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Book Reviews
The origin of creole languages has been center stage for more than thirty years. In the absence of early spoken language data, written documents are crucial for reconstructing their emergence. Apart from their scarcity, however, it is often not easy to determine their relationship to the early spoken varieties because the people who crafted them were often not fluent in the creole, had little sustained contact with its main users, and pursued goals that were not fully compatible with language documentation. Sabino's investigation makes a strong case against the common practice "of treating corpora from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century as a chronologically continuous ... data set" (202). Drawing on data from various disciplines, Sabino convincingly argues in favor of distinguishing the language of the written records from Africans' speech. She demonstrates that the latter--Negerhollands (N)--emerged among Afro-Caribbeans in the late seventeenth century and is much influenced by (New) Kwa languages. By contrast, the language of the missionary documents is a special variety that derives from Hoch Kreol (HK), which emerged among the Euro-Caribbean community in the eighteenth century. It is documented in some descriptions and differs from N in that it is characterized by a higher preponderance of Germanic (Danish, Dutch, and English) features.
The book consists of nine chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, a preface by Velma Pollard, three appendices, and an author and a subject index. The introduction briefly introduces the reader to the linguistic diversity of the Danish West Indies--three Dutch-lexified varieties and a structurally related English-lexified variety--clarifies naming issues, and presents the approach, sources, and structure of the study. Ch. 1 examines the colonial mindset. Exploring European language ideologies, European, including academic, views about non-Europeans, their languages and contact languages, it demonstrates how an ideology of superiority constructed Africans as Europeans' alter ego. This legitimated "centuries of exploitation and influenced inquiry into the origin and nature of Caribbean communities and the languages they created" (30). Africans' response to Europeans' disdain is explored in Ch. 2, where Sabino compares linguistic, social, economic, and religious differences between Africans and Europeans. She argues that Europeans systematically misinterpreted Africans' actions. Their oppressive measures towards Africans cemented the gulf between Africans and Europeans, leading to...