[4] The language, spelled Papiamento in Aruba and Papiamentu in Bonaire and Curaçao, is largely based on Portuguese as spoken in the 15th and 16th centuries, and has been influenced considerably by Dutch and Venezuelan Spanish.

Due to lexical similarities between Portuguese and Spanish, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of some words.

An example of a hybrid word is verfdó, which is a combination of a Dutch root verf (meaning 'paint') and the Portuguese and Spanish suffix -dor (used for a person who performs an action, like 'painter').

The transformation from verver to verfdó involved changing the -dor to -dó due to a linguistic process called apocopation.

[9] The name of the language itself originates from papia, from Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole papear ("to chat, say, speak, talk"), added by the noun-forming suffix -mento.

In 1634, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) took possession of the islands, deporting most of the small remaining Arawak and Spanish population to the continent (mostly to the Venezuelan west coast and the Venezuelan plains, as well as all the way east to the Venezuela Orinoco basin and Trinidad), and turned them into the hub of the Dutch slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean.

In the 19th century, most materials in the islands were written in Papiamento including Roman Catholic school books and hymnals.

Another theory is that Papiamento first evolved from the use in the region since 1499 of 'lenguas' and the first repopulation of the ABC Islands by the Spanish by the Cédula real decreed in November 1525 in which Juan Martinez de Ampués, factor of Española, had been granted the right to repopulate the depopulated Islas inútiles of Oroba, Islas de los Gigantes, and Buon Aire.

The evolution of Papiamento continued under the Dutch colonisation under the influence of 16th-century Dutch, Portuguese (Brazilian) and Native American languages (Arawak and Taíno), with the second repopulation of the ABC islands with immigrants who arrived from the ex-Dutch Brazilian colonies.

The Judaeo-Portuguese population of the ABC islands increased substantially after 1654, when the Portuguese recovered the Dutch-held territories in Northeast Brazil, causing most Portuguese-speaking Jews and their Portuguese-speaking Dutch allies and Dutch-speaking Portuguese Brazilian allies in those lands to flee from religious persecution.

Many early residents of Curaçao were Sephardic Jews from Portugal, Spain, Cape Verde or Portuguese Brazil.

The Jewish community became the prime merchants and traders in the area and so business and everyday trading was conducted in Papiamento.

[7] Since there was a continuous Latinisation process (Hoetink, 1987), even the elite Dutch-Protestant settlers eventually communicated better in Spanish than in Dutch, as a wealth of local Spanish-language publications in the 19th century testify.

According to this theory, Papiamento was derived from one or more of these older creoles or their predecessors, which were brought to the ABC islands by slaves and traders from Cape Verde and West Africa.

The similarity between Papiamento and the other Afro-Portuguese creoles can be seen in the same pronouns used, mi, bo, el, nos, bos(o), being Portuguese-based.

Guene (the name comes from "Guinea") was a secret language that was used by slaves on the plantations of the landhouses of West Curaçao.

Since the late 1990s, research has been done that shines light on the ties between Papiamento and Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole.

In Bart Jacob's study The Upper Guinea Origins of Papiamento[17][page needed] he defends the hypothesis that Papiamento is a relexified offshoot of an early Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole variety that was transferred from Senegambia to Curaçao in the second half of the 17th century, when the Dutch controlled the island of Gorée, a slave trading stronghold off the coast of Senegal.

Despite the changes, the morphosyntactic framework of Papiamento is still remarkably close to that of the Upper Guinea Creoles of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.

[19][page needed] Papiamento is spoken in all aspects of society throughout Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire.

Many immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean choose to learn Papiamento because it is more practical in daily life on the islands.

[23] The first opera in Papiamento, adapted by Carel De Haseth [nl] from his novel Katibu di Shon, was performed at the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam on 1 July 2013, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the ending of slavery in the Dutch Caribbean.

[26] It was sent by the Sephardic Jew Abraham Andrade to his mistress Sarah Vaz Parro, about a family meeting in the centre of Curaçao.

Bida, manda gabla ku my, kico Bechy a biny busca na Punta & borbe bay asina presto.

Si bo sabi, manda palabra, ku mi Dios ta bai pagabo.

[28] It is an affidavit (written testimony for use in a court of law as evidence) signed by 26 Aruban farm workers to support their supervisor Pieter Specht against false accusations by landowner B.G.

Noos ta firma por la berdad, y para serbir na teenpoe qui lo llega die moosteer.

In 1977, Aruba approved a more etymology-based spelling, presented by the Comision di Ortografia (Orthography Commission), presided by Jossy Mansur.

Papiamento is primarily spoken on the ABC Islands and to a lesser extent by the Dutch Caribbean diaspora,[29] namely in the Netherlands.

When a word deviates from the rules, the stressed vowel is indicated by an acute accent ( ´ ), but it is often omitted in casual writing.