History
Knowledge of Pidgin Delaware subsequently spread to speakers of Swedish, and later from Swedes to Englishmen, and was used beyond the immediate area where the pidgin originated. It is most likely that Swedes learned Pidgin Delaware from Dutch speakers; for examples, one of the early Swedish expeditions to the Delaware area had a Dutch interpreter. Similarly, succeeding English groups learned Pidgin from Swedes; Pennsylvania founder William Penn's interpreter Lars Petersson Crock was Swedish. Pidgin Delaware was used by both Munsee and Unami Delawares in interactions with speakers of Dutch, Swedish, and English. Some non-Delaware users of the pidgin were under the impression that they were speaking true Delaware. Material cited by William Penn as being from a Delaware language is in fact from Delaware Pidgin, and he was apparently unaware of the difference between real Delaware and Pidgin Delaware. Patterns of usage, involving both Munsee and Unami Delaware, as well as separate groups of Europeans, attests to a widespread and persistent use of Delaware Pidgin as a medium of communication for speakers of Dutch, Swedish, and English, as well as Unami- and Munsee-speaking Delawares.Derivation
Recordings of Pidgin Delaware suggest that Pidgin words originated from both Northern and Southern Unami. Although the best-known early Dutch settlement was New Netherland, on Manhattan Island, which is in Munsee Delaware territory, Pidgin Delaware has Unami vocabulary almost exclusively, with no terms that can be ascribed solely to Munsee. Even recordings of Pidgin Delaware that were clearly made in Munsee territory have Unami characteristics.Goddard, Ives, 1995, p. 139 The first permanent Dutch settlement in New Jersey was Fort Nassau (on the site of modern Gloucester City). Settlers to an earlier and short-lived factorij at Fort Wilhelmus arrived there in 1624 were subsequently removed to Manhattan between November 1626 and October 1628. Goddard, Ives, 1997, pp. 81–82 Both of these locations are in traditional Unami Delaware territory. The origins of Delaware Pidgin must originate in the earliest contacts between Dutch settlers and Unami Delaware speakers at those locations.Sources
The first recorded mention of Pidgin Delaware dates from 1628, while the final recorded mention is from 1785. There are two main sources of Pidgin Delaware material. Swedish Lutheran ministerGrammar
Pidgin Delaware is characterized by its extreme simplification of the intricate grammatical features of Unami nouns and verbs, with no use of the complex inflectional morphology that Unami uses to convey grammatical information.Goddard, Ives, 1997, p. 57 Morphologically complex words are replaced by sequences of separate words. In cases where a Pidgin word is based on a Unami word that contains more than one morpheme, it can be argued in all cases that the word is treated in the Pidgin as a single unanalysable unit.Goddard, Ives, 1997, p. 58 The Unami distinction between singular and plural inflection of nouns and verbs is eliminated. The pronominal categories, which are extensively marked in Unami with prefixes on nouns and verbs, as well as through the system ofTreatment of gender
A central concept in the Delaware languages, and in all other Algonquian languages is the distinction made between the two grammatical genders, animate and inanimate. Every noun in Unami and Munsee is categorized as either animate or inanimate. Gender does not always correspond to biological categories. All living entities are animate, but so are items such as tobacco pipes, bows, nails, potatoes, and others. Nouns agree in gender with other words in a sentence. For example, the form of a transitive verb will vary depending upon the gender of the grammatical object. The Unami verb for 'I saw it' has the form ''nné·mən'' if the grammatical object is inanimate (e.g. a knife, pumpkin, water) but the form ''nné·yɔ'' if the object is a ball, an apple, or snow. Demonstrative pronouns also agree in gender with the noun they are in construction with, so that ''wá'' (with emphatic form ''wán'') means 'this' referring to animate nouns, such as man, peach, kettle); ''yə́'' (emphatic form ''yó·n'' or ''yó·ni'') also means 'this', referring to inanimate nouns such as stone, pumpkin, or boat.Goddard, Ives, 1999, p. 67 In the Pidgin grammatical gender is not distinguished anywhere. The pronoun ''yó·n'' in Pidgin Delaware is used for any demonstrative use as well as the third person pronoun; hence the meaning can be interpreted as 'he', 'she', 'it', 'they', 'this', 'that', 'these', and 'those'. In the treatment of verbs, Pidgin Delaware typically uses the form a verb specialized for inanimate gender, regardless of the gender of the entity being referred to. Unami uses the verb ''wələ́su'' 'be good, pretty' to refer to anything that is classified as animate in gender (e.g. a person, animal), and the corresponding verb ''wələ́t'' 'be good, pretty' to refer to anything that is classified as inanimate (e.g. a house, gun). Pidgin Delaware only uses the inanimate form regardless of the gender of the referent; the word is typically represented as orthographic ''orit'' or ''olit''. Hence the Pidgin expression 'good friend' occurs as ''orit nietap'', with ''nietap'' being the Pidgin word for 'friend'. The same pattern holds for transitive verbs as well. Learning the patterns of when to use animate and inanimate forms of verbs and pronouns would be very difficult for Europeans to learn since there are no overt cues to help learners decide whether nouns are animate or inanimate. It is likely that the most difficult point would come from nouns such as 'snow' or 'tobacco' which are not biologically alive but count as grammatically animate in gender. Goddard proposes that the strikingly consistent use of inanimate forms, rather than a mixture of animate or inanimate, derives from a systematic strategy adapted by native Delaware speakers to simplify their language when addressing Europeans by employing the inanimate as a default, presumably triggered by the erroneous use of inanimate forms of verbs and pronouns with nouns that are animate in gender but not logically animate. Comments by Jonas Michaëlis, an early observer, suggest that Delaware speakers deliberately simplified their language to facilitate communication with the small numbers of Dutch settlers and traders they encountered in the 1620s. The same observer also notes that when the Delaware talked among themselves, their language was incomprehensible to Dutch speakers who were otherwise able to communicate with the Delaware using the Pidgin, strongly suggesting that the Delawares reserved the full Delaware language for themselves and used the simplified Pidgin when addressing Europeans. Delaware Pidgin appears to show no grammatical influence at all from Dutch or other European languages, contrary to the general patterns occurring in pidgin languages, according to which a European contributing language will constitute a significant component of the pidgin. Delaware Pidgin also appears to be unusual among pidgin languages in that almost all its vocabulary appears to come from the language spoken by the Delaware users of the Pidgin, with virtually none coming from European users. The relatively few Pidgin Delaware words that are not from Unami likely were borrowings mediated through Unami or Munsee or other languages.Other Algonquian pidgin languages
Pidgin Delaware is only one of a number of pidgin languages that arose on the Atlantic coast due to contact between speakers of Algonquian languages and Europeans.Goddard, Ives, 1977 Although records are fragmentary, it is clear that many Indians used varieties of pidginized English, and there are also recorded fragments of aSee also
* Mohawk DutchReferences
Sources
* Goddard, Ives. 1977. "Some early examples of American Indian Pidgin English from New England." ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 43: 37–41. * Goddard, Ives. 1997. "Pidgin Delaware." Sarah G. Thomason, ed., ''Contact Languages: A Wider Perspective,'' pp. 43–98. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. * Goddard, Ives. 1999. "The use of pidgins and jargons on the east coast of North America." Edward R. Gray and Norman Fiering, eds., ''The Language Encounter in the Americas, '' pp. 61–78. New York: Berghahn Books. {{Refend Native American history of Delaware North America Native-based pidgins and creoles Languages attested from the 17th century 17th-century establishments in North America Languages extinct in the 17th century 17th-century disestablishments in North America Dutch language in the United States