Vanishing Culture: Preserving Papiamento—Safeguarding Aruba’s Language and Cultural Heritage

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The following guest post from digital librarian Peter Scholing is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Languages are living entities that carry the collective memory, culture, and identity of a people. For the people of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao (the ABC islands), Papiamento is not only their official language and their native tongue, but also a vital part of this identity. However, in today’s rapidly evolving online landscape, where access to English and Spanish language content is easier than ever before, small scale languages like Papiamento may be hard to find, and the traditional (oral, written, analog) methods of language preservation are no longer sufficient.


The Wind-Blown Language: Papiamento (1945) by Jerome Littmann
The preservation of Papiamento now relies on the strategic image masking service use of digital tools to capture, store, and make accessible the rich body of written and audiovisual materials that embody the language. This essay will examine the essential role of digital preservation in maintaining Papiamento’s vitality, discuss the broader implications for language preservation in the digital age, and highlight the joint efforts of the Aruban heritage community and the Internet Archive in making this a reality.

Papiamento is a Creole language spoken primarily in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, blending elements from Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and African languages, as well as indigenous Arawak. It is a vital part of the cultural identity in these regions, serving as a unique linguistic bridge that reflects the diverse historical influences of the Caribbean. Papiamento is not just a means of communication, but a symbol of resilience and cultural pride for its speakers.

With Papiamento being a relatively small and regional language, publications in Papiamento are characterized by small print runs, limited availability beyond libraries in the long term, apart from the financial and logistical factors usually associated with small-scale (island) society and (relative) geographic remoteness.

And although the language is very much alive, very resilient, and widely spoken, it is not commercially viable or interesting for international markets. Such is (or was) the case for Papiamento in a digital sense as well: the smaller the language, the longer it takes for a language to be supported or included in software or online products.

But the tide seems to be changing: Launched in 2019, the National Library of Aruba’s online collection (hosted by the Internet Archive), has grown into a veritable National Collection effort called Coleccion Aruba with over a dozen partner institutions, from Aruba and beyond, providing access to handwritten, printed and audiovisual works in seven languages, including

the largest online text corpus for the Papiamento language, spanning over a million digitized and digital-born pages. Using this growing Papiamento text corpus, Large Language AI Models (LLMs) like ChatGTP can now converse and answer in Papiamento/u, and Papiamento/u is now a supported language in both Meta’s AI-assisted “No Language Left Behind” initiative and Google Translate. And just recently in January 2024, the Council of Europe recognized Papiamento as an official European minority language, after having been officialized in Aruba in 2003 and in Curacao and Bonaire in 2007.