The status of Dutch in post-colonial Suriname (original) (raw)
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This article describes the sources for, and the origins and uses of, the creole languages in the Dutch colony of eighteenth-century Suriname -those created and spoken among slaves on the plantations, among the free black Maroons in the jungle villages and among the mixed population (freed/slave, Christian/Jewish, French/Dutch, etc.) of the town of Paramaribo. The rich sources derive especially from plantation managers and Moravian missionaries, at their best working with black or coloured collaborators. These creoles, both the Englishbased Sranan and the Portuguese-based Saramaccan, allowed generations of Africans and Surinamese-Africans of diverse background to discuss matters of family, health and religion, to tell stories, to establish intimacy and mount quarrels with each other, to consider relations with masters and settlers, to plot resistance and sometimes to construct a past history. The uses of the creole languages by settlers are described, including their limited employment for religious conversion. The article concludes with the Dutch and Sranan poems published in the seventeen-eighties by a Dutch settler married to a mulatto heiress, poems casting in doubt hierarchies of colour. * This article is a revised version of the plenary lecture presented to the 77th
The Life of Language: dynamics of language contact in Suriname
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Language lives. And just like other living things, languages come into being, develop over time, and eventually die. Often these developments are motivated by interaction with other languages, known as language contact. This dissertation contains a bundle of articles that report on the various ways that languages effect each other and the factors that condition the linguistic results in the Surinamese context. Following a chapter summarizing socio - historical developments of Suriname from its beginnings as a plantation colony to a modern multiethnic, multilingual country, the reader will find a case study detailing the various formative processes of language mixture, intertwining , and obfuscation that led to the creation of Kumanti, a ritual language spoken among the Ndyuka. The three subsequent chapters contain case studies of contact - induced language change among Surinameâs languages. The first explores convergence in the semantics of kinship terms in a sample of Surinamese languages. A similar language sample is employed in an investigation of contact induced developments among the languages â tense, mood, and aspect systems. The following chapter argues that the syntactic structures associated with Dutch particle verbs has been transferred to Surinamese creole languages . The last case study addresses questions of language death and linguistic variation among a small group of Maroons, the Coppename Kwinti. These case studies allow for a number of generalizations to be made about the mechanisms and processes of language contact in Suriname which can hopefully be useful in our further understanding of other complex contact settings and language contact in general.
On the linguistic consequences of language contact in Suriname: The case of convergence
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Suriname is often represented as a stratified mosaic of cultures and languages. The country boasts languages from two major indigenous Amerindian families, several Afro-Caribbean English Lexifier Creoles and further dialectal varieties of Indo-European languages belonging to the Germanic cluster (English, Dutch) and the Italic cluster (French, Portuguese), and futher representatives of major linguistic families of the world, namely Indic (Sarnami), Austronesian (Javanese) and Sino-Tibetan (Hakka or Keija). In this chapter, we challenge this somewhat static view of Suriname’s cul- tural and linguistic diversity. The linguistic data that we present will show that languages in Suriname do not merely co-exist. There are ongoing changes in the distribution of languages across functional domains and new mixed codes are emerging. In this chapter, we focus on convergence, the emergence of (partial) similarities at the expense of diffferences between the languages in contact. Specifically, we look at language mixing phenomena and language change involving Surinamese Dutch, Sranan, Sarnami (Suriname Hindustani), the Maroon Creole language Ndyuka and Surinamese Javanese.
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This introductory chapter aims at re-visiting the social and linguistic context of contemporary Suriname and shifting attention away from the purely historical and anthropological construction of Surinamese reality to look instead at language practices in Suriname through the lens of identity construction, mobility patterns, linguistic ideology and multilingualism. The three main themes we engage in this book, language, identity and mobility overlap in several aspects, though the link between language and social identity would likely seem the most obvious for most people.
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Most Surinamese today acquire a heterogeneous variety of Sranan characterized by extensive admixture with Dutch. The analysis of a corpus of contemporary Sranan reveals variation in the expression of spatial relations and the realiza- tion of arguments in ditransitive constructions. Both domains feature syntactic rearrangements and semantic changes that replicate Dutch structures. Pattern replication has led to alterations in the frequency and distribution of Sranan elements and structures, as well as innovations with Sranan and Dutch borrowed elements fulfilling new, previously unattested functions. Sranan is undergoing a substantial typological shift from more substrate-oriented Kwa-like structures to ones similar to those found in the West Germanic superstrate Dutch. Society- wide multilingualism involving Dutch, Sranan and often additional languages provides the socio-linguistic backdrop to contact-induced variation and change in Sranan.