Language Contact in the Danish West Indies: Giving Jack His Jacket

"Language Contact in the Danish West Indies: Giving Jack His Jacket" lays bare crucial roles played by community and resistance in the refashioning of heritage languages. Robin Sabino draws on her community relationships, her fieldwork with a last speaker, and research from a range of disciplines, to advance a revisionist history that elucidates the African linguistic resources used to create community in a land those who were transhipped did not choose and from which they could not return. In parallel fashion, the narrative locates the partial appropriation of creole features by the colony s Euro-Caribbean community in the emergence of local identity. It also traces the replacement of Dutch and Virgin Islands Dutch Creole with their English counterparts.