The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics

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substratum language is Ijo, a west African language group whose nine languages are
spoken by about two million people. A series of historical accidents allowed the language
to survive through the twentieth century, but as of 1990, the latest date for which I could
find accurate data, there were only three known speakers remaining. In addition, then, to
being a typologically rare language, it is also a highly endangered (if not extinct) one.
To get an idea of how Berbice Dutch Creole (henceforth BDC) speakers used spatial
vocabulary, I looked at about 100 descriptions of spatial locations culled from texts.
These texts consisted of stories recorded between 1986 and 1990 from a variety of elderly
speakers of the language. Topics ranged widely from memories to folktales to small talk.
Spatial descriptions in these texts were coded for the Berbice Dutch Creole preposition
used and its English equivalent.
It is worth noting briefly that Berbice Dutch Crole has both prepositions and
postpositions, but that all of the spatial relations of interest are expressed with
postpositions.
Berbice Dutch Creole Postposition English Preposition(s)
anga / hogang in
atr ɛ / atr ə / atri
after, back, behind, following
ben in, inside, into, on, (no equivalent)
bof head, on, on top, top
bofu up, upriver
faro ahead
for before, front, in front, over