Guene language

Pre-Dutch Curaçao

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the island of Curaçao was inhabited by Caiquetio Indians who were speakers of an Arawakan language.^[6] Although the island was encountered by Spanish expeditions as early as 1499,^[6] Spanish settlement did not begin until 1527.^[9] During the Spanish period, which lasted until 1634, African slaves were not imported to Curaçao and Spanish and Caquetio were the languages of the island.^[9]

The Portuguese slave trade and the development of Afro-Portuguese pidgins and creoles

During the 15th century, Portuguese mariners gradually explored the west coast of Africa and its offshore islands. As part of this process, the Portuguese set up outposts in locations such as Cape Verde, A Mina (modern day Elmina in Ghana) and Sao Tomé. These depots were nuclei of Portuguese culture, and soon became hubs for the exportation of enslaved Africans to Portugal and Spain.^[6] From 1510 onwards, enslaved Africans were transported to the Spanish colonies in the Americas, initially from Spain but later directly from the Portuguese enclaves in Africa.^[6]

In the Portuguese settlements, which soon developed into forts, the lançados, Portuguese who settled in Africa and had children with local women, played an important role.^[6] A Portuguese pidgin grew up in these outposts, combining Portuguese vocabulary with grammatical features of African languages.^[6] Scholars disagree on whether this pidgin was the source of all the Atlantic pidgins and creoles.^[10] However, it is certain that children soon began speaking the pidgin as their native language, creating a creole language or languages.^[7][10]

As early as the 15th century, a Portuguese Creole became the main spoken language in Cape Verde, which had been uninhabited prior to Portuguese colonisation and importation of African slaves, and was soon also a significant dialect in what would become modern day Guinea-Bissau.^[7] In the slave entrepôt of Mina in Ghana, African languages rather than creole remained dominant, but a Portuguese pidgin was widely used.^[7] Both the Mina pidgin and the Upper Guinea creoles were likely significant influences on Guene.^[2][7]

Dutch Curaçao

In 1634, the Dutch captured Curaçao from the Spanish and expelled all of the island's inhabitants except for 75 Caquetio people.^[9] Following the 1648 peace treaty between Spain and The Netherlands, Curaçao became a depot for the importation of enslaved Africans.^[6] Due to the island's arid climate, it was unsuitable for large scale plantation agriculture, and the majority of imported slaves were sold on to Spanish colonies in the West Indies and on the Caribbean coast of America.^[6] Nevertheless, a large enslaved population grew up in Curaçao, and enslaved Africans were also exported from the island to work in the salt pans of Bonaire.^[6] It is likely that the majority of these forced African immigrants spoke an Afro-Portuguese creole or pidgin as a first or second language.^[8] Guene most likely developed from these pidgins and creoles.^[2][7]

The arrival of the Dutch allowed Portuguese-speaking Sephardic Jews, descended from Jews expelled from Portugal and Spain, to migrate to Curaçao.^[8] Many prominent Dutch slave traders were of Sephardic origin, and many Jewish families arrived in Curaçao when they were expelled from the short-lived Dutch colony at Recife by the Portuguese.^[8] The Sephardic immigrants from Brazil brought with them enslaved people alongside non-Jewish dependents, and the Creole speech of these groups may have influenced the development of Guene.^[8] The importation of enslaved people to Curaçao ceased in 1788, by which time the island's main language was Papiamento, another creole with some Portuguese influence.^[8][6]

Oral history collected in the 20th century suggests that Guene had been used and maintained as a secret language, in order to allow the enslaved to converse without slave owners understanding.^[4][2][8] The descendants of Guene speakers state that use of the language was banned by plantation owners for this reason.^[11] This use of Guene as a cryptolect continued during the 19th century, even after the abolition of slavery in 1863.^[3][12]

Extinction and recording

Guene was spoken as a community language or at least as a cryptolect well into the 19th century.^[12][4] However, there is no evidence of a community of fluent Guene speakers surviving into the early 20th century, though some individual speakers may have remained.^[4]

Despite the death of Guene, Elis Juliana and Paul Brenneker collected a body of songs, sayings and folklore, either in Guene or containing Guene phrases, during the 1960s.^[5] Some of their informants still had some understanding of some of the material.^[5] The collected folkloric material, in both Papiamento and Guene, are housed in the Zikinzá foundation in Willemstad, and were published in a series of books by Brenneker entitled Sambumbu.^[3] These archives allowed linguistic studies of the language by Curaçaoan academic Frank Martinus.^[2][8]

According to academic Richenel Ansano, Guene song-master Martili Pieters (1901-2000)^[11] is the only direct informant on the language to state they personally knew a fluent Guene-speaker.^[4] One of Pieters' song teachers spoke Guene with his elderly mother who would not, or could not, speak Papiamento.^[4] Accounts of people still alive in the 1980s attest that, around the 1920s, Afro-Curaçaoans sang work songs in Guene, which the singers understood but which were incomprehensible to their Papiamento-speaking bosses.^[3] According to the accounts, these workers valued the cryptic nature of Guene.^[3] Pieters was still composing songs using Guene vocabulary in the 1950s.^[4]

Folk songs in Guene, often versions of those collected by Brenneker in the 1960s, were still being sung in the early 21st century. However, Rose Mary Allen stated that those singing the songs were unable to translate them into Papiamento.^[11]