In Search of the ‘Lingua Franca’ of Manhattan’s First Enslaved African Community | a talk by Professor Jeroen Dewulf (University of California, Berkeley)

Monday, February 12th at 4pm in HQ 134

a talk by Jeroen Dewulf, Queen Beatrix Professor, Department of German & Dutch Studies, University of California, Berkeley

In Search of the ‘Lingua Franca’ of Manhattan’s First Enslaved African Community

Since the enslaved population in New Netherland (1614-1664), the Dutch colony in Manhattan, was small compared to that of other Dutch Atlantic colonies such as Curaçao, Dutch Brazil and Suriname, it has traditionally received little scholarly attention. One question that has long been ignored is that of language use. This presentation uses historical data and a comparative analysis to explore which language most likely served as the lingua franca of Manhattan’s first Black population. Was it an African Indigenous language, was it the Dutch language of the colonizers or was it an Afro-Iberian creole language, similar perhaps to the Portuguese-derived language Papiamentu that developed in Curaçao?