OSO. Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse Taalkunde, Letterkunde en Geschiedenis. Jaargang 3

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Nineteenth century Virgin Island creole French
Morris Goodman

The earliest comparative study of creole languages (Van Name 1869/70) described a variety of creole French spoken in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Today two forms of French are spoken there by descendants of white immigrants from St. Barthélemy; one is a creole similar to that spoken in Guadeloupe, and the other is a non-creole overseas French dialect (Goodman 1964: 12, fn. 8; Highfield 1979, chap. I). It is virtually certain, however, that Van Name was not referring to either of these. He wrote (p. 127):

For this dialect my authority has been a young man, Frederico Antonio Camps, recently from St. Thomas. He was born in Havana, but since his sixth year has lived in St. Thomas and speaks besides the French, also the Dutch and Spanish Creole [i.e. Papiamento, then widely spoken in St. Thomas; see Hesseling 1979: 47-8] all three with great readiness.

Camps must therefore have immigrated to St. Thomas during the 1850's (if not earlier) and must have reached the United States by 1870 at the very latest in order to have provided Van Name with his data. According to Highfield (1979: 3):

No one is exactly certain when the first St. Bartians arrived in St. Thomas. Some say that it was as early as 1865; others say that it was after 1870. Whatever the case, it is now well-established that a small but steady stream of immigrants was flowing into St. Thomas, Danish West Indies in the early 1870's.

If the later date is correct, Camps could scarcely have had any contact with the group, but even if the earlier one is, he would have had very little opportunity to learn their language. In addition, the language known to him was spoken by ‘a considerable part of the city population of St. Thomas’ (Van Name, p. 126), whereas the creole speaking immigrants from St. Barthélemy are almost entirely rural (Goodman ibid; Highfield, p. 16-7). Finally, the two creoles, though similar, show significant linguistic differences (Goodman ibid.).

Clearly, some form of creole French, now extinct, must have been spoken in St. Thomas before the arrival of the St. Barthelemy immigrants. When and how did it originate? St. Thomas was permanently colonized by Denmark in 1672, and from the start various European nationalities were represented there. The principal ones recorded in the earliest census (1688) were Dutch, English, Danish, and French (Knox 1850: 59). The latter were Hugenots from St. Christofer (St. Kitts) and perhaps other French Caribbean islands, who left after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 (ibid. p. 58). Although they probably brought some slaves with them, the nineteenth century

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creole cannot be traced back to this group. The community was still active in 1718, but by the mid-nineteenth century (about the time Camps arrived) all trace of it had been lost, and its few descendants were connected with the Reformed Dutch and Lutheran churches (ibid., p. 160).

Oldendorp, a Moravian missionary who lived in St. Thomas in 1767-8 described the language situation there at the time (p. 262). Creole Dutch was used by the slaves and those who had dealings with them. Most locally-born whites knew it, but the English rarely learned it, and their slaves had to adjust accordingly. English and High German were widely spoken and Spanish was important for foreign trade. The Dutch, Danes, and French¹ each spoke their own language among themselves. Oldendorp was aware of the existence of various Caribbean creoles based on different European languages, and he observed that many slaves of English masters in St. Croix had been brought from English islands and thus spoke creole English (p. 424). Yet he said nothing about a distinctive creolized form of French used in the Danish islands. It seems likely, therefore, that the language was introduced sometime between his visit and the arrival of Camps more that eighty years later. The following account by Knox (p. 90-1) offers an obvious explanation.

From the year 1792, a great change commenced in the commercial prosperity of the island... The neutral port attracted hundreds from Europe and the other West Indian Islands, who now crowded in to enjoy its advantages. So great was the strife to share in these, that from the year 1792 to 1801, no less than fifteen hundred and sixty-nine strangers had enrolled themselves as citizens... With the influx of foreigners... the town extended in every direction, and was supposed in 1799 to contain over seven thousand inhabitants. Many of these were refugees from St. Domingo.

However, linguistic evidence (discussed below) suggests that refugees from the French Lesser Antilles were also present in significant numbers and contributed at least as much as the Haitians to the distinctive St. Thomas dialect.

The French Revolution brought enormous internal as well as external conflict not merely to Haiti, but to the entire French Caribbean and even to the former French colonies of Dominica, Grenada, and St. Vincent, which had been English since 1763 but where a large French creole population still lived. Inhabitants from any and all of these areas might have sought refuge in St. Thomas. Unfortunately, however, no detailed information is available, but an examination of the St. Thomas dialect (based on Van Name's rather limited data) can throw some light on the question.²

The demonstrative cé (Fr. ce) is preposed to the noun which need not be followed by the postposed definite article la (e.g. cé liv ‘this book’). In all other varieties of New World creole French the demonstrative normally follows the noun except in French Guiana (e.g. sa liv la ‘this/that book’). Here the postposed article la is obligatory if the demonstrative is used, as is generally the case in creole French. However, few if any immigrants are likely to have come to St. Thomas from that underpopulated and relatively distant area. A more likely source is a Haitian construction labeled a Gallicism by Hall (1953, p. 33) ‘sé-momâ-la “that moment”; pâda-sé-tâ “during this time”.’ The plural marker is postposed yo la (yo is the 3rd plural pronoun) but if cé is used the article la is omitted, thus liv yo la ‘the books’ but cé liv yo ‘these books’. Haitian seems to be the source in this case also, but there are some differences from present day varieties, where only postposed yo (without la) or la yo are found, the former in the central and northern areas, the latter in the south and Jacmel (Orjala, p. 37). It is possible that yo la was used in some of these areas ca. 1800 (more likely those which now use

1 It is possible that at least some of these were descended from the original Huguenot immigrants. On the other hand, they might have been part of the Catholic community in St. Thomas, which was attested as early as 1754 (Knox, p. 155).

2 All of the examples cited preserve the orthography of the source (e.g. Van Name's quasi-etymological spelling, the McConnell-Laubach system followed by Hall, etc.). Where no source is indicated a phonemic transcription has been used (see Goodman, p. 20). Likewise, the translations and grammatical definitions of the various sources have been given without attempting to reinterpret them according to contemporary views. All page references unless otherwise specified are to Van Name.

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yo alone), but it is not attested. The indefinite article in St. Thomas is yon and the numeral ‘one’ is yone (p. 131), as in northern Haitian and much of Antillean creole as well.

The personal pronouns are: singular; 1) mo (all contexts), 2) ou, 3) li, plural; 1) nou, 2) ou or zott, 3) yo. These could just as well be of Haitian or Antillean origin. Today mo is restricted to French Guiana (in all contexts) and to Louisiana and Mauritius (as subject and preposed possessive only), but none of these is likely to have any direct influence on the St. Thomas dialect. However, mo is recorded both as subject and object in an early work, Ducoeur-Joly (1802), which was evidently based on the northern Haitian dialect (Cap Haitien) of that period. The same form was probably once used in Antillean also, since Martinique has mõ and mã (in subject position) as alternatives to the more general form mwẽ (Goodman, p. 34) and once used to ‘2nd singular’ (now obsolete in the Caribbean dialects)³ in all positions (Goodman, p. 36). The possessives (whether nouns or pronouns) are postposed without the connective a, which is confined to Guadeloupe and northern Haiti. The independent possessive (i.e. ‘mine’ etc.) is expressed in two ways, pa mo or cela mo (p. 138). The former is found throughout Haiti except the north, which today uses kin-a-m etc., recorded as tien a toué ‘yours’ by Ducoeur-Joly (p. 352) during the colonial period. Apparently, therefore, most Haitians in St. Thomas were from non-northern areas, perhaps from Port-au-Prince. The latter, on the other hand, is confined today to Trinidad and Grenada but may once have been more widespread. The current construction in Martinique and Guadeloupe is ta mwẽ etc. (a reanalysis of French c'est à moi), but it is possible this is a Martinican innovation which originated in prestigious urban speech and subsequently spread throughout the island and to Guadeloupe as well. Both St. Lucia and Dominica, which were permanently colonized from Martinique during the first half of the eighteenth century, use sa mwẽ, which is more closely related to the Grenadian and Trinidadian sla mwẽ. These forms, therefore, might have been common in Guadeloupe and even Martinique at the end of the eighteenth century. The use of ta rather than sa or sla as a demonstrative in Martinique (but nowhere else) might have originated as a hypercorrection based on the (unconscious) reasoning that if ta mwe is ‘superior’ to sa mwẽ or sla mwe (when these various forms were in competition), then liv ta la ‘that book’ is ‘superior’ to the synonymous liv sa la or liv sla la.

Of the preposed tense/aspect markers two are clearly of Antillean rather than Haitian origin: ca ‘repeated and habitual as well as progressive action’ (p. 143) and callé (ca allé) ‘future’ (p. 145), which is infrequent today but well attested in early sources (Jourdain, p. 144-5). The remainder, for the most part, could just as well be from Haitian or Antillean: te ‘pluperfect’; a/va ‘future’ (an alternative to calle), still current in Haitian and well attested in early Antillean sources (Goodman, p. 86); se ‘conditional’ (<French serait), still current in Antillean and recorded as seré in early Haitian (Goodman, p. 88). The St. Thomas past conditional sé va and té va also occur according to Van Name (p. 145) in Trinidad, presumably based on his only source for that dialect, J.J. Thomas (1869), but they are no longer used there. The latter, contracted to ta, is attested in another early Antillean source (Marbot 1846: 28) and is still current in Haitian (Sylvain, p. 87).

In vocabulary as well as morphology the St. Thomas dialect shows both Haitian and Antillean influence. The word for ‘thing’ bitin (p. 149) French butin ‘loot’ is otherwise found only in Guadeloupe: in the rest of the Lesser Antilles as well as in Haiti bagay (<French bagage) is used. This item therefore provides strong evidence that Guadeloupeans were proportionally numerous in St. Thomas. On the other hand, the word for ‘child’ is pitite (p. 136) as in Haitian; throughout Antillean it is (y)is Spanish hijo/hija. Two common verbs have alternate forms, gagné (<Haitian) vs. tini (<Antillean) ‘have’ and capabe

3 Here the term Antillean refers to all varieties of creole French spoken in the Lesser Antilles (i.e. Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, Grenada, Trinidad, etc.) and Caribbean creole includes both Haitian and Antillean.

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(<Haitian) vs. pé (< Antillean) ‘can’. However, ‘sit’ (p. 142) is recorded as assise (as in Martinique) or sizé (as in Guadeloupe), whereas the Haitian equivalents, sinta and variants (< Spanish asienta), apparently do not occur. In those relatively few cases where Haitian and Antillean have selected different inflected forms of the same French verb, St. Thomas creole tends to follow the latter, e.g. connaite ‘know’ (<Fr. connaître and couvè (Fr. couvert) vs. Haitian kôn(ê) (<French connaît) and kouvri (<Fr. couvrir) (Hall, p. 241-2). On the other hand, the St. Thomas adverb ennique ‘only’ (p. 148) is like Haitian ânik (Hall, p. 225) rather than the Antillean ani (Jourdain, p. 169); evidently from English only.⁴ Van Name (ibid) attributes both âni and ânique to Martinique (but I have only found evidence of the former in Antillean creole), ôni to Trinidad, and necque to Haitian (probably < French n'est que / n'ai que). The current Haitian form may have originated as a blend of ãni and nek, perhaps also influenced by French unique, although Sylvain (p. 149) attributed it to an Amerindian source auniq, but without any documentation or further specification.

In resumé, it seems clear that immigrants from various French Caribbean colonies settled in St. Thomas during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Haitians (probably including many from Port-au-Prince) and Antilleans (evidently including many from Guadeloupe) were both well represented. By the mid-nineteenth century, their distinct yet similar and largely mutually intelligible dialects had merged into a single fairly uniform language, selecting different features from these diverse sources. Ultimately it became extinct, but there must have been some who still knew it even during the early years of this century.

4 There are a few other anglicisms common to all varieties of Caribbean creole French - bway ‘boy’, gyal ‘girl’ (used pejoratively), saybot ‘sideboard’, and perhaps tu ‘too’, though a French dialectal origin has also been suggested (Faine, p. 258).

References

Ducoeur-Joly, S.J., 1802: Manuel des habitans de Saint-Dominque. Paris, Chez

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Lenoir.

Faine, Jules, 1936: Philologie créole, etc. Port-au-Prince, Impr. de l'Etut.

Goodman, Morris F., 1964: A Comparative Study of Creole French Dialects. The Hague, Mouton & Co.

Hall, Robert A. Jr., et al, 1953: Haitian Creole: Grammar-Texts-Vocabulary. Philadelphia, American Folklore Society.

Hesseling, Dirk Christiaan, 1979: Papiamentu and Negerhollands, in On the Origin and Formation of Creoles: A Miscellany of Articles by D.C. Hesseling, edited and translated by T.L. Markey and Paul T. Roberge. Ann Arbor, Karoma Publishers, Inc.

Highfield, Arnold R., 1979: The French dialect of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Ann Arbor, Karoma Publishers, Inc.

Jourdain, Elodie, 1956: Du francais aux parlers créoles. Paris, Librarie Klincksieck.

Knox, John P., 1852: A Historical Account of St. Thomas, W.I. New York, Charles Scribner.

Marbot, Francois-Achille, 1931: Les bambous: fables de La Fontaine, travesties en patois martiniquais. Paris, J. Peyronnet & Cie. [original edition 1846].

Oldendorp, C.G.A., 1777: Geschichte der Mission der evangelischen Brueder auf den caraibischen Inseln S. Thomas, S. Croix und S. Jan. Barby, Christian Friedrich Laur.

Orjala, Paul R., 1970: A dialect survey of Haitian Creole. The Hartford Seminary Foundation, unpubl. Ph. D. diss.

Sylvain, Suzanne, 1936: Le créole haïtien, morphologie et syntaxe. Port-au-Prince: chez l'auteur.

Thomas, J.J., 1869: The theory and practice of Creole grammar. Port-of-Spain, The Chronicle Publishing Office.

Van Name, Addison, 1869/70: Contribution to Creole grammar, Transactions of the American Philological Association. 1: 123-67.