NEHOL | CLARIN-NL

NEHOL: Negerhollands Database

Summary

Negerhollands, the now extinct Dutch-derived creole of the Virgins Islands, is unique in that there is a rich digitized corpus of historical as well as almost contemporary texts available that hardly have been studied. The language emerged around 1700 and the last known speaker died in 1987. This database contains a rich digitized corpus of historical as well as almost contemporary texts (1742-1936) in Negerhollands. These data were carefully edited and digitized in a previous NWO project. A considerable and representative part of the database is annotated, which enables the user to make advanced search queries.

Background

NEHOL is a digitally accessible and searchable database with the Dutch-lexifier Creole language Negerhollands, in the same format as the parallel SUCA (SUriname Creole Archive) corpus, coordinated by Margot van den Berg (Radboud University Nijmegen). The NEHOL project was coordinated by Pieter Muysken (Radboud University Nijmegen), and technically supported by the TLA (‘The Language Archive’) unit at the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.
The majority of the data included in the database have been digitalized and carefully edited in a previous NWO financed project from the first part of the ‘90s, carried out by Cefas van Rossem and Hein van der Voort. This mostly concerns the eighteenth and nineteenth century documents written by Moravian missionaries and discovered by dr. Peter Stein in the Archiv der Brüder-Unität in Herrnhut (Germany). Other documents digitalized in the previous project mainly consist of primers, hymn books and documents from the Danish Lutheran mission. This project also resulted in the publication of Die Creol Tael (Van Rossem & Van der Voort 1996), a comprehensive book discussing and exemplifying the broad variety of Negerhollands sources and their different varieties of the language.
All documents included in NEHOL have been checked with copies of the original manuscripts for errors, as it was not feasible to do this for all the data in the previous project. Additional sources have been digitalised for NEHOL, of which the 1926 publication by De Josselin de Jong, containing 58 pages of basilectal Negerhollands data plus a wordlist, is the most important. The main feature of NEHOL is that a considerable and representative part of the database is annotated, which enables the user to make advanced search queries. The annotations consist of three lines: 1) a morphological line, containing a standardised lemma for each lexical and functional item to overcome spelling variation in search queries; 2) a line with glosses, providing information on the meaning of content words and the grammatical properties of function words; 3) a line containing Part of speech tags

Contacts

Project leader: Prof. dr. P.C. Muysken (Radboud University)  
CLARIN center: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) and Meertens Institute
Help contact : http://tla.mpi.nl/contact/

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