Abstract
Since the slave population in New Netherland (1614–1664) was small compared to that of other Dutch Atlantic
colonies such as Curaçao, Dutch Brazil, and Suriname, it has traditionally received little attention by scholars, including
creolists. It is, therefore, not well known that traces of Iberian languages can be found among the black population of
seventeenth-century Manhattan. While the paucity of sources does not allow us to make any decisive claims with regard to the
importance of Spanish and Portuguese for the colony’s black community, this article attempts to reconstruct the language use of
this population group on the basis of an analysis of historical sources from New Netherland in a broader Atlantic context.
