The Dutch linguist Silvia Kouwenberg subsequently investigated the creole language, publishing its grammar in 1994, and numerous other works examining its formation and uses.
A few years later, Suriname was settled by Englishmen Lord Willoughby and Lawrence Hyde under a grant from the English King, Charles II.
These plantations created close contact between numerous language groups as slaves were transported in from surrounding areas.
Due to Berbice's relatively small size, they would use undesirable slaves as they were cheaper,[6] leading to a single language coming over from Africa, though in multiple varieties.
[7] As missionaries and enslaved people from Barbados arrived, this new Creole gained popularity and Berbice Dutch started to disappear.
For the next century, small groups of multi-lingual mixed heritage people continued to live in the original location up-river and spoke Berbice Dutch.
The last known Berbice Dutch Creole speaker was Albertha Bell, who was 103 years old when last interviewed by Ian Robertson and a UWI linguistics research team in March 2004.
In February 2010, the language was declared officially extinct, according to an article in the March issue of the Dutch edition of National Geographic magazine.
'The suffix -di is added for emphasis: ɛkɛ1SGpama-tɛtell-PFVɛkɛ-di1SG-EMPHjɛrmawoman[...][...]ɛkɛ pama-tɛ ɛkɛ-di jɛrma [...]1SG tell-PFV 1SG-EMPH woman [...]'I told my wife [...]'The 1st and 2nd person forms and the empathic marker di are of Dutch origin, while the nominalizer jɛ and the 3rd person forms o, ori and enilini are from Eastern Ijo.