The Suriname creole languages

Let us now turn to a consideration of the phonologies of the three Surinamese creole languages we will deal with here. The first is Sranan, the former language of the coastal plantations, and of the capital, Paramaribo. The second is Ndyuka, which we may take to be descended from an 18^th century plantation variety of Sranan. The speakers of Ndyuka descend from maroons (escapees) from the coastal plantations. The third language is Saramaccan, which has a more complex history. This is also a maroon language, but one spoken largely by the descendants of slaves who escaped from the Jewish-owned plantations on the middle Suriname River. In the late 17^th and early 18^th century there was a concentration of Jewish-owned plantations in this area, with as its mini-capital the settlement of Joden-Savannah (‘Jews’ Savanna’).

The origin of this Jewish population is the subject of controversy (cf. Arends 1999; Smith 1999a), but we will adhere here to the scenario sketched by Smith that the Jews hailed indirectly from Brazil, and that they brought Portuguese-speaking slaves with them, who influenced the local Sranan to the extent that some 300 English-derived forms were replaced by Portuguese Creole forms, giving rise to a new creole language that was to some extent mixed in vocabulary. This was the precursor of Saramaccan.

There are other creole languages/dialects spoken in Suriname, but these do not differ to any large degree from the three we will be dealing with. Closely related to Ndyuka are Aluku, Paramaccan and Kwinti, while Matawai resembles Saramaccan.

We exclude from consideration here any word whose source is not clearly English. As the Netherlands was the colonial power for over 300 years there are a number of forms whose origin could be either Dutch or English. We will not go into any detail on why we consider a particular form to be of English origin.