The Creole of Diu in Hugo Schuchardt’s Archive

Abstract

With close to 200 speakers, the Indo-Portuguese Creole of Diu is currently spoken by a fraction of the island’s population and, despite a centuries-old history, has been largely unacknowledged. In the last decade, it was the object of linguistic documentation and description, making it available to researchers in the field of Creole Studies. Before that, however, the only significant source of linguistic information was a seminal 1883 article by Hugo Schuchardt, all the more relevant by the fact that it was one of the first publications dedicated to a creole by the pioneer of Creole Studies. To write it, Schuchardt relied on data obtained through a vast network of correspondents scattered across the globe. The recent edition of Schuchardt’s letter and manuscript archive, a collective effort coordinated by the Institute of Linguistics of the University of Graz, now makes it possible to reconstruct nineteenth-century interest in this language and ensuing scholarly debates. Here, we explore this archive and complementary sources to: (a) retrace Schuchardt’s steps in search of adequate informants; (b) observe Schuchardt’s process of data collection and analysis; (c) recover the opinions of several interlocutors about the status of Diu Creole; and (d) reconstruct the impact of the article’s publication.