Papiamento

Where Papiamento came from

Its parent is West Iberian Romance, and its base is largely the Portuguese of the 15th and 16th centuries, with heavy later influence from Dutch and Spanish. Which came first is disputed. Most linguists now trace it to the Portuguese creoles of the West African coast, since it shares pronouns such as mi, bo and nos with Cape Verdean and Guinea-Bissau Creole. Bart Jacobs argues that it is an offshoot of an early Upper Guinea creole brought from Senegambia to Curaçao in the second half of the 17th century, when the Dutch held Gorée off Senegal. A rival theory has it forming on the islands from a Portuguese-African pidgin.

The Dutch West India Company took the islands in 1634 and made them a hub of the slave trade. Sephardic Jews, many from Portugal, Spain and Brazil, later carried on much of the islands' trade in Papiamento. Spanish pressed in from the 18th century, when island schools taught mainly in Spanish.

Which texts show Papiamento earliest

The oldest surviving text is a letter of 1775 from Abraham Andrade about a family meeting in Curaçao. A letter of 1783 and an affidavit of 1803, signed by 26 Aruban farm workers, follow it. The first printed book, the Catecismo Corticu of 1837, was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2009, and the first newspaper, Civilisadó, appeared in 1871.

Why Aruba writes o and Curaçao writes u

The islands settled on two spellings in the 1970s. Curaçao and Bonaire adopted the phonetic Römer-Maduro-Jonis spelling in 1976; Aruba approved a spelling closer to word origins in 1977. So many words end in o on Aruba and in u on the other islands, and Aruban c is k elsewhere. The two dialects also differ in some vocabulary and in intonation.

Official status came island by island. Aruba granted it in May 2003 and the Netherlands Antilles in March 2007, and when the Antilles were dissolved on 10 October 2010 the status was confirmed for the Caribbean Netherlands.