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

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 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.

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The advent of artificial intelligence has made quite an impact in the world of documentary heritage, with one of the newest developments being handwritten text recognition (HTR).With new technologies like the AI-supported Transkribus, HTR technologies are becoming available not only to the bigger institutions in wealthy nations, but also to small island institutions such as Biblioteca Nacional Aruba (the Aruba National Library) and Archivo Nacional Aruba (the Aruba National Archives), which adopted this new technology at a relatively early stage in 2019. The ability to add  text layers to scanned manuscripts unlocked documentary treasure chests containing centuries of written records, correspondence, and prose—all within the reach of the Aruba institutions. 

After a pilot project in 2022–2023, called “Coleccion Aruba,” between the Internet Archive, the National Library of Aruba, and the National Archives of Aruba, the Aruba subcollection of the Internet Archive became one of the first online platforms where full-text search for handwritten documents was made available. This functionality was completely integrated into its full-text search capabilities, with words and phrases in centuries-old documents becoming just as easy to find as words and phrases written down or spoken as part of the current news cycle. Few (commercial) archival platforms offer full-text search for handwritten sources separately, let alone fully integrated or at no cost, like the Internet Archive does.

In April 2024, the Internet Archive, together with their Aruban partners, announced plans to attempt to digitize all works published in the Papiamento language, enlarging the online footprint of the Papiamento language even more, starting with the works held by Biblioteca Nacional Aruba in their National and special collections. These works will be digitized in-house by the institutions themselves, and to assist in this effort, the Internet Archive has pledged to send a book scanner to the island to increase the scanning capacity on the island. After having visited their new Coleccion Aruba partners, the Internet Archive—together with Aruban national broadcaster Telearuba— have also joined forces to digitally preserve all contents of Telearuba’s livestream and TV offerings. Once combined with the aforementioned future automatic captioning support for Papiamento, thousands of hours of Aruba’s audiovisual heritage will also be opened up for full-text search, for further research and for use in Aruba’s education system, which is currently transitioning from a colonial-era education system completely taught in Dutch to a multilingual model mother tongue-based education system.

During the global COVID-19 pandemic, the use of online resources and demand for digital access to information increased greatly: online access was not just expected, but became a basic necessity and a direct life-line for many people. Luckily, with Aruba being a small-scale society like, the library was able to meet this increased demand by rapidly operationalizing the “short lines” that exist between them and local book authors and publishers, by making available crucial resources, such as Papiamento language literary works and essential resources like daily newspapers —free of cost, to not only Aruban students, but also to the general public.

The momentum set into action in 2020 still has not slowed down; rather, it seems to be increasing. More and more local authors choose to forego all the increasing costs typically associated with print publishing, instead choosing to publish directly to the online Aruba Collection and the Internet Archive. Aruba’s efforts to digitize and preserve its culture and documentary heritage have piqued the interest of more international audiences as well, with other (Dutch) Caribbean island nations and territories showing interest in replicating the model implemented in Aruba, and with media outlets like Wired, The Verge, and PBS News Weekend, as well as regional news outlets like Antilliaans Dagblad and Caribisch Netwerk, also dedicating attention to the “Aruba story.” For example, Wired author Kate Knibbs even mentioned during a recent Slate podcast that she suspected Aruba’s digital preservation efforts being part of  “a really effective guerilla tourism campaign […] aimed at dorks.“

All things considered, future prospects look encouraging: Aruba’s institutions and the Internet Archive are in it for the long haul, and even intend to expand their efforts beyond the white shores of sunny Aruba.

About the author

Peter Scholing is a digital librarian, researcher and information scientist working for Biblioteca Nacional Aruba, Aruba’s National Library. He currently serves as the President of MoWLAC, the Regional Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean for UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme for Documentary Heritage. In 2024, he was awarded the “Caribbean Information Professional of the Year” award by ACURIL, the Caribbean Library Association. His main project, Coleccion Aruba, the Aruba Digital Collection, is the recipient of this year’s Internet Archive Hero Award.

2 thoughts on “Vanishing Culture: Preserving Papiamento—Safeguarding Aruba’s Language and Cultural Heritage

  1. Diana Tanquary

    No longer afraid of lack of good listening material heading forward; your news gives me confidence. My internet signal is very poor, in my remote location, and I have been able to listen to books and radio dramas, and even watch black and white movies sometimes, through your website, with no special settings or apps, or whatever services might be applied, in this very confusing modern age. I read some items, too, on my phone, but that is kind of hard on my eyes. Glad I read some of your news posts !
    I will certainly continue mailing annual contributions by snail mail.
    🙂

  2. Rom

    Preserving Papiamento is essential for keeping Aruba’s rich culture alive—thank you for dedicating efforts to safeguard this incredible heritage

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