechua
vocabulary by Spanish) must have occurred sometime between 1920 and 1940
(Muysken 1997: 374) and most likely in a time span of less than a decade (Pieter
Muysken p.c.). Not just Media Lengua, but also several other recognized mixed
languages are thought to have emerged in remarkably short periods of time (cf.
Bakker 2003: 136). Mednyj Aleut (a.k.a. Copper Island Aleut = Aleut + Russian)
and Michif (= Cree + French) were presumably created in the space of a single
generation (i.e., two to three decades at most) according to Comrie (2008: 25) and
Thomason (2007: 55). Moreover, Gurindji Kriol, a mixed language composed of
Gurindji (an Australian aboriginal language) and Kriol (an English-based creole),
developed in the 1960s–70s out of the regularization of code-switching patterns
and subsequent nativization. This process took no more than two decades to be
carried out (McConvell & Meakins 2005: 15). Another interesting example of
abrupt mixing is provided by the Surinamese creole Saramaccan, mentioned in the
introduction. The available historical and linguistic documentation suggests that
the process that gave rise to Saramaccan, i.e. the partial relexification of Sranan
towards (Creole) Portuguese, was completed between the late 1660s and 1680, i.e.
in slightly more than one decade (Cardoso & Smith 2004: 117).
These examples show that we need not insist on Schabel’s failure to recognize
an earlier more pronounced Portuguese character of Papiamentu, but may instead
assume that, at the time of his observation, the relexification had already been
completed, indeed, in the time span of some four decades or less.
Like Schabel’s observation, the previously mentioned Papiamentu love let-
ter from 1775 had also been used as an argument against Portuguese-to-Spanish
relexification hypotheses. As noted previously, the quantity and quality of
Spanish-derived vocabulary in this Early Papiamentu text is pretty much equal
to modern-day Papiamentu and, conversely, the letter does not contain any ad-
ditional Portuguese lexical material in comparison to modern-day Papiamentu.
This discovery, Wood (1972a: 28) claimed, crucially challenged the hypothesis that
Papiamentu is a relexification of an originally Portuguese-based variety, since, if
that were the case, the 1775 letter should have revealed more Portugese lexical
material. This reasoning shows that Wood and with him many others involved in
the debate on the origins of Papiamentu have uncritically assumed that relexifica-
tion is a gradual process. However, the evidence from mixed languages suggests
that the far-reaching lexical shift towards Spanish may, or perhaps must, have hap-
pened well before 1775. Thus, in an Upper Guinea PC-to-Spanish relexification

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68 Bart Jacobs
scenario, the predominance of Spanish-derived content vocabulary at around

1775 is merely predictable.
To sum up, rather than constituting evidence against the Afro-Portuguese roots
of Papiamentu, Father Schabel’s testimony and the 1775 Papiamentu letter in fact
provide valuable clues as to the rate at which Upper Guinea PC shifted its original
Portuguese-based core vocabulary towards Spanish: this process must have been
carried out in the time span of three to four decades at most, providing a compel-
ling link between Papiamentu and several recognized cases of language mixing.
5.2 From Upper Guinea PC to Papiamentu: Deliberate relexification?
The very nature of mixed languages (e.g., the absence of simplification processes in
their genesis) clearly suggests they arise in communities where fluent bilingualism
is the norm (e.g. Winford 2003: 171, Matras 2009: 304). Scholars therefore agree
that, unlike creoles, mixed languages do not arise out of a strict communicative
need, but that the main driving force behind their creation is the need or desire to
flag a new group identity. This, in turn, implies that the process of language mix-
ing is to an important extent a conscious, intentional, or deliberate act (Muysken
1997: 376, Bakker & Matras 2003b: 13, Thomason 2003: 32, but see McConvell
& Meakins 2005: 16 for an opposing view).7 At least two factors suggest that the
relexification of Upper Guinea PC towards Spanish was a conscious, intentional
act of linguistic change as well.
First, though to my knowledge this is not discussed in the existing literature
on mixed languages, I assume that the conscious, intentional character of language
mixing is one reason why it can be carried out in such a brief space of time. If
language mixing were an unconscious and unintended by-product of (intensive)
language contact, one would expect this to occur, if at all, at a much slower rate.
The correlation between intentionality/deliberateness and rate of lexical replace-
ment can be illustrated by means of so-called taboo languages. These are languages
in which the use of certain words can, for different cultural-religious reasons, sud-
denly become forbidden, obliging their speakers to replace these words by others,
be it through borrowing or through coining (cf. Comrie 2000, Mous 2003: 219).
Evidently, the word replacement in taboo languages is a conscious and deliberate
speech act (viz. an act of lexical manipulation) and, indeed, can occur at a remark-
ably high rate (Comrie 2000: 38). While the motivation behind language mixing/
intertwining is of course different from taboo-motivated change, the two phenom-
ena are comparable in that they concern drastic linguistic change which is both
intentional/deliberate and abrupt. Of course, this is not to say that all intentional
change will be abrupt, but rather that, in the absence of other factors, intentional
change is more likely to be abrupt than unintentional change. For Papiamentu,

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this means that the abruptness of the relexification (Section 5.1) can be under-
stood and explained more easily by assuming the relexification was carried out
consciously viz. intentionally.8
A second clue is that when the two languages, Spanish and Upper Guinea PC,
came in contact there must already have been some degree of mutual intelligibility
between them due to the closeness of their lexicons. Pieter Muysken (p.c.) cor-
rectly observes that this intelligibility may have cancelled the strictly communi-
cative necessity for relexification. If not for communicative reasons, the primary
incentive for the shift towards Spanish must have been the desire to mark the
emergence of a new group identity and/or to flag acculturation to the dominant
Spanish culture. It is implied that this shift was indeed to some degree a conscious
and intentional act of change.
If the relexification of Upper Guinea PC towards Spanish was indeed a con-
scious process, the notion of ‘lexical re-orientation’ as defined by Matras (2000)
might turn out to be applicable:
Lexical re-orientation is the conscious shifting of the linguistic field that is respon-
sible for encoding meaning or conceptual representations away from the language
in which linguistic interaction is normally managed, organised and processed:
speakers adopt in a sense one linguistic system to express lexical meaning […]
and another to organise the relations among lexical symbols, as well as within
sentences, utterances, and interaction. The result is a split, by source language,
between lexicon and grammar.
(Matras 2000: 82, cf. the discussion in Golovko 2003: 192–196)
Note, finally, that the view that the relexification of Upper Guinea PC towards
Spanish was an intentional, conscious act of identity correlates well with the fact
that Papiamentu is an important identity marker for most of its speakers and en-
joys comparatively high social status vitality, which is not at all obvious for a creole
language (cf. Parkvall 2003 in this regard).
6. The source(s) of the Spanish content vocabulary
Although the discussion of the origins of Papiamentu has thus far been domi-
nated by the quest for the source(s) of its Portuguese elements, the search for the
origin(s) of the Spanish elements in the creole’s basic vocabulary is an equally
complex matter: who provided the Spanish linguistic input and/or target neces-
sary for the rapid and far-reaching relexification of Upper Guinea PC towards
Spanish to occur?
As noted previously, for quite obvious reasons, mixed languages are thought
to typically emerge in communities where a high degree of bilingualism is the

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70 Bart Jacobs
norm. If we are to continue the parallel between Papiamentu and mixed languag-
es, this poses a historical problem, since pockets of native Spanish speakers are
not officially documented on Curaçao during the second half of the 17th century.
Although the Amerindians present on the island may have spoken Spanish (see
pertinent remarks in Maurer 1998: 185–187), it seems justified to exclude them
from this analysis, since there are no indications of any intimate contact between
them and the African slaves (Hartog 1968: 29–42). Also, even if there was con-
tact, it is not clear why Upper Guinea PC-speaking slaves would drastically adapt
their speech habits under the influence of the Amerindians, whose demographic
relevance was negligible and who probably lacked the social prestige necessary to
exert any linguistic pressure. Hence, it is more plausible to look for other sourc-
es for the Spanish. Curaçao’s principal colonizing powers and slave keepers, the
Sephardim and the Dutch, are the first to come to mind.
Before proceeding, it should be borne in mind that Curaçao was a transitory
slave trading post. Most slaves were briefly held in slave camps and subsequently
redistributed throughout the Caribbean. Since these transit slaves quickly disap-
peared from the island, I assume they did not have any significant impact on the
shaping of the linguistic landscape of Curaçao. In the discussion below, therefore, I
will not take the transit slave camps into consideration and rather focus my atten-
tion on the slaves that stayed on the island as domestic and/or field slaves.
6.1 Sephardim or Dutch WIC officials?
Though the Curaçaoan Sephardim are traditionally thought to have spo-

ken Portuguese and in the literature are sometimes held responsible for the
Portuguese elements in Papiamentu, the truth is that we have no historical evi-
dence of what the Curaçaoan Sephardim spoke at home and it may have differed
from one family to the other. In fact, like the Sephardic community of Amsterdam
in the 17th century, I assume that the Sephardim of Curaçao were fully bilingual
in Portuguese and Spanish and that Spanish, not Portuguese, must have been the
main in-group communication vehicle (even though Portuguese remained the
principal language of the synagogue well into the 18th century). After all, trade
with the continent was conducted in Spanish only. Spanish-speaking Sephardic
slave holders may thus very well have provided the source for the Spanish ele-
ments in Papiamentu.
Another possible source for the Spanish is the officials of the Dutch West India
Company (WIC), who were also the principal slave owners. Though we know lit-
tle with certainty about their actual Spanish competence, it is historically docu-
mented that some of them, especially those occupying the higher ranks within
the WIC, knew Spanish fluently (Kramer 2004: 135). It seems important to note,

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furthermore, that there were in fact Spanish Catholics among the higher ranked
WIC officials on Curaçao (Kramer 2004: 124).
6.2 On community size
From a strictly demographic point of view, it might appear more plausible to hy-
pothesize a relexification process within Spanish-speaking WIC circles than among
the Sephardim, given that the WIC owned three or four times as many slaves as the
Sephardim did (Maurer 1998: 199). This demographic fact, however, need not be
as decisive as it seems. Indeed, a relatively small mixed bilingual community with
speakers of Spanish and Upper Guinea PC may in principle have sufficed, or even
have been favorable, for rapid relexification to take place: as Comrie (2000: 37)
points out, “in the absence of other factors, one would expect more rapid change
the smaller the community involved”. The reason for this, he explains, is that, “[i]n
a small community, innovations introduced by one individual can rapidly become
known to all members of the community; the chance of some other member of the
community rejecting the innovation is relatively low because the number of other
members of the community is low” (Comrie 2000: 36, cf. Thomason 2003: 32, but
see Bowern 2010, 2011). Accordingly, it is unsurprising to learn that, in as far as
it can be determined, most mixed languages are indeed thought to have arisen in
relatively small communities of perhaps only a few hundred speakers (Golovko
2003: 198). It follows that the relexification of Upper Guinea PC by Spanish may
have been carried out and brought to completion in a small but influential bi-
lingual speaker community, small enough for the relexification to be rapid and
influential enough for the speakers to subsequently spread their speech to newly
incoming slaves and other segments of the society.
6.3 Language mixing in the absence of full bilingualism?
Thus far, I have focused on the Sephardim and the WIC officials in search of a
bilingual Spanish-Upper Guinea PC community in which the relexification could
have been carried out. However, bilingualism is of course not a sine-qua-non for
one language to exert pressure on another. As is well known, prestige can offer a
sufficiently strong motivation for borrowings from and changes towards a target
language to occur, even if the direct access to that target is limited (see Goyette
2000). For instance, Haspelmath (2009: 48), in discussing loanword integration,
points out that, even though “ ‘prestige’ is a factor that is very difficult to measure
independently, [it seems] undeniable that prestige is a factor with paramount im-
portance for language change, going far beyond our current topic of loanwords.”
Goyette & Parkvall (forthcoming) provide a case in point when pointing out that

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72 Bart Jacobs
the cultural prestige of Latin in the post-Renaissance era was so high as to trigger
numerous borrowings of words and productive morphemes from Latin into sev-
eral Indo-European languages, in spite of the fact that only very small percentages
of the recipient speaker populations had knowledge of Latin (cf., furthermore,
the particular case of French influence on Romanian mentioned by Goyette &
Parkvall and discussed also in Schulte 2009: 237–238). Note, though, that these
borrowings occurred more gradually, that is, certainly not at the rate at which full-
scale language mixing tends to occur.
A more pertinent case in point is Thomason’s (2001: 213) discussion of “the
unnamed mixed language spoken in Ternate in North Maluku (Indonesia)”.
This mixed language combines a Ternatean lexicon with a Malay morphosyntax.
Importantly, the mixed language arose abruptly and in the absence of full bilin-
gualism, along the following lines:9
[Malay] is the children’s first and only language until they reach an age when they
find themselves in social situations where Ternatean is the appropriate language.
They […] do not bother learning Ternatean grammar, but instead simply attach
Ternatean lexicon onto Malay grammar so that they can imagine that they are
speaking Ternatean. (Thomason 2001: 214)
Translated to the present case, we can hypothesize a scenario in which the members
of a community of Upper Guinea PC speakers realize that Spanish is the appropri-
ate language in certain social settings on Curaçao and, instead of fully switching to
Spanish, commence attaching Spanish lexicon onto their native grammar, so as to
pretend to speak Spanish, viz. to flag acculturation (cf. Matras 2003: 155). If this is
what happened, full bilingualism would not have been required for Upper Guinea
PC to develop into Papiamentu.
Like Ternatean in Ternate, Spanish was doubtlessly the most appropriate lan-
guage in certain social contexts on Curaçao. One such domain was the domain of
religion. Although, unfortunately, quite little is known about the religious habits
of the slaves, we do know that already in the late 17th century Spanish-speaking
Catholic priests would occasionally come over from the Venezuelan mainland to
perform a variety of clerical services (Hartog 1968: 145–154, Munteanu 1996: 85–
86). These Catholic priests visited not only the transit slaves (i.e., those destined
for resale), but notably also those permanently residing on Curaçao (Hartog
1968: 152). The Catholic priests were given full freedom to operate on Curaçao,
first, because this was included in the terms of the asiento contract obtained by
the Dutch WIC and, second, because Curaçao’s Protestant Dutch and Sephardic
Jewish elites did not want their slaves to be members of their church (Hartog
1968: 148).10 Quite early on, as a consequence of the Catholic missions, Curaçao’s

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slave society had indeed become predominantly Catholic, rather than Protestant
or Jewish (Hartog 1968: 178).
Thus, the fact that Spanish was heavily associated with the slaves’ religious
instruction may have granted it the necessary prestige and accessibility necessary
to initiate far-reaching relexification of the basic vocabulary. On the other hand,
as noted, the interaction between the Catholic, Spanish-speaking priests and the
Curaçaoan slaves in the early period has remained scarcely documented and war-
rants future research.
Finally, in the search for the origin(s) of the Spanish elements in Papiamentu,
it should not be forgotten that Spanish was the language of Curaçao’s external
trade. A possibility is that the relexification was performed among a community
of freed (Upper Guinea PC-speaking) slaves involved in the trade, but this idea
remains highly tenuous for now.
6.4 Relexification among domestic or plantation slaves?
An important issue still to be explored is whether the relexification of Upper

Guinea PC by Spanish occurred among field slaves or among the domestic slaves.
Some scholars assume an important role for the Curaçaoan yayas, who were house
slave nannies of African origin tasked with the upbringing of the master’s chil-
dren (Eckkrammer 1999: 61, cf. van Wijk 1958: 181).11 Martinus (1998), however,
claims that Papiamentu established itself first among the field slaves only to subse-
quently diffuse to the house slaves — “the language moved from the fields into the
Big Houses, not the other way around” (Martinus 1998: 114) — a view shared by
the historian Krafft (1949, cited in Maduro 1965: 18).
In 1683, no less than 75% of all the slaves residing on Curaçao worked as
domestic slaves (Hoetink 1958: 58, Bartens 1996: 243). As noted previously in
Section 6.2, however, community size does not necessarily correlate positively
with degree and rate of contact-induced change. In other words, these demo-
graphic figures do not annul the possibility that the relexification occurred on one
of the agricultural farms in the interior and from there spread into the colonial
houses, as Martinus (1998) claims.
Still, however, two factors speak in favor of the idea that the house slaves were
pivotal in the relexification of Upper Guinea PC. First, the yayas were women.
A relexification scenario involving Upper Guinea PC-speaking yayas and Spanish-
speaking masters would thus be a perfect parallel with several established cases
of language mixing, involving mixed marriages in colonial settings, in which the
bulk of the morphosyntax is derived from the language of the mothers, while the
lexicon is predominantly from that of the fathers (see, e.g., Bakker & Matras 2003b
for some cases in point; cf. also Bakker’s 1997 intertwining model).

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74 Bart Jacobs
Second, the number of light-skinned slaves on the agricultural farms was rela-
tively low, but they constituted the majority among the group of domestic slaves
(Hoetink 1958: 75, Allen 2007: 73–74). This is important in light of the fact that
most of the Upper Guinea PC-speaking slaves, drawn from the creolized societies
of the Cape Verde Islands and Cacheu, were of mixed descent and, consequently,
lighter skinned than the slaves from the Gold Coast, Congo and Angola, who were
also present on Curaçao.
It is a small step from assuming that the majority of the first Curaçaoan yayas
were Upper Guinea PC-speaking women working for Spanish-speaking mas-
ters (be they Sephardic Jews or WIC officials) to understanding how a Spanish-
relexified variety of Upper Guinea PC could emerge and spread on Curaçao.
7. Final remarks and conclusions
The present paper discussed whether, and to what extent, Papiamentu can be ana-
lyzed as a mixed language composed of an Upper Guinea PC morphosyntactic
matrix and an embedded Spanish content lexicon. I explained how the perspective
on Papiamentu as a mixed language allows us to disassociate the notion of relexi-
fication from creole studies, which, eventually, may lead to a broader recognition
of the hypothesis that Papiamentu is a relexified offshoot of Upper Guinea PC,
brought to the island in the second half of the 17th century.
The split in the grammar of Papiamentu (Spanish content lexicon vs. Upper
Guinea PC morphosyntax) warrants the creole’s classification as a (rather typical)
mixed language. The available clues suggest that the development of Papiamentu
(viz. the relexification of Upper Guinea PC), like recognized cases of language
mixing, (a) was an abrupt process and (b) was to a certain extent a deliberate and
conscious effort to flag the creation of a new group identity.
The most promising contact scenario for the emergence and spread of
Papiamentu, I believe, is the one involving (the offspring of) Upper Guinea PC-
speaking yayas and Spanish-speaking slave masters (be it Sephardim or WIC of-
ficials). However, since the existence of such a bilingual setting on 17th-century
Curaçao cannot be proven historically, we must alternatively consider the pos-
sibility that Upper Guinea PC was relexified in the absence of full bilingualism.
Therefore, an alternative scenario involving Venezuelan Catholic priests, in which
native speakers of Upper Guinea PC (consciously) shifted their lexicon under the
pressure of Spanish as the language of religion, should also be looked into in future
research.
Some of the issues raised above of course remain more tenuous than others.
However, I feel at least some speculation is necessary if we want to advance in a

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case such as the present (in which clear-cut historical documentation is scarce)
and come to a plausible account of the history of Papiamentu and the circum-
stances under which it managed to develop into the mother tongue of the people
of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao.
Notes
* I would like to thank Peter Bakker, Stéphane Goyette, Yaron Matras, Pieter Muysken and
Mikael Parkvall for valuable comments on earlier drafts. All disclaimers apply. Parts of this ar-
ticle were adapted from Jacobs (2012).
1. Goyette & Parkvall (forthcoming) dedicate an interesting paper to showing that, contrary
to popular belief, there is nothing particularly ‘mixed’ about creoles and hence that there is no
good reason to treat creoles and mixed languages in the same manner.
2. Note that, in this paper, I am not concerned with the Dutch contribution to Papiamentu,
since scholars agree that this contribution is not constitutive either of the core grammar of
Papiamentu or of its basic vocabulary. Indeed, Dutch-derived function words in Papiamentu
can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the Dutch contribution to the Papiamentu
Swadesh-100 list is restricted to two items.
3. The Surinamese maroon creole Saramaccan was also important in this discussion, owing to
its mixed Portuguese-English vocabulary. Like Papiamentu, Saramaccan was initially believed to
constitute an offshoot of the alleged Portuguese-based proto-variety relexified towards English
(e.g. Voorhoeve 1973). Today, however, there is a broad consensus that the Portuguese elements
were added to an already existing English-based creole, probably Sranan (Smith 1987, Bakker
2009: 155, McWhorter 2011: 172, 173).
4. This can be checked quite easily via the splendid online World Loanword Database (WOLD);
see Haspelmath & Tadmor (2009).
5. Note that the hypothesized lexical shift of Upper Guinea PC towards Spanish, besides the ac-
tual relexification (i.e., the replacement of basic and native content vocabulary), inevitably also
involved regular lexical borrowing with the mere purpose of vocabulary expansion, but since
we do not know the original size of the vocabulary of the Upper Guinea PC variety that arrived
on Curaçao, it is impossible to estimate the relative proportions of relexified versus borrowed
vocabulary in that early period.
6. The love letter is reproduced and discussed in, for instance, Maduro (1971), Wood (1972a),
Salomon (1982), Martinus (1996: 9–10) and Kramer (2004: 217–222).
7. Mous’s (2003) notion of ‘lexical manipulation’ nicely reflects the intentional character of the
process. Thomason (1999) provides a detailed discussion of how language change in general
correlates with speakers’ conscious and/or deliberate choices.

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76 Bart Jacobs
8. Of course, as Muysken (2006: 328) correctly stresses, “[t]he word ‘conscious’ should not be
taken too literally, since we are dealing with speech communities without a tradition of meta-
linguistic reflection.”
9. Tadmor’s (2007) account of the core vocabulary borrowings from Malay into the Austroasiatic
language Ceq Qong is quite comparable. Haspelmath (2009: 46, fn) summarizes this account as
follows: “Speakers tried to assimilate to the strongly dominant Malay people, but had very little
access to the Malay language, so they borrowed what they could, the basic vocabulary that they
knew.”
10. The so-called asientos were contracts or trading agreements that would give their owner the
exclusive right to trade with Spain in a specific region.
11. For an interesting case study of language creation in the context of employers and their
maids, see Bizri (2010).
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Author’s address
Bart Jacobs
Universität Konstanz
Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft (Fach 189)
D-78457 Konstanz
Germany
bart.jacobs@uni-konstanz.de, bartjacobs3@googlemail.com

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This is a contribution from Journal of Historical Linguistics 2:1

This paper takes as a point of departure the hypothesis that Papiamentu

Keywords: Papiamentu, Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole, Spanish, mixed

The status of Papiamentu as a creole language is quite uncontroversial. However, it

1.1 Creoles and mixed languages

Creoles and mixed languages (alternatively referred to in the literature as ‘bilin-

Journal of Historical Linguistics 2:1 (2012), 52–82. doi 10.1075/jhl.2.1.05jac

1.2 Papiamentu and Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

1.3 Papiamentu: A mixed language?

Undeniably, the (basic) content vocabulary of present-day Papiamentu is predom-

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

2. Papiamentu, monogenesis, and the notion of relexification in creole

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

– Hancock (1971: 513) classified Papiamentu as a “Spanish creole derived from

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

discrepancies between creoles owing to increasing access to comparative data

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

hypothesis has to be “viewed with suspicion since relexification is a rather unusual

3. From Upper Guinea PC to Papiamentu: Identifying the inherited

Building on work by Martinus (1996), Quint (2000) proposed to link Papiamentu

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

Could the correspondences between Papiamentu and Upper Guinea PC in the

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

4. From Upper Guinea PC to Papiamentu: Relexification rather than

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

4.1 Replacement of basic content vocabulary

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

unambiguously Portuguese-derived functional morphemes such as the previously

4.2 Abrupt lexical shift

Another property that distinguishes relexification from more normal processes

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

5. Analyzing Papiamentu as a mixed language

If Papiamentu results from the relexification of Upper Guinea PC towards Spanish,

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

lexicon. One classical, but more controversial, definition of a mixed language is

5.1 More on the rate of relexification

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

scenario, the predominance of Spanish-derived content vocabulary at around

5.2 From Upper Guinea PC to Papiamentu: Deliberate relexification?

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

6. The source(s) of the Spanish content vocabulary

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

6.1 Sephardim or Dutch WIC officials?

Though the Curaçaoan Sephardim are traditionally thought to have spo-

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

6.2 On community size

6.3 Language mixing in the absence of full bilingualism?

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

6.4 Relexification among domestic or plantation slaves?

An important issue still to be explored is whether the relexification of Upper

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

7. Final remarks and conclusions

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company