African ethnolinguistic diversity in the colonial Caribbean: The case of the eighteenth-century Danish West Indies

Abstract

This study reconstructs a profile of the ethnolinguistic groups originating in Africa represented in the eighteenth-century Danish West Indies (i.e., St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix, today's US Virgin Islands), based on triangulation of four bodies of direct and indirect evidence of African languages in the colony. I analyze i) data on the recorded slave trade to the colony; ii) data on 26 African languages collected in peer-group interviews conducted in the late 1760s by the German Moravian missionary and historian C.G.A. Oldendorp, with an estimated 70 enslaved individuals on St. Thomas and St. Croix; iii) data on the "nations" (i.e., approximate ethnic backgrounds) represented in a sample of 418 Christianized Africans and African Caribbeans of the Moravian congregation on St. Thomas, recorded in 1753 by the missionary Nathanael Seidel; and iv) baptismal records from 1744–1832 collected by the Moravians on St. Croix, featuring systematic information on more than 6,000 baptismal candidates of African descent. The results show that a wide range of languages were spoken within the enslaved population. In addition, a number of differences are identified in the distribution of groups and their proportions between St. Thomas and St. Croix. The findings, I argue, have implications by extension for contact linguistics more generally, shedding new light on the sociohistorical settings characterizing high-contact sites in the circum-Caribbean region.