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

Robin Sabino (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Auburn University interested in language contact, variation and change. Ongoing projects include exploration of variationist models, multilingualism, and development self-instructional materials for Tsalagi.

"Sabino’s investigation makes a strong case against the common practice 'of treating corpora from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century as a chronologically continuous … data set'. Drawing on data from various disciplines, Sabino convincingly argues in favor of distinguishing the language of the written records from Africans’ speech. [...] This study of the history of VIDC is not only of interest to researchers interested in Dutch creoles. It is a fine demonstration of how careful cross-disciplinary research can provide invaluable insights into the conditions, processes, and outcomes of language-contact situations past and present." - Bettina Migge, in: Language and Society 42: 5 (2013), 579-582