Papiamentu is a creole language that was born during the slave trade era on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao. The slaves used the languages of their different European colonizers such as Spanish, Dutch, English or Portuguese and created a new hybrid form of communication. Since then, Papiamentu has been the native language of the islanders. But Bonarians are also well known for being multilingual, they can easily switch between four languages. Today, their native language is thriving in new ways as new-coming immigrants are starting to learn it. In this documentary we will travel to the furthermost part of The Netherlands to discover the stories behind new speakers of Papiamentu on the island of Bonaire.
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Victor is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker based in Barcelona, Spain. He spent his first academic years studying migrants moving to Iceland who were learning Icelandic, researching on their motivations to learn this language and their experiences using it with native Icelanders. During his Master specialization in Visual Ethnography at Leiden University he has brought his research topic to the audio-visual format and to a different location, by filming a documentary about new speakers of Papiamentu on the island of Bonaire (Caribbean Netherlands). At the moment he is about to start his PhD at Autonomous University of Barcelona, where he expects to create an academic methodology to research the topic of language learners combining written and audio-visual formats.
