Listen to Papiamento as a Spanish speaker and you understand every third word. Then the sentence goes somewhere you didn’t expect.
It’s the creole language of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire, the ABC islands of the Dutch Caribbean, spoken by some 323,000 people. Most of its vocabulary comes from Portuguese, then Spanish, with Dutch, English, French, African and Arawak languages mixed in. But it isn’t a dialect of anything: it has its own grammar, quite far from modern Spanish.
It was born as a contact language between enslaved Africans, Portuguese speakers, Sephardic Jews and Dutch colonists, and became a mother tongue. The oldest known text is a 1775 letter written by a Jewish man from Curaçao. The name comes from papia, “to speak”.
Official in Aruba since 2003 and in Curaçao and Bonaire since 2007. And even the spelling is split: Curaçao and Bonaire write it phonetically and call it Papiamentu; Aruba uses an etymological spelling, closer to Spanish, and calls it Papiamento.
Three islands, two spellings, one language.