Mi no sal tron tongo : early Sranan in court records 1667 - 1767 (2025)

Creole in transition: Contact with Dutch and typological change in Sranan

In Kofi Yakpo & Pieter Muysken (eds.), Boundaries and Bridges: Language Contact in Multilingual Ecologies, 57–85. (Language Contact and Bilingualism (LCB) 14). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017

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.

Using features of a Creole language to reconstruct population history and cultural evolution: tracing the English origins of Sranan

Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution, 2018

Creole languages are formed in conditions where speakers from distinct languages are brought together without a shared first language, typically under the domination of speakers from one of the languages and particularly in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism. One such Creole in Suriname, Sranan, developed around the mid-seventeenth century, primarily out of contact between varieties of English from England, spoken by the dominant group, and multiple West African languages. The vast majority of the basic words in Sranan come from the language of the dominant group, English. Here, we compare linguistic features of modern-day Sranan with those of English as spoken in 313 localities across England. By way of testing proposed hypotheses for the origin of English words in Sranan, we find that 80% of the studied features of Sranan can be explained by similarity to regional dialect features at two distinct input locations within England, a cluster of locations near the port of Bristol and another cluster near Essex in eastern England. Our new hypothesis is supported by the geographical distribution of specific regional dialect features, such as post-vocalic rhoticity and word-initial ‘h’, and by phylogenetic analysis of these features, which shows evidence favouring input from at least two English dialects in the formation of Sranan. In addition to explicating the dialect features most prominent in the linguistic evolution of Sranan, our historical analyses also provide supporting evidence for two distinct hypotheses about the likely geographical origins of the English speakers whose language was an input to Sranan. The emergence as a likely input to Sranan of the speech forms of a cluster near Bristol is consistent with historical records, indicating that most of the indentured servants going to the Americas between 1654 and 1666 were from Bristol and nearby counties, and that of the cluster near Essex is consistent with documents showing that many of the governors and important planters came from the southeast of England (including London) (Smith 1987 The Genesis of the Creole Languages of Surinam; Smith 2009 In The handbook of pidgin and creole studies, pp. 98–129).

Natalie Zemon Davis, “Creole Languages and Their Uses: The Example of Colonial Suriname,” Historical Research 82 (May 2009): 268-284

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

Sentential Complementation in Sranan: On the Formation of an English-Based Creole Language

Language, 1995

The status of Dutch in post-colonial Suriname

Diepeveen, Janneke & Matthias Hüning (2016): The status of Dutch in post-colonial Suriname. In: Daniel Schmidt-Brücken, Susanne Schuster & Marina Wienberg (Hrsg.), Aspects of (post)colonial linguistics. Current perspectives and new approaches, 131-155. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter., 2016

Dutch is an official language not only in the Netherlands and Belgium, but also in Suriname, a country in South-America. Before its independence, Suriname was a colony of the Netherlands, starting as early as 1667. After its independence in 1975, the multilingual Republic of Suriname maintained Dutch as its official language, the language of education and public life. In this paper, we shall address two seemingly conflicting developments which take place in this former Dutch colony: on the one hand, the growing use of the creole language Sranantongo as a lingua franca across Suriname and on the other hand, the persistence of Dutch. We shall argue that the linguistic developments in Suriname must be understood against the background of a young nation which is constructing its own post-colonial national identity.

Multilingual Language Use and Creole Formation: The Case of Property Items in Early Sranan

Ghana journal of linguistics, 2012

This paper sets up a comparison between the use of property concept items in a creole language and in the languages that contributed to the creole's emergence. The comparison is extended with equivalent constructions in a different outcome of language mixture, namely codeswitching mode, in order to advance our understanding of the role of language transfer in creole formation. While the type of language transfer that is observed in codewitching mode differs from the type of transfer typically found in creole formation, that is recipient language agentivity and source language agentivity respectively, it is shown in this paper that the Surinamese creole Sranan Tongo displayed both types of transfer in the early stages of its development, which underlines the slow nativization of this particular creole.

Grammaticalization in creoles: The development of determiners and relative clauses in Sranan. By Adrienne Bruyn

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 1998

FISCHER on Early Middle English infinitives ('Verbal complementation in Early ME', 247-70), MARIA JOSE LOPEZ COUSO on the choice between that and a null complementizer in John Dryden's English ('A look at that/zero variation in Restoration English', 271-86), and DAVID DENISON on the relevance of a person hierarchy in the extension of the objective pronoun in Early Modern English ('The case of the unmarked pronoun', 287-99). The section on sociohistorical linguistics contains articles on Early Modern English by TER-TTU NEVALAINEN and HELENA RAUMOLIN-BRUNBERG ('Social stratification in Tudor English', 303-26), INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OS-TADE on Boswell ('Social network theory and eighteenth-century English', 327-37), CAROL PERCY on the increasing awareness of 'proper' English by Captain Cook ('Eighteenth century normative grammar in practice', 339-62), and JOAN BEAL on eighteenth century pronouncing dictionaries ('The jocks and the geordies', 363-82). The articles in this volume are interesting and thorough. Some deal with more well-known topics in English historical linguistics; others cover completely new ground. It is particularly interesting that more work is being done on Early Modern English. That should continue given the recent explosion of computer-readable versions of lesser known texts of that era. [ELLY VAN GELDEREN, Arizona State University.] Grammaticalization in creoles: The development of determiners and relative clauses in Sranan. By ADRIENNE BRUYN. (Studies in language and language use, 21.) Amsterdam: Institute for Functional Research into Language and Language Use, 1995. Pp. vii, 281. Sranan Tongo is an English-based creole which constitutes the primary lingua franca for urban and coastal Surinam. The language was formed in the seventeenth century, apparently within a narrow window of some 30 years, and has been cut off from contact with English since around 1680. As a result, Sranan has formed the basis for much theoretical research into rapid or 'radical' creolization. This book examines documents written in Sranan from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and traces the develop-FISCHER on Early Middle English infinitives ('Verbal complementation in Early ME', 247-70), MARIA JOSE LOPEZ COUSO on the choice between that and a null complementizer in John Dryden's English ('A look at that/zero variation in Restoration English', 271-86), and DAVID DENISON on the relevance of a person hierarchy in the extension of the objective pronoun in Early Modern English ('The case of the unmarked pronoun', 287-99). The section on sociohistorical linguistics contains articles on Early Modern English by TER-TTU NEVALAINEN and HELENA RAUMOLIN-BRUNBERG ('Social stratification in Tudor English', 303-26), INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OS-TADE on Boswell ('Social network theory and eighteenth-century English', 327-37), CAROL PERCY on the increasing awareness of 'proper' English by Captain Cook ('Eighteenth century normative grammar in practice', 339-62), and JOAN BEAL on eighteenth century pronouncing dictionaries ('The jocks and the geordies', 363-82). The articles in this volume are interesting and thorough. Some deal with more well-known topics in English historical linguistics; others cover completely new ground. It is particularly interesting that more work is being done on Early Modern English. That should continue given the recent explosion of computer-readable versions of lesser known texts of that era. [ELLY VAN GELDEREN, Arizona State University.] Grammaticalization in creoles: The development of determiners and relative clauses in Sranan. By ADRIENNE BRUYN. (Studies in language and language use, 21.) Amsterdam: Institute for Functional Research into Language and Language Use, 1995. Pp. vii, 281. Sranan Tongo is an English-based creole which constitutes the primary lingua franca for urban and coastal Surinam. The language was formed in the seventeenth century, apparently within a narrow window of some 30 years, and has been cut off from contact with English since around 1680. As a result, Sranan has formed the basis for much theoretical research into rapid or 'radical' creolization. This book examines documents written in Sranan from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and traces the develop-FISCHER on Early Middle English infinitives ('Verbal complementation in Early ME', 247-70), MARIA JOSE LOPEZ COUSO on the choice between that and a null complementizer in John Dryden's English ('A look at that/zero variation in Restoration English', 271-86), and DAVID DENISON on the relevance of a person hierarchy in the extension of the objective pronoun in Early Modern English ('The case of the unmarked pronoun', 287-99). The section on sociohistorical linguistics contains articles on Early Modern English by TER-TTU NEVALAINEN and HELENA RAUMOLIN-BRUNBERG ('Social stratification in Tudor English', 303-26), INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OS-TADE on Boswell ('Social network theory and eighteenth-century English', 327-37), CAROL PERCY on the increasing awareness of 'proper' English by Captain Cook ('Eighteenth century normative grammar in practice', 339-62), and JOAN BEAL on eighteenth century pronouncing dictionaries ('The jocks and the geordies', 363-82). The articles in this volume are interesting and thorough. Some deal with more well-known topics in English historical linguistics; others cover completely new ground. It is particularly interesting that more work is being done on Early Modern English. That should continue given the recent explosion of computer-readable versions of lesser known texts of that era. [ELLY VAN GELDEREN, Arizona State University.] Grammaticalization in creoles: The development of determiners and relative clauses in Sranan. By ADRIENNE BRUYN. (Studies in language and language use, 21.) Amsterdam: Institute for Functional Research into Language and Language Use, 1995. Pp. vii, 281. Sranan Tongo is an English-based creole which constitutes the primary lingua franca for urban and coastal Surinam. The language was formed in the seventeenth century, apparently within a narrow window of some 30 years, and has been cut off from contact with English since around 1680. As a result, Sranan has formed the basis for much theoretical research into rapid or 'radical' creolization. This book examines documents written in Sranan from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and traces the develop-FISCHER on Early Middle English infinitives ('Verbal complementation in Early ME', 247-70), MARIA JOSE LOPEZ COUSO on the choice between that and a null complementizer in John Dryden's English ('A look at that/zero variation in Restoration English', 271-86), and DAVID DENISON on the relevance of a person hierarchy in the extension of the objective pronoun in Early Modern English ('The case of the unmarked pronoun', 287-99). The section on sociohistorical linguistics contains articles on Early Modern English by TER-TTU NEVALAINEN and HELENA RAUMOLIN-BRUNBERG ('Social stratification in Tudor English', 303-26), INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OS-TADE on Boswell ('Social network theory and eighteenth-century English', 327-37), CAROL PERCY on the increasing awareness of 'proper' English by Captain Cook ('Eighteenth century normative grammar in practice', 339-62), and JOAN BEAL on eighteenth century pronouncing dictionaries ('The jocks and the geordies', 363-82). The articles in this volume are interesting and thorough. Some deal with more well-known topics in English historical linguistics; others cover completely new ground. It is particularly interesting that more work is being done on Early Modern English. That should continue given the recent explosion of computer-readable versions of lesser known texts of that era. [ELLY VAN GELDEREN, Arizona State University.] Grammaticalization in creoles: The development of determiners and relative clauses in Sranan. By ADRIENNE BRUYN. (Studies in language and language use, 21.) Amsterdam: Institute for Functional Research into Language and Language Use, 1995. Pp. vii, 281. Sranan Tongo is an English-based creole which constitutes the primary lingua franca for urban and coastal Surinam. The language was formed in the seventeenth century, apparently within a narrow window of some 30 years, and has been cut off from contact with English since around 1680. As a result, Sranan has formed the basis for much theoretical research into rapid or 'radical' creolization. This book examines documents written in Sranan from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and traces the develop-FISCHER on Early Middle English infinitives ('Verbal complementation in Early ME', 247-70), MARIA JOSE LOPEZ COUSO on the choice between that and a null complementizer in John Dryden's English ('A look at that/zero variation in Restoration English', 271-86), and DAVID DENISON on the relevance of a person hierarchy in the extension of the objective pronoun in Early Modern English ('The case of the unmarked pronoun', 287-99). The section on sociohistorical linguistics contains articles on Early Modern English by TER-TTU NEVALAINEN and HELENA RAUMOLIN-BRUNBERG ('Social stratification in Tudor English', 303-26), INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OS-TADE on Boswell ('Social network theory and eighteenth-century English', 327-37), CAROL PERCY on the increasing awareness of 'proper' English by Captain Cook ('Eighteenth century normative grammar in practice', 339-62), and JOAN BEAL on eighteenth century pronouncing dictionaries ('The jocks and the geordies', 363-82). The articles in this volume are interesting and thorough. Some deal with more well-known topics in English historical linguistics; others cover completely new ground. It is particularly interesting that more work is being done on Early Modern English. That should continue given the recent explosion of computer-readable versions of lesser known texts of that era. [ELLY VAN GELDEREN, Arizona State University.] Grammaticalization in creoles: The development of determiners and...

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 2016

List of Tables and Figures Tables 2.1 Names used by children to refer to the language officially called Sarnámi 21 2.2 Names used by children to refer to the Maroon languages according to whether it was claimed as L1 or as a L3 22 2.3 Names for Sranantongo according to whether it was declared as L1, L2 or L3 24 2.4 Common L1 and L2 combinations found in children's linguistic repertoires 27 2.5 Percentage of children claiming to use Sranantongo for some functions in different areas of Suriname 29 2.6 The place of Maroon languages in children's linguistic repertoires in Suriname 43 2.7 Children's self-assessment of their speaking competence in Sranantongo 48 2.8 Children's self-assessment of their speaking competence in Aukaans

The role of Dutch in language practices in the Dutchspeaking periphery: the impact of Dutch on the Eastern Maroon Creoles

Revue Belge De Philologie Et D Histoire Belgisch Tijdschrift Voor Filologie En Geschiedenis, 2013

The genesis of the creole languages of Surinam.pdf

Our basic aim in this thesis is to provide a new hypothesis regarding the genesis of the Creole languages of Surinam - Sranan, Saramaccan, Matawai, Ndjuka (Auka), Paramaccan, Boni (Aluku) and Kwinti. This is an extremely complex question, and we do not pretend to be able to cover it exhaustively. What we will do is attack the available linguistic data from an angle that has hitherto been neglected - that of historical phonology. We have not chosen to utilize this method as an end in itself, although the application of the techniques of historical phonology to the data of the Surinam Creoles clarifies many questions which have been dealt with unsatisfactorily in the past, such as the question of the establishment of the source language of lexical items in these languages. We employ the techniques of historical phonology rather as a tool for extracting new evidence with a potential bearing on the linguistic interrelationships in the earliest period of the colony of Surinam, and thereby of relevance for the controversial topic of this work - the genesis of the Surinam Creole languages.