A grammatical and graphematic comparison of five Creole primers from the Danish West Indies (1770–1825), with a preliminary phonemic inventory

This article offers a grammatical and graphematic comparison of the five known language primers (ABC books) in Virgin Islands Dutch Creole, including a newly discovered primer from 1782 (Anonymous 1782), along with a preliminary phonemic inventory based on these primers. The earliest primers are Kingo (1770) and Wold (1770), followed by the anonymous 1782 primer. Two later primers, from 1800 and 1825, are analyzed together, since they present two identical editions of the same text. The first three primers were produced by Lutheran Danish missionaries and printed either in St. Croix or Copenhagen, while the latter two were produced by the German Moravian Brethren and printed in Germany. The grammatical comparison, based on 17 selected features, aims to position the primers between Dutch, as the main lexifier of the language, and 20th-century Creole, as the final stage of its development. The findings suggest that the primers represent an intermediate stage with a closer affinity to 20th-century Creole than to Dutch. The graphematic analysis examines the primers’ alignment with 18th-century Dutch spelling conventions. The results indicate that the Lutheran primers exhibit less alignment with 18th-century Dutch orthographic norms compared to the Moravian primers, which, in turn, display more Danish influence. Finally, the preliminary inventory of the phoneme system points to a strong connection with (Zealandic) Dutch in all the primers.