My research interests focus on outcomes of language contact in various types of language contact settings in the past and the present.
Extreme kinds of language contact can result in the emergence of new languages, such as pidgins, creoles a mixed or intertwined languages, that are only partly based on the languages in contact. Many languages that are known as pidgins and creoles emerged from prolonged contact between African and European languages in the Caribbean and the Americas in the long 18th century, when enslaved Africans were deported en masse to work on the sugar, coffee and cotton plantations.
Contrary to popular belief, these languages are in fact fully functional natural languages with a lexicon, a grammar and a set of language norms that regulate language use, identical to other languages that did not emerge from language contact in recent times. Within a contact linguistics perspective, creole languages are interesting as they demonstrate how people create new linguistic systems.
The Surinamese creole Sranantongo (Sranan) and the now extinct Dutch creole of the Virgins Islands, known as Negerhollands (endonym) as well as Virgin Islands Creole Dutch or simply Creol, are among the few creole languages that are documented in the earliest stages of their development. The historical sources are stored in the Suriname Creole Archive (SUCA) and the Negerhollands Database (NEHOL). They provide a unique window on these languages as they were developing. In my research I focus on questions such as the following: Which parts of the linguistic system develop early, which appear late(r)? Do we find traces in these languages of the different roles of locally-born children and foreign-born adults in the process of language formation? What types of cross-linguistic effects can be observed? In what ways are Sranantongo and Negerhollands similar/different? In general my research aims to provide new insights in the processes and factors that contribute to the emergence of new linguistic systems, including the interrelatedness of the social and linguistic lives of the people who create them.
Less extreme kinds of language contact are encountered in West Africa, although pidgins are also to be found. The same languages that contributed primarily to the emergence of Sranantongo in the long 18th century are in contact in West Africa in the present, that is the Akan and Gbe languages and English, giving. From 2010 onward I collected data on multilingual language practices in Ghana and Togo via semi-experimental elicitation techniques (Toy Task, TEMPEST, Elicikit) in collaboration with Evershed Amuzu (University of Ghana, Legon) and Komlan Essizewa (University of Lome, Togo) and students of their universities. The approach of my research, unlike that of many others in the field, has been to systematically collect the same type of data (using the same semi-experimental setup) in a range of different language contact settings. The data collected in 2010 suggested that there may be a relation between the degree of heterogeneity of the population of a particular setting, structural congruence of the languages in contact and the degree of language mixing and restructuring in the individual's language practices. In the following trips special efforts were made to collect data in different types of localities (+/- ethnically diverse; +/- congruent; +/- multilingual) in order to test this hypothesis. In addition to samples of mono- and multilingual language use from the national samples of mono- and multilingual language use from the regional capitals were added to the emerging database of multilingual language use practices in Ghana and Togo. Analysis of the data (van den Berg et al. 2012, submitted) support the hypothesis. This new line of inquiry enabled me to get a more detailed picture of the social and linguistic factors that contribute to language variation in Ghana and Togo, so that Akan- and/or Gbe-specific characteristics in language contact situations can be more easily detected in the Sranantongo and Negerhollands data.
By means of the same semi-experimental elicitation techniques as used in Ghana and Togo I currently collect data on varieties of Sranantongo of Surinamese and Dutch people of Surinamese descent as well as migrants from Ghana and Togo in the Netherlands.