and a UWI linguistics research team in March 2004. Extinction In February 2010, the language was declared officially extinct, according to an article in the March issue of the Dutch edition of National Geographic magazine. In the '80s there was still a small number of Berbice speakers in Guyana but since then it has been discovered that the last speaker, Albertha Bell, died in 2005, the international language database Ethnologue had declared it extinct. Phonology Vowels There is a large degree of free variation in the vowels, with the range of realizations of the phonemes overlapping. and are almost in complementary distribution, and were probably allophones at an earlier stage of the language. Consonants is usually in complementary distribution with , occurring only before , but there are a handful of exceptions. and occur only in loanwords from Guyanese Creole. References Other Reading External links APiCS Online - Survey chapter: Berbice Dutch Interview with the last living speaker of Berbice Creole Dutch Dutch-based pidgins and creoles Dutch language in the Americas Languages of Guyana Extinct languages of South America Languages extinct in the 2000s Creoles of the Americas