Mengtalen in de Archipel: Nederlands in Vreemde Mond

In the former colonial society of the Indies mixed languages came into being among Dutch migrants living together with a native woman. In this community of settlers and their Indo-european offspring, the native women were forced to speak Dutch, and imposed the structure of their own languages on Dutch. The result was a mixed language: the vocabulary being mainly Dutch and the structure Javanese (as in the case of Javindo) and Jakartan Malay (as in the case of Petjok). I will examine to what extent a characteristic of Javanese - the not-actor oriented verb morphology - has been preserved in Javindo, and a characteristic of both Javanese and Malay - the so-called topic deletion - has survived in Javindo and Petjok.