Yakpo, Kofi & Pieter Muysken. 2014. Language change in a multiple contact setting: The case of Sarnami (Suriname). In Isabelle
Buchstaller, Anders Holmberg & Mohammad Almoaily (eds.), Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa-Europe encounters, 101–140.
(Creole Language Library (CLL) 47). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 9789027252708
Language change in a multiple contact setting
The case of Sarnami (Suriname)1
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
The University of Hong Kong and Radboud University Nijmegen
The South American nation of Suriname features a situation of multiple language contact in which speakers
use various languages in changing constellations, and often simultaneously. Sarnami (Surinamese
Hindustani) shows traces of koineization of various Indian languages, and the effects of multilingualism
involving Sranan Tongo and Dutch, the two dominant languages of Suriname. Sarnami has undergone
substantial contact-induced change in its lexicon and grammar, including the rise of SVO alongside the
inherited SOV basic word order. We conclude that the ever growing influence of Sranan Tongo and Dutch
may lead to more extensive restructuring with similar outcomes as “creolization”. Traditional labels are
therefore not always adequate beyond the realm of the canonical creoles involving European lexifiers and
(West) African substrate languages.
1.
Introduction
Suriname is well known among creolists for the three clusters of Creole languages that have
emerged there: The coastal Creole Sranan Tongo, and the two clusters of maroon languages, i.e.
Western (including Saramaccan) and Eastern Maroon (including Ndyuka), for details cf. Carlin and
Arends (2002).These languages have been the subject of a rich literature, both from a diachronic and
synchronic perspective. There is also website with historical materials at www.ru.nl/suca.
1
We are grateful for comments from Bob Borges and Margot van den Berg, as well as from the editors and two anonymous
readers. This paper was written with the support of the European Research Council “Traces of Contact” Grant to the LinC
group at the Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen (www.ru.nl/linc). We are indebted to Renata De
Bies, Lila Gobardhan-Rambocus and Motilal Marhé for their invaluable help in obtaining the Sarnami data on which this
paper relies.
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
No matter how interesting these Creoles are – and they have been at the centre of discussions about
Creole genesis ever since Schuchardt’s applied his theory of Sprachchemie (“language chemistry”,
cf. Schuchardt 1914) to them – Suriname harbours a number of other very interesting phenomena of
language contact. The country is a unique laboratory of language contact, in which about about
twenty languages with very different typological make-ups interact with each other in a whole
range of diverse contact scenarios. Most importantly, Suriname features a situation of multiple
language contact, in which more than two languages are normally in contact with each other in
various constellations. In the case of Suriname, there are two dominant languages, namely Sranan
Tongo (henceforth referred to by its short name Sranan) and the colonial language Dutch that
function as donor languages to other languages while simultaneously exerting an influence on each
other. Trilingualism (and competence in even more languages) among a good proportion of
Suriname’s population has been leading to interesting contact-induced changes and convergence
phenomena in the languages of the country.
In this paper, we illustrate some of these changes by focusing on Sarnami, a language spoken by
the Indian-descended population of Suriname. Sarnami is not a creole language in the traditional
sense, and certainly not a pidgin. Rather it exemplifies the survival of an Indian diaspora language
in the Caribbean. Sarnami, referred to by its speakers as Sarnámi (the accent denotes a long vowel)
or by its Dutch name Hindostaans is the result of the koineization in Suriname of several closely
related languages spoken in the present-day Indian federal states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and
Jharkhand. The languages that were to merge and become Sarnami were transplanted to Suriname
during the indentured labour trade of the 19th century, during which tens of thousands of people
were shipped from India to the Caribbean by the European colonial powers in order to substitute for
African slave labour after the abolition of slavery. Sarnami is the only Indic language in the
Caribbean with roots in the colonial indenture trade that still enjoys a stable speaker community.
Related varieties in Guyana and Trinidad have all but disappeared. Sarnami is the result of a number
of language contact scenarios: leveling as a koine in the situation of diaspora; superstrate influence
from the colonial prestige language Dutch; and adstrate influence from the Surinamese national
vernacular Sranan. The combination of these three processes has yielded a unique new language. By
examining a less known language of Suriname like Sarnami, we hope to broaden the discussion of
language contact in Suriname beyond the scope of the languages traditionally referred to as creoles.
The emergence of Sarnami and its present situation are the result of a complex set of
circumstances, both social and linguistic. A considerable part of this paper is therefore dedicated to
shedding light on historical and socio-linguistic aspects of multilingualism in Surinamese society in
the past and present.
102
Language change in a multiple contact setting
This paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we discuss the theoretical background by
reviewing a number of relevant scenarios (including maintenance, shift, and creation). In section 3
we describe our methodology. Section 0 presents the context of multilingualism and language
contact in Suriname, both from a historical and a contemporary perspective. In section 0, we move
on to Sarnami, the main focus of this paper, from the perspective of koineization, code-switching
and borrowing, as well as language change due to adstratal influence. Section 6 contains points for
further discussion and some conclusions.
2.
Theoretical background
Language contact and mutual borrowing of lexical items and structures in the languages of
Suriname is a consequence of widespread multilingualism. We will therefore first review some of
the concepts related to language contact and multilingualism that we will be referring to. The
typology of language contact that Thomason and Kaufman (1988) propose provides for three
principal contact scenarios. We define scenario as the organized fashion in which multilingual
speakers, in certain social settings, deal with the various languages in their repertoire.
In a maintenance scenario the language that borrows (henceforth the recipient language), from
another language (henceforth the donor language) continues to be spoken by its speaker
community, i.e. it is maintained. The literature shows that there is a large range of variation in
maintenance scenarios. In some cases of maintenance, the recipient language may undergo more
moderate lexical and structural transfer from a donor language (e.g. Heinold 2009 on transfer of
English morphology to French and German as a case of rather moderate transfer; Bubenik 1990 on
the influence of Persian and Arabic on western Indic languages as instances of extensive lexical
borrowing and more moderate structural transfer). Other cases of maintenance show extensive
transfers of phonological features, lexical material and structural patterns (e.g. Hainan Cham, whose
Austronesian typological profile has been significantly altered due to contact with Sinitic, cf.
Thurgood & Li 2003). The classification of a scenario as involving maintenance may also be theorydependent. For example, a strong position on relexification – i.e. the mapping of one language’s
semantic and morphosyntactic properties onto another’s phonological shapes – may in fact be seen
as a case of maintenance of the language providing the semantic and morphosyntactic content.
Such a position is implicit in Lefebvre’s (1998) interpretation of the rise of Haitian Creole.
In the second scenario suggested by Thomason and Kaufman (1988), a community leaves behind
its traditional language and shifts to another language, usually due to the socio-economic and/or
political dominance of the community
103
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
speaking the language shifted to. Contact effects in shift scenarios may be very similar to those
encountered in maintenance scenarios. Studies have shown that intermediary stages of language
shift and obsolescence (cf. e.g. the case studies in Aikhenvald 2012) show the same kind of heavy
structural and lexical borrowing that may characterize maintenance scenarios in which a recipient
language is not threatened by language loss (for an illustrative example, cf. Gómez-Rendón 2007).
A principal difference between shift and maintenance is pointed out by van Coetsem (2000):
Language shift involves a change in directionality of borrowing (termed “agentivity” by van
Coetsem) between a recipient language and a source language. Hence during a shift, contact effects
chiefly manifest themselves through structural rather than lexical influence from a shifting
community’s traditional language which is usually still spoken alongside the dominant language by
some proportion of the shifting community. In a maintenance scenario, however, the traditional
language of the community remains the dominant language and lexical borrowing is usually far
more common, or at least as common as structural borrowing from the donor language. The
distinction is also relevant for Suriname, which features a range of maintenance scenarios of
varying depth or extensiveness of contact.
The third major scenario proposed by Thomason and Kaufman (1988) involves the creation of
new linguistic systems composed of elements of contributing languages. Creolization as one type of
language creation is particularly important in the linguistic trajectory of Suriname. In the
Surinamese creolization scenarios, European superstrate languages (English and Portuguese)
provided most of the lexicon while several African substrate languages provided some lexicon and
substantial parts of the grammatical and phonological systems. Next to genetic inheritance from
contributing languages, creolization in Suriname also seems to have involved various degrees of
restructuring of the input languages driven by linguistic-cognitive factors – the respective
contribution ascribed to either of the two factors being subject to theoretical leaning (Alleyne 1980;
Lefebvre 1998; McWhorter 2005; Bickerton 2009).
Language creation in Suriname concerns not only creolization but also koineization as diachronic
and synchronic processes. We understand koineization as a less pervasive type of language creation
in that there is less restructuring of the input languages involved in the creation of the koine, as has
been amply observed in cases of dialect contact (cf. e.g. Auer 1998 and the classic study of the rise of
the Indic koine of Fiji, cf. Siegel 1985). The literature suggests that typological proximity and mutual
intelligibility are the chief linguistic reasons responsible for the more modest restructuring of an
interlanguage or koine with respect to its input languages (cf. e.g.the studies in Braunmüller 2009;
Kühl and Petersen 2009).
104
Language change in a multiple contact setting
A stable multilingualism over some generations, as in Suriname, can lead to structural convergence
between the various languages spoken in the same geographical space (Winford 2003). In the
process, the languages in contact may become more similar by mutual accommodation, i.e.
bidirectional change, for example by adopting a compromise on the basis of already existing
common structures. In this paper, we employ “convergence” in a broader sense, however, as a cover
term for the multiple contact scenario characteristic for Suriname. Here, borrowed structures may
stem from the two dominant donor languages Dutch and Sranan simultaneously, and these two
languages may interact in their influence on a recipient language. Due to this circumstance, it is
often difficult to attribute instances of contact-induced change in a language like Sarnami to a single
source.
In our classification of contact phenomena in the Surinamese languages we rely on models that
differentiate between the borrowing of forms or matter (morphemes and their phonological shapes)
and structures or patterns (morphosyntactic and semantic structures without the corresponding
forms). The latter phenomenon has been also been referred to in the literature (with varying
degrees of overlap in meaning) by terms like “calquing” (Haugen 1972), “metatypy” (Ross 1996),
“grammatical replication” (Heine and Kuteva 2003; Heine and Kuteva 2010), “pattern
replication”(Matras and Sakel 2007; Sakel 2007), “rule borrowing” (Boretzky 1985) and last but not
least “relexification (e.g. Muysken 1981; Lefebvre 1993).
Such an approach not only allows operationalizing these two fundamental types of borrowing, it
also allows yet finer distinctions of structural borrowing. Borrowing of patterns allows us to
differentiate for example, between the replication of lexical versus grammatical structures. It may
also encompass cases of partial replication in which a donor language pattern undergoes adaptation,
i.e. is grammaticalized to fulfill functions in the recipient language that differ to some degree from
those attested in the donor language (Heine & Kuteva 2003; Meyerhoff 2009). The differentiation
between the borrowings of forms (matter) and structure (pattern) also leaves room for identifying
combinations of matter and pattern borrowing, in which a form and its morphosyntactic and
semantic specifications are carried over into another language. As we move on, we will see that both
types of borrowing and combinations between them can be found in our Surinamese corpus.
Before moving on to the next section, we wish to point out that we share the general
understanding that the outcomes of multilingualism and language contact are of course not solely
determined by linguistic factors. Socio-economic, political, cultural and demographic factors, the
time-depth of cultural and linguistic contact between communities and so forth, are at least as
important in fashioning the processes and outcomes of contact between languages (Myers-Scotton
1993; Roberts 2005; Gómez-Rendón 2008). Our focus in this paper is on the linguistic as much as the
extra-linguistic factors of contact-induced language change in Suriname.
105
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
3.
Methods and data
This study relies for the largest part on field data collected in Suriname in 2011-12 as part of the ERC
project “Traces of Contact” at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. The
corpus contains recordings in eight Surinamese languages: The Creole languages Sranan, Ndyuka,
Kwinti and Saramaccan, as well as Sarnami, Surinamese Javanese, Surinamese Hakka and
Surinamese Dutch. Comparative data has been collected in India, the Netherlands, West Africa and
Mauritius. The corpus consists of a total of about hundred and fifty hours of data, of which the
recordings of Sarnami and its control groups in India (Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Magahi) and
Mauritius (Mauritian Bhojpuri) make up about thirty hours. All unreferenced examples in this paper
stem from our own field data.
The data was collected according to a unified methodology in order to allow comparison across
varieties and languages. Data collection methods involved the use of broad (story-based) and narrow
(video clip-based) visual stimuli on the one hand and (semi-)structured interviews on specific topics
on the other. Elicitation was complemented by recordings of natural discourse. In Suriname, we also
conducted about fifty sociolinguistic interviews in Sranan on the backgrounds of speakers and their
attitudes vis-à-vis the languages they speak.
We are much in favour of approaches employing quantitative analyses based on large diachronic
and synchronic corpora in order to differentiate between codeswitching and borrowing, as well as
between “normal” variability and contact-induced change (e.g. (Van Hout & Muysken 1994; Poplack,
Zentz & Dion 2012). However, when working with less documented languages, as in the case of
Suriname, one is in a less fortunate position. There is a lack of sizeable corpora of diachronic data
for all languages but Sranan (cf. http://suca.ruhosting.nl), and the collection and handling of even
modest corpora of synchronic data involves considerable efforts. It seems then that only a mixed
strategy is feasible. This involves quantitative investigations based on smaller corpora and
extrapolation based on in-depth morpho-syntactic investigations of particular structural areas.
4.
Multilingualism and language contact in Suriname
Suriname has been the scene of complex and overlapping population movements throughout its
history. In this section, we give a brief overview of how these movements have driven the
development of multilingualism in the recent history of Suriname and in present times. Patterns of
community-wide multilingualism have probably characterized the societies of Suriname from well
before colonial conquest. Linguistic diversity in Suriname has
106
Language change in a multiple contact setting
increased significantly since the beginning of the colonial period, reaching a peak in contemporary
Suriname and ushering in the type of extensive language contact that characterizes the country
today (for detailed overviews of multilingual Suriname, cf. Charry, Koefoed and Muysken 1983;
Carlin and Arends 2002).
4.1 Historical overview
Key events in the history of Suriname and their sociolinguistic significance that we refer to in the
following are presented in Table :
Table 1. Some key events in the history of Suriname and their sociolinguistic significance
Date
Event and its demographic
Contact-related aspects
significance
1200 –
Migratory movements in the
Extensive contact between Warao, Cariban and Arawak
1500s
Guianas
languages
1650
Establishment of an English
Varieties of English brought to Suriname
colony in Suriname
1652-
1665
Beginning of deportation to and
Gradual creation of a English lexicon coastal Creole language
enslavement of West Africans in
which would develop into Sranan Tongo in the latter part of
Suriname
the 17th century
Arrival of the Portuguese Jewish
Varieties of Portuguese and quite possibly Portuguese-based
planters from Brazil, possibly
Creole brought to Suriname
with some enslaved Africans
1667
1685
Suriname becomes a Dutch
Varieties of Dutch brought to Suriname as an elite language;
colonial possession
speedy end to the presence of English
Emergence of the Saramaccans as
Creation of the Saramaccan language out of West-African
a separate ethnic group
languages, a Portuguese- and the English lexicon
pidgin/Creole
1730
Emergence of the Ndyuka
Creation of Ndyuka out of West-African languages and the
maroons as a separate ethnic
coastla English lexicon Creole of Suriname
group
1804-1816
English occupation
English superstrate influence on the Sranan lexicon, but
limited to a few words
1844-1854
1863
Enslaved population was allowed
Sranan texts created; consolidation of a written register in
to learn how to read and write
the language
Emancipation of the enslaved
Increased presence of groups of Sranan speakers in the
107
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
Date
Event and its demographic
Contact-related aspects
significance
rural population and
urban centre Paramaribo
dismantlement of the traditional
plantation system
1853
First arrival of Chinese
Hakka and other Chinese languages brought to Suriname
indentured labourers and traders
1876
Dutch introduced into schools as
The beginnings of urban Dutch-Sranan multilingualism in a
only medium of instruction and
slightly larger population; begin of prestige loss of Sranan.
part of universal education
The adoption of Dutch as an L2 by increasing numbers of
Surinamese causes the creation of a profoundly Srananinfluenced Surinamese Dutch.
1873-1916
1890-1939
1975
Immigration of Indian
Varieties of north Indian languages brought to Suriname,
indentured labourers (34306)
such as Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Magahi and Maithili
Immigration of Javanese contract
Dialectal/regional varieties of Javanese brought to Suriname
labourers (32956)
from Java (Indonesia)
Independence of the Republic of
Symbolic break with the former colonial power, possibility
Suriname
for autonomous developments in Surinamese Dutch,
stronger Dutch influence on Sranan due to circular
migration Netherlands-Suriname
1986 -
Surinamese civil war
Refugee movements of marroon peoples from the interior to
1992
(‘binnenlandse oorlog’)
Paramaribo, neighbouring French Guiana, Netherlands and
France; establishment of Maroon Creoles outside of their
traditional area
Since mid-
Increasing political and
Gradual influx of Haitians, Brazilians, Chinese and other
1990s
economic stability
immigrant groups; further linguistic diversification.
4.2 Precolonial contact and creolization
Taking pre- and early colonial times as a starting point, there were originally three indigenous
language families represented on the territory of present-day Suriname, namely Warao, Carib, and
Arawak (cf. Hoff 1995). Particularly striking is the partly convergent development within the
Arawak and Cariban languages, including the creation of a 16th century Carib Coastal Pidgin (Taylor
and Hoff 1980). Convergence must have been the consequence of multilingualism in a situation of
maintenance as defined in section 2, probably with both Carib and Arawak enjoying similar degrees
of prestige.
108
Language change in a multiple contact setting
With the beginning of European colonization of Suriname in the 17th century, the linguistic situation
becomes more complex. The Netherlands ends up being the sole colonial power in 1667. The
establishment of a plantation economy leads to the deportation from the western seaboard of Africa
of an estimated total of approximately 350’000 Africans between 1675 and 1803 (Postma 1990).
Arends (1995) underlines the key demographic role of enslaved Africans from two historical regions
of Africa: The Slave Coast, hence present-day Benin and Togo, entailing the dominance in Suriname
of speakers of Gbe languages (Kwa, Niger-Congo), and the Loango region of the two Congos and
Angola in which languages of the Kikongo cluster (Bantu, Niger-Congo) are spoken.
Various interlocking linguistic processes played a role in the emergence of the Creole languages
of Suriname, among them the present-day lingua franca Sranan. Language creation led to the rise of
early Creole varieties largely drawing on first Portuguese, then English superstrate lexicon and
grammatical features from African substrate languages (cf. e.g. Huttar 1983; Huttar, Essegbey and
Ameka 2007; Winford and Migge 2007). High mortality rates under the brutal labouring conditions
on Dutch-owned plantations made it impossible for the enslaved African population to replenish
itself through natural growth (Arends 1995). Therefore most sources agree that creolization in
Suriname must have been gradual, involving a long period of multilingualism in the emerging
Creole, African and European languages (Arends, Van den Berg & Cardoso 2009). Language creation
must therefore have been accompanied both by gradual language shift (to the Creole and often
enough Dutch) by Suriname-born Africans as well as the maintenance of African languages among
African-born Africans and Suriname-born children. African languages have only survived into the
present in a fossilized form in the ritual languages Kumanti, Ampuku and Papa (Velzen and
Wetering 1988; Velzen, Wetering and Elst 2004).
The Creole languages of Suriname, however, thrived and have differentiated into the three
distinct clusters of Sranan, Western and Eastern Maroon Creole (Smith 1987; Smith 2002). Amongst
these, Sranan has spread beyond the coastal belt into the interior to become the most-widely
spoken Creole of the country. We should also mention that concomitant with creolization were
other types of language creation. In the emergence of Ndyuka-Tiriyo pidgin, for example,
pidginization was the dominant process (Huttar and Velantie 1997).
The indigenous languages of Suriname have undergone quite fundamental contact-induced
changes since colonization as well, both through contact with each other (Carlin 2006) as well as
with Sranan and Dutch (Rybka 2009). After independence and with the increase of regional and
global economic and migratory flows, significant communities of speakers of Guyanese Creole,
Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Mandarin have further increased the linguistic diversity of
an already highly heterogeneous society.
109
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
4.3 The Asian languages of Suriname
The full abolition of slavery in 1873 after a transitional period of ten years of forced labor prompted
the Dutch colonial regime to “import” indentured labourers from Asia, as in other plantation
economies throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere in the colonial world in order to substitute for
slave labour (Saunders 1984; Kale 1998). Through these arrangements, a total of about 30000 (male
and female) labourers were transshipped to Suriname from northern India between 1873 and 1916
(Damsteegt 1988: 95). A total of about 30000 labourers arrived from Java (Indonesia) between 1890
and 1939 (Bersselaar, Ketelaars and Dalhuisen 1991). A third, much smaller wave of migrants arrived
from Guangdong province of southern China from the 1850s onwards as labourers and traders,
numbering only about two thousand but constituting an important community in economic terms
(Fat 2009: 52).
These migratory movements brought about a fundamental transformation of the previously
established demographic constellation in Suriname. A country with a largely African-descended
population with relatively small Indigenous American and European components in the mid-19th
century had acquired an Asian-descended population numbering nearly half the size of the
population by the turn of the 21st century. Hence in the 2004 national census about 27% of the total
Surinamese population of half a million self-identifies as “Hindostaans” (Indian-descended) and15%
as “Javaans” (Javanese-descended) while the category “others” of 6% subsumes amongst others the
Chinese-descended population and the Indigenous peoples of Suriname. Self-identified “Kreolen”
and “Marrons” (both African-descended) Surinamese make up 18% and 15% respectively of the
population. The substantial number of Surinamese who self-classify themselves as “mixed” (12%) or
leave their ethnicity unreported (6%) might be indicative of a growing proportion of Surinamese
either claiming a mixed heritage of various constellations or rejecting ethnic labeling altogether.
The migratory mass movements of the indenture period have been equally transformative for
the linguistic situation in Suriname as they have been for the demography of the country. Various
northern Indian language varieties merged to form the koine Sarnami, the community language of
the Indian-descended population of Suriname (Damsteegt 1988). Here follows a brief summary of
language contact tendencies involving Asian and non-Asian languages of Suriname apart from
Sarnami, which is covered in more detail in section 5. Besides change due to contact with Sranan
and Dutch, some degree of koineization also affected the Javanese language since it arrived in
Suriname (cf. Vruggink 1987). This is probably also due to the fact that a small but not insignificant
part of the “Javanese” population of Suriname had its origins elsewhere in the Indonesian
110
Language change in a multiple contact setting
Archipelago than Java (Gobardhan-Rambocus and Sarmo 1993). One change that has been
documented is the erosion of the formal ‘high’ registers of speech and the corresponding
abandonment of a complex system of honorificity expressed through personal pronouns in
Surinamese Javanese (Wolfowitz 2002) as well as extensive borrowing from Sranan in particular, but
also Dutch (Gobardhan-Rambocus and Sarmo 1993). Contrary to Sarnami, there are indications that
Javanese is not as vital anymore as it still was in the second half of the 20th century and that there is
an ongoing language shift, particularly by speakers below twenty to Sranan and Dutch. Our
recordings of Surinamese Javanese show effects of language attrition with younger speakers, i.e.
frequent hesitation and the use of repair strategies, retrieval difficulties, and morphological
simplification.
The language of the Chinese community was, for a long time, chiefly Hakka (also called “Kejia”).
But Cantonese and more recently Mandarin have played important roles as prestige languages
within the community and there is an ongoing language shift to Sranan and Dutch (Fat 2002).
Certain features that distinguish Surinamese Hakka from its Chinese sister language have also been
attributed to the effects of contact, i.e. the reduction of tonal distinctions, and extensive lexical
borrowing from Sranan and Dutch (Fat 2002, p.c.).
4.4 Sranan and Dutch as lingua francas
Sranan and Dutch play a special role in Suriname: they are the only languages that are extensively
used outside of their traditional speaker communities (principally the Afro-Surinamese population
of the coastal belt). Within the four hundred years or so since its creation by enslaved Africans on
the European plantations of Suriname, Sranan has evolved into a multi-ethnic diasystem used as a
lingua franca by the ethnically diverse population of the coastal belt. The language has also made
inroads into the interior where it shares a common space with various Maroon Creoles (Migge 2007;
Migge and Léglise 2011) and Indigenous languages. Sranan served as the primary donor of lexical
material to the Asian languages of Suriname during the indenture period, when knowledge of Dutch
was not yet as widespread within these communities as it now is. Nowadays Sranan plays the role of
a donor language together with Dutch. Sranan is the only language of Suriname that virtually every
Surinamese has at least some knowledge, however in growing competition with Dutch. It should be
pointed out that the expansion of Sranan is solely a consequence of an incremental growth because
the language has not benefited from state support of any kind whatsoever since it was abolished as a
language of instruction in 1876 (cf. Table ).
111
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
This stands in stark contrast to the development of Dutch, which has also witnessed a considerable
growth in speaker numbers throughout the 20th century due to sustained institutional and elite
support. Since colonial times, Dutch has been the sole language of government business and
parliamentary affairs, and the de facto language of education at the primary, secondary and tertiary
levels. It has remained the language of upward social mobility and high prestige and is extensively
used by officialdom and by coastal Surinamese in a variety of registers. One of the consequences of
this disposition is that Dutch has witnessed a fundamental transformation within the last hundred
years or so. From being a language of the colonial administration and a relatively small Dutcheducated elite, it has been appropriated by larger sections of Surinamese society. In the process,
Dutch has engaged on a trajectory of its own and today plays an important role as a donor language
to Sranan and other languages of Suriname. At the same time, Dutch has itself become a recipient
language for lexical (cf. De Bies, Martin and Smedts 2009) and structural borrowing from Sranan (De
Kleine 1999).Our sociolinguistic interviews show widespread competence in (varieties of) spoken
Dutch with Surinamese of diverse class backgrounds hence beyond the traditional patterns of upper
and middle class use of Dutch inherited from the colonial period. Together with Sranan, Dutch is
also a target for language shift from traditional community languages such as Javanese, Sarnami and
Hakka.
The hierarchical superposition of Dutch to Sranan and the other languages of Suriname is being
driven by a similar set of ideological, political and economic factors as in other postcolonial societies
(cf. Omondi & Sure 1997; Heine 1990; Veiga 1999 for the status quo of colonial and African languages
in African nations). The widespread assumption and acceptance of the “superior” status of Dutch in
Suriname is reflected in often negative and self-denigrating attitudes of speakers towards the nonEuropean languages they speak and in the corresponding language practices. Our field data shows
the existence of a range of attitudinal and communicative patterns with respect to Sranan as a
concomitant of its social subordination to Dutch, compounded by negative attitudes related to its
historical origins in slavery. However, the social and functional division of labour between Dutch
and Sranan outlined above has also led to Sranan enjoying a large amount of covert prestige. In
many contexts, using Sranan is an act of identity assertion, defiance and resistance against norms
transmitted through Dutch, with all its problematic associations with elitism, the colonial past and a
post-colonial present.
4.5 Data on m ultilingualism in Suriname
Determining the size of speaker communities in present-day Suriname is not easy in the absence of
a comprehensive linguistic survey. We therefore have to rely on self-reported language knowledge
in official census data or extrapolate from
112
Language change in a multiple contact setting
existing micro-surveys. The 2004 official census is the only one so far to provide figures for selfreported language use in all districts. Households were asked to name the "language spoken most
often" and the "second language spoken". The figures are given in Table below. Note that the
census does not provide a complete listing of languages spoken in Suriname as it lumps together the
Eastern and Western Maroon languages under one heading and does not even list the Indigenous
languages of the country (cf. Carlin and Arends 2002 for a complete overview of languages).
Table 2. Self-reported language use in Suriname by household (census 2004)
Language spoken most often
Second language spoken
Total
Language
In thousands
In %
In thousands
In %
Total %
Dutch
57.577
46,6
29.163
23,6
70,2
Sranan
11.105
9,0
45.634
37,0
46,0
Sarnami
19.513
15,8
8.121
6,6
22,4
Javanese
6.895
5,6
6.846
5,5
11,1
Maroon languages*
18.797
15,2
2.493
2,0
17,2
Others
6.501
5,3
4.030
3,3
8,6
No 2nd language**
NA
NA
23.754
19,2
19,2
Unknown
3.075
2,5
3.422
2,8
5,3
Total
123.463
100
123.463
100
(Source: Algemeen Bureau voor de Statstiek Suriname/Censuskantoor 2005)
* Saramaccan, Aucan, Paramaccan, **NA= Not applicable
Table 2 confirms the observation made further above that Sranan and Dutch constitute the two
main axes of multilingualism. The two languages show the highest total percentages of “most often”
and “second language” uses. At the same time they manifest the largest differences between “most
often” and “second language” uses. The differences in social function between these two most
widely spoken languages of Suriname transpire in the significant differences in percentage of “most
spoken”. The percentage of 9% for Sranan for “language spoken most often” is surprisingly low,
particularly in comparison to an equally surprisingly high score of 46,6% for Dutch. We attribute
these percentages to prevailing language attitudes in Suriname that result from the functional and
prestige differences between these languages referred to in the preceding section. Hence the high
prestige of Dutch leads to overreporting of use as “language spoken most often”, while the, the low
prestige of Sranan leads to underreporting of use as a primary language.
113
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
As for the other languages listed in Table 2, the lower percentages in the “second language” column
seem to point to these languages largely functioning as in-group “ethnic” languages. For Sarnami
for example, the relation of “most spoken” (about 75% of the total) and “second language” (about
25% of the total)
may well be indicative of a partial language shift to Dutch and Sranan, or at least a certain decline in
use. The same holds for Javanese.
We have seen that language creation has been of primordial historical importance for the rise of
linguistic diversity in the country. In the present, we find the maintenance of community languages
alongside language shift to the two dominant languages, Sranan and Dutch. In section 5, we will
show the types and extent of interaction that these two languages can have with another
Surinamese language. We focus on Sarnami, the language of the Indian-descended community of
Suriname in order to explore aspects of language contact in more detail.
5.
Sarnami: koineization, contact and maintenance
In this section, we turn to Sarnami and explore in more detail how the situation of widespread
multilingualism and multiple language contact has affected a particular language since its
implantation in Suriname. In section 0, we discuss koineization, the process which gave birth to
Sarnami as an independent language. In 0, we address contemporary contact-induced change in the
grammar of Sarnami. We conclude that Sarnami appears to be converging towards Dutch and
Sranan in the domain of clausal word order. We assume that the main cause of this development is
wide-spread multilingualism in Sranan and Dutch in the Sarnami-speaking community.
Structural and lexical features seem to indicate that Sarnami is the result of the mixing of at
least three languages of the Bihari group of Indic, namely Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili. These
three languages are classified as languages in their own right, separate from Hindi (cf. Masica 1993:
12ff.). The grammar and lexicon of Sarnami also reflect the influence of varieties of the eastern
reaches of the Hindi-Urdu continuum, namely Braj and Kannauji, generally classified as varieties of
Hindi, (ibid.) and Awadhi, generally seen as a variety more distinct from Hindi albeit closely related.
As previously mentioned, Sarnami is the only Indic language of the Caribbean with a sizeable
speaker community. Trinidad Bhojpuri and Guyanese Bhojpuri
have only very few elderly speakers left with younger speakers having completed the shift to
Creolese (Guyanese Creole, Gambhir 1981 and Trinidad Creole, Mohan 1990, cf. Boer (1998) for the
complex mix of circumstances that has favoured the survival of Sarnami as opposed to its Caribbean
sister languages).
114
Language change in a multiple contact setting
We will henceforth collectively refer to the Indic languages that constituted themselves during the
indentured labour trade as overseas Indic (rather than overseas “Hindi”, cf. Barz and Siegel 1988).
Our data and sociolinguistic interviews seem to indicate that Sarnami is actively used by all
generations within the Indo-Surinamese community in a pattern of trilingualism involving Sranan
and Dutch as additional languages. Our observations point to a functional specialization with
Sarnami serving largely as a language for the informal and family domain. A significant aspect of
this pattern of trilingualism is that the Sranan and Dutch are nonetheless extensively used within
the Indo-Surinamese community and not simply reserved for out-group communication. The
following two sections describe how two types of language contact have affected Sarnami during
and since its emergence in Suriname. Through koineization the speakers of various closely-related
Indian languages forged Sarnami into a common community language. Language contact with
Sranan and Dutch, two typologically more distant languages, has affected Sarnami in yet other ways.
5.1 Sarnami as a koine
In the following, we provide a brief overview of the koineization of Sarnami. We concentrate on the
verbal system to show the effects of this process on the shape of Sarnami (a more general overview
including other aspects of koineization in Sarnami can be found in Damsteegt 1988). The indentured
labourers brought to Suriname came from virtually all regions of India. However, the largest
component by far came from the eastern reaches of the Ganges Plain of India, hence the
easternmost part of the present-day federal states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and the northern part of
Jharkhand, as well as the westernmost part of West Bengal (Klerk 1953: 53ff, but note that there are
no precise figures in this work). The following principal languages are spoken in these areas (from
west to east): Braj and Kannauji (eastern varieties of Hindi), Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Magahi, and Maithili.
A complicating factor is that Hindi-Urdu has served as a prestige supra-lect and written register to
the languages of north-eastern India at least since the departure of indentured labourers in the 19th
century and has continued to do so in the Indic languages of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean (Bhatia
1982; Damsteegt 1990). We have also observed that spoken registers of Hindi/Hindustani are
additionally exerting influence on Sarnami via globalized Indian popmusic and and Bollywood
movies.
Sociohistorical research suggests that speakers of Bhojpuri varieties were either numerically
dominant amongst the Indian emigrants in the European colonies that employed indentured labour
(cf. Gambhir 1981: 9ff) or constituted the largest northern Indian linguistic group (cf. Meshtrie 1991:
28 for South Africa). A preponderance of Bhojpuri-speaking immigrants has also been proposed for
Suriname (Damsteegt 1988: 28). The linguistic evidence from these sources seems to suggest an
important role of Bhojpuri in the koineization process that the north-Indian languages underwent
in their new homelands.
115
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
We will show in the following, however, that in the structural area singled out in this section, there
is quite a degree of inter-variety mixing in Sarnami. Although Sarnami has a strong Bhojpuri import
it is difficult to establish with certainty that the Bhojpuri element is dominant. One of the principal
reasons for this is the existence of intra- and interlectal continua within and between the
contributing languages. Centuries of multilingualism would have led to convergence of the
languages spoken in the areas where indentured labourers came from (cf. e.g. Abbi 1997 for
convergence in present-day Jharkhand).
Sarnami shows the characteristic effects of koineization that have been widely documented in
the literature, namely mixing, leveling, simplification and reallocation (Kerswill 2002). Table 3 below
features verbal suffixes that serve to express perfective/past aspect/tense in Sarnami, Bhojpuri,
Awadhi, Maithili and Magahi. We provide two varieties of Bhojpuri in order to exemplify the degree
of intralectal variation in one of these languages (and the possibility of mutual borrowing by the
contributing languages): The southern standard variety, described by Tiwari (1960) and Sadani
Bhojpuri, spoken in southern Jharkhand (Horstmann 1969). For now, the table only contains nonhonorific suffixes. Honorificity will be covered below. Variants are separated by a comma, feminine
gender forms are provided in parentheses where they exist:
Table 3. Perfective/past suffixes in Sarnami and north Indian languages
Sarnami
Southern
Sadani
Bhojpuri
Bhojpuri
-li, -lin
-l! ̄̃
-lō̃
-li
-li
-eũ
1PL
-li, -lin
-l! ̄̃
-lī
-li
-li
-en
2SG
-le
-lā, (-liu)
-lis
-le, -lẽ
-la
-ē, -isi
2PL
-le
-lā, (-liu)
-lā
-le, -lẽ
-la
-eu
3SG
-l, -is
-l, (-li)
-lak
-l, -lək
-l, -lak
-isi
3PL
-l, -is, -lẽ
-lẽ, (-lini)
-aī
-l, -lək
-l, -lak
-ini
1SG
Maithili
Magahi
Lakhimpuri
Awadhi
(Sources: Saksena 1971 for Awadhi; Tiwari 1960 and Shukla 1981 for Bhojpuri; Horstmann 1969 for Sadani
Bhojpuri; Yadav 1996 for Maithili; Verma 1966 for Magahi)
The table shows that the Sarnami perfective/past suffixes have multiple sources, hence are of mixed
origin. Also, some degree of leveling has taken place in Sarnami; the language has not simply
accumulated all forms from its various sources. Instead, specific forms have been picked out while
others have not survived the koineization process:
−
The 1SG/PL forms are found in all potential contributing languages except Sadani Bhojpuri and
Awadhi (with minor adaptations in Sarnami, such as an optional final nasal instead of
nasalization);
116
Language change in a multiple contact setting
−
The 2SG/PL forms are found in Maithili, while the /l/ consonant is found all contributing
languages except Awadhi;
−
The /-l/ variant of 3SG is found in all contributing languages except Sadani Bhojpuri and
Awadhi, while the [-is] variant is unmistakably of Awadhi origin;
−
The /-lẽ/ variant of 3PL is found in southern Bhojpuri alone.
It is noteworthy that Southern Bhojpuri features gendered suffixes in the 2nd and 3rd persons and
separate suffixes for plural number. Some varieties of Awadhi also show gendered verb suffixation
in intransitive clauses (Saksena 1971: 249). But the lack of a gender distinction in the verbal
morphology of Sarnami may not be symptomatic of simplification. The use of feminine gender
seems to have been optional in Bhojpuri itself for a long period of time (Gambhir 1981: 249) and the
distinction is lax in Awadhi as well (cf. Saksena 1971: 249,139). The disappearance of feminine
gender verbal suffixes in Sarnami might therefore simply reflect the end-point of a development
long foreshadowed in Bhojpuri and other languages to the east of the Hindi-Urdu heartlands (cf.
Gambhir 1981: 254 for the same conclusion with respect to Guyanese Bhojpuri). However, there are
also more unequivocal indications of morphological simplification in the verbal system of Sarnami.
Firstly, the four Indian contributing languages feature a larger range of honorificity distinctions
than Sarnami, reflected both in the use of specific personal pronouns as well as in separate
inflectional suffixes on verbs. Table 4 provides the corresponding personal pronouns and person
endings for perfective/past in Sarnami, southern Bhojpuri and Maithili. For clarity of exposition,
Table 4 features the past/perfective person suffixes alone; it does not include the past/perfective
tense-aspect marker /-l/:
Table 4. Honorificity levels in the pronominal and verbal system compared
Sarnami
Southern Bhojpuri
Maithili
Pronoun
Suffix
Pronoun
Suffix
Pronoun
Suffix
1SG
ham
-i
ham
-! ̄̃
həm
-i
1SG.HON
-
-
-
-
-
-əhũ
2SG
-
-
tẽ
-ẽ
tõ
-e, -ẽ
2SG.MHON
tu
-e
tu,tũ
-ā, (-ũ)
-
-əh
2SG.HON
-
-
-
-
əhã
-i
2SG.HHON
āp
-o
āp, rauā, raurā
-! ̄̃
əpne
-i
3SG
u
-ø
ū
-ø, (-i)
o, u
-ək
3SG.HON
-
-
uhā(̃ kā), wan
-! ̄̃
o
-əinh
(Sources: Tiwari 1960; Shukla 1981 for Bhojpuri; Yadav 1996 for Maithili)
117
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
Table 4 shows that Maithili represents the most complex type. It features a four-fold honorificity
distinction in the 2nd person (non-honorific, mid-honorific, honorific and high-honorific) and a twofold distinction in the 1st and 3rd persons (non-honorific vs. honorific). Honorificity is expressed both
by the use of distinct personal pronouns and/or dedicated verbal suffixes. Whenever the personal
pronoun remains the same, verbal suffixation expresses honorificity and vice versa. This is, for
example, the case with the distinction between 1SG.FAM and 1SG.HON as well as 2SG.FAM and 2SG.MHON.
Southern (standard) Bhojpuri is second in line with one layer less in the 1st and 2nd person paradigm.
However, Bhojpuri features the usual additional gender differentiation (in parentheses) that we
already encountered in Table 3 above. With only two levels of honorificity in the 2nd person and no
differentiation according to gender, Sarnami shows the lowest number of distinctions.
A second feature of interest in Table 4 is that Sarnami also shows signs of mixing. The 2SG
honorific pronoun āp is also found as a 2SG high honorific pronoun in southern Bhojpuri. Tiwari
(1960:146) however attributes the presence of āp in Bhojpuri to influence from (western) Hindi and
Awadhi, with rau(r)ā serving as the traditional 2SG high honorific pronoun. There are no traces of
rau(r)ā or 2SG high honorific forms from other Bihari languages in modern Sarnami. So āp seems to
have been incorporated from or reinforced through its existence in western Indic varieties such as
Standard Hindi, Braj, Kannauji or Awadhi, all of which use āp in the same or overlapping functions.
Evidence for this also comes from the corresponding honorific verb suffix /-o/ in Sarnami, which
is also attributable to (eastern) Hindi and Awadhi sources (cf. Saksena 1971; McGregor 1995). The
suffix is not attested in any variety of Bhojpuri (cf. Gambhir 1981: 240), nor is it found in the same or
similar functions in any of the works on the other Bihari languages that we consulted.
The functions of /-o/ in Sarnami constitute a good example of the often overlapping processes of
mixing, simplification, leveling and reallocation characteristic of the contact-induced changes
accompanying koineization. The inclusion of /-o/ into the inflectional form inventory of Sarnami
next to forms of other origins indicates mixing. Simplification and leveling are evident in the fact
that /-o/ is the only bound morpheme to express honorificity in Sarnami, as opposed to the
numerous, functionally specialized forms that do so in southern Bhojpuri and Maithili.
The uses of /-o/ in Sarnami also constitute a case of paradigmatic leveling, both vertically
(within the same paradigm) and horizontally (across different paradigms): In Hindi varieties /-o/
serves as a 2PL non-honorific verb suffix and by extension, as a honorific suffix for singular number
in concert with an appropriate personal pronoun. In addition, it is only employed in a restricted
number of tense, aspect and
118
Language change in a multiple contact setting
mood categories (cf. Gambhir 1981: 283). In contrast, Sarnami makes use of /-o/ as a 2nd person
honorific verb suffix for both singular and plural number as well as across all tense, aspects and
mood categories of the language. Finally, reallocation is manifested by the functional shift of /-o/
from 2PL non-honorific (and honorific 2SG) in the contributing languages to an exclusively honorific
function in Sarnami. Having shown how the two subsystems covered above reflect the results of
koineization, we now turn to contact-induced change in contemporary Sarnami.
5.2 Codeswitching and borrowing
In the following, we discuss some of the effects that multilingualism and language contact have had
on Sarnami. We first take a look at codeswitching as a conventionalized linguistic practice within
the Sarnami-speaking community. We then turn to structural borrowing into Sarnami in the next
section.
Codeswitching is seen as a principal cause of contact-induced change and convergence (e.g.
Muysken 2000; Backus 2004). Codeswitching is also hypothesized to have accompanied the rise of
mixed languages like Gurindji Kreol (Meakins 2011) and Media Lengua (Muysken 1981; 1997). The
data presented in the following paragraphs highlights some of the strategies employed during
codeswitching in order to accommodate non-native material from Sranan and Dutch, two languages
that are typologically quite distinct from Sarnami. Multilingual competence coupled with frequent
codeswitching also appears to lie at the heart of lexical and structural borrowing in Sarnami.
The following sentence exemplifies the kind of codeswitching that characterizes our Sarnami
corpus: The Dutch verb proberen ‘try’ is integrated into Sarnami morphosyntax via a compound verb
construction featuring the generic verb kare ‘do’. The Dutch 3SG present tense serves as a fixed
insertion form for Dutch verbs in such mixed expressions. Dutch nouns are inserted into Sarnami
NPs without any further adaptation and may be modified by Sarnami nominal morphology, as
shown by the co-occurrence of bal 'ball' and doos 'box' with the definiteness-marking suffix –wá:
(1)
probeer
kar-e
hai
bal-wá
ke
big-e
try
do-INF
be.PRS ball-DEF ACC/DAT throw-INF
ke
doos-wá
meṉ.2
ACC/DAT
box-DEF
in
‘(He) is trying to throw the ball into the box.‘
2
Sarnami has a standard orthography with the following additional conventions: retroflex consonants feature an
underscore, hence ṟ [ ɽ ], ḏ [ ɖ ]. A nasalized vowel is rendered by a following ṉ as in meṉ [mẽ] ‘in’. Long vowels bear an
acute accent, hence á [aː].
119
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
Table 5 below features a type-token analysis of Sarnami Dutch and Sranan items in a small
subsample of about 300 words. The sample consists of a recording of the frog story (Mayer 1969) by a
male speaker of 17 years. The speaker is a secondary school student from a village in the Nickerie
district, in the westernmost part of the country. We chose him because he represents a less typical
Sarnami speaker: He grew up and lives outside of the multilingual and multiethnic capital district
(where the majority of Suriname’s population lives) in a predominantly rural area. For Surinamese
standards, Nickerie is ethnically very homogenous (at least 80% of the population of Nickerie district
is of Indo-Surinamese extraction). And yet, as can be seen below, codeswitching with Dutch and
Sranan appears to be the norm with this speaker: 3
In spite of its brevity, the text reveals in an exemplary fashion some of the tendencies of Sarnami
as a language in contact: (1) a substantial percentage of tokens, namely a quarter, consists of nonnative items of either Dutch or Sranan origin;
Table 5. Type-token analysis of Dutch and Sranan items in a Sarnami frogstory
Tokens
Types
Sarnami
Dutch
Sranan
Sarnami
Dutch
Sranan
Nouns
Determiners
Pronouns
Verbs
Auxiliaries
Adjectives
Adverbs
Adpositions
35 (67%)
32 (89%)
27 (75%)
51 (77%)
35 (78%)
11 (55%)
27 (82%)
14 (29%)
4 (11%)
9 (25%)
13 (20%)
5 (11%)
5 (100%)
7 (35%)
5 (15%)
2 (4%)
2 (3%)
5 (12%)
2 (11%)
1 (3%)
27 (73%)
3 (60%)
3 (60%)
15 (68%)
6 (67%)
4 (44%)
6 (60%)
8 (22%)
2 (40%)
2 (40%)
5 (23%)
2 (22%)
3 (100%)
4 (44%)
3 (30%)
2 (6%)
2 (10%)
1 (12%)
1 (12%)
1 (11%)
Clause linkers
24 (65%)
11 (30%)
2 (6%)
6 (43%)
7 (50%)
1 (8%)
Total
242 (73%)
74 (22%)
14 (4%)
70 (61%)
36 (32%)
8 (8%)
3
All words in the respective languages and word classes were counted and we did not exclude changes in the base
language, i.e. entire (chunks of) sentences in Dutch and Sranan. We do not attempt to make a distinction between
established loans and nonce borrowings, hence the column entitled “Sarnami” simply lists words with an Indic etymology.
“Determiners” includes bound forms in Sarnami (hence ego ‘a’ as well as –wa/-ya ‘DEF’). “Auxiliaries” lists unbound function
words (all of which are verbal in this text) expressing tense, aspect and modal functions. “Adpositions” includes core casemarking postpositions like ke ‘ACC/DAT’ in Sarnami, and the preposition aan ‘DAT’ in Dutch, as well as elements expressing
more peripheral semantic functions, e.g. meṉ ‘in’ (Sarnami) and naar ‘to’. “Clause linkers” includes coordinating (aur ‘and’
(Sarnami) and subordinating linkers (ki ‘that’(Sarnami); omdat ‘because’ (Dutch)) as well as linking adverbs like tab ‘then’
(Sarnami) and dan ‘then’ (Dutch).
120
Language change in a multiple contact setting
(2) the Sranan percentage of the total of tokens (4%) is far lower than the Dutch percentage (22%);
(3) although the sample contains non-native items from all word classes, nouns (33% non-native),
adverbs (46% non-native) and clause linkers (36%) score particularly high in the text sample. It is
well reported that nouns, free (non-selected) constituents and pragmatic elements including clause
linkers are particularly prone to switching. The results of the Type count do not differ greatly from
those of the Token count due to the small sample size. Nevertheless, one observation can be made
with respect to the Type count: Only Sarnami shows a lower Type than Token percentage. The
higher Type than Token percentage for Dutch and Sranan indicates that a higher proportion of
words from these two languages are “one-shots”, i.e. they only occur once in the text. This seems to
indicate that the narrative backbone of the story consists of native (Sarnami) lexical items.
The amount of codeswitching recorded in Table 5 contrasts starkly with the situation
encountered in the frog stories in the Indian sister languages of Sarnami. In a randomly picked frog
story in Maithili of 790 words, we found not a single English item and only three tokens of Hindi
origin. In the same vein, a Bhojpuri frog story of 753 words chosen at random contained a total of 14
Hindi tokens and a single English token (namely ‘time’).
A word is in order on the low proportion of Sranan items in the text analyzed in Table 5 above.
For one part, the correspondingly high proportion of Dutch items is a consequence of the observer’s
paradox. As previously mentioned, the social functions of Dutch and Sranan differ widely. Dutch is
the language of first contact in many communicative exchanges, and is often associated with a
larger social distance between interactants. The recording setting with its air of formality, the
potential for a hierarchical relationship due to the age-gap between interviewer and interviewee,
and the association of Dutch with story-telling tasks inherited from the school-setting create a bias
towards Dutch as the primary switching language. We have observed the tendency that the more
egalitarian, in-group, male-only, informal and emotionally charged the context is, the more likely it
is that Sranan becomes the primary language that speakers switch to. We have already mentioned
that the use of Sranan vs. Dutch (codeswitching) is subject to complex socio-pragmatic norms
conditioned by the respective status of Dutch and Sranan in Surinamese society. It is therefore well
possible that Sranan exerts its influence on Sarnami more covertly, hence primarily through
pattern borrowing (whether lexical or grammatical) while Dutch does so covertly and overtly, hence
via a combination of matter and pattern borrowing.
There appears to be a diachronic dimension to the relative importance of Sranan vs. Dutch as
donor languages to Sarnami. In Suriname, the use of (spoken) Dutch, including the entire range
from native-like to diverse types of L2 varieties, seems to have grown exponentially in the past halfcentury or so.
121
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
During the colonial period, however, Sranan appears to have played a far more important role than
Dutch as a donor of lexical material to Sarnami. The most comprehensive dictionary of Sarnami
(Santokhi and Nienhuis 2004) contains hundreds of items of Sranan origin from diverse semantic
fields such as the natural habitat, culture, and technology, and far fewer from Dutch. There appears
to be a consensus amongst Sarnami native speaker linguists that such items have entered the
Sarnami lexicon for good (e.g. Kishna 1979; Marhé 1985; Santokhi and Nienhuis 2004). Their
widespread acceptance points to them having been borrowed into Sarnami sufficiently long ago,
maybe during or in the aftermath of the indenture period. Some examples are given in (2) (Data
from Marhé 1985; Damsteegt and Narain 1987; Santokhi and Nienhuis 2004). Note that the three last
items in (2) are listed as basic vocabulary in the Swadesh 200 wordlist:
(2)
Natural habitat
General culture
Technological
Basic
kasaba
‘cassava’
wátrámun
‘water melon’
krabu
‘crab’
godo
‘calabash, wasps’ nest’
bergi
‘hill’
datrá
‘doctor’
dwengi kare
‘force’
froisi howe
‘move house’
lesi rahe
‘be lazy’
láti awe
‘arrive late’
tafrá
‘table’
kukru
‘kitchen’
baskita
‘basket’
soroisi
‘sluice’
stráti
‘street’
ot̠o
‘car’
hebi
‘heavy’
ribá
‘river’
t̠iki
‘(small) stick’
Society-wide, generalized bi- or multilingualism in a donor language is not a prerequisite for lexical
borrowing into a recipient language of the type shown in (1) above, not even in cases of extensive
lexical borrowing. It is usually sufficient for a small but influential proportion of (passive) bilinguals
to introduce non-native lexical items (cf. e.g. Sakel 2007: 25). In fact, we must assume that
widespread multilingualism involving Sranan (and even less so Dutch) was not the norm in the
Indo-Surinamese community before the deep social transformations that
122
Language change in a multiple contact setting
began in the mid-twentieth century and have been referred to above. Until then, spatial
segregation, a predominantly rural settlement pattern, economic specialization, endogamy, lack of
access to education and institutional discrimination by the colonial state (cf. Hira 1998) would have
limited the possibilities of large-scale social interaction and hence the acquisition of Sranan,
particularly for children and women. The latter were particularly restricted in their ability to
network outside of the community due to economic restrictions imposed by the colonial state and
patriarchal social structures (cf. de Koning 1998).
The distinction between nonce borrowings and loans is far more difficult to make synchronically,
in view of the characteristic pattern of Sarnami-Sranan-Dutch trilingualism and the resulting
omnipresence of codeswitching. An exhaustive treatment of the question of nonce borrowings
versus loans would seem to require statistical analyses of the kind mentioned in section 3, with the
known limitations of small data sets in this respect (cf. Poplack 2012). Nonetheless, a more intuitive
approach may also serve to distinguish ‘one-shot’ nonce borrowings from established loans.
Numerous items of Sranan and Dutch origin in our corpus are not contained in Santokhi and
Nienhaus’s 2004 dictionary of Sarnami, for example, but are overwhelmingly (at least 90% of tokens)
used instead of a Sarnami equivalent throughout our corpus. Apart from items that stem from
material or technological culture (e.g. trap> Dutch ‘stairs’, blik> Dutch ‘tin’), there are also numerous
items like the ones listed in (3). The list contains only predicates borrowed from Sranan and Dutch
into Sarnami, loosely grouped according to semantic field. We address the bipartite nature of
Sarnami predicates in the next paragraph below:
(3)
Predicate
(a)
bigin kare
(b)
(c)
Origin
Sarnami equivalent
‘begin’
Sranan
suru kare
stop kare
‘stop’
Sranan/Dutch
band kare
pruberi/probeer kare
‘try’
Sranan/Dutch
kausis kare
doro já
‘continue’
Sranan
áge baṟhe/cale
opmerk kare
‘realize’
Dutch
dekhe (‘see’)
kennismaak kare
‘get to know’
Dutch
cinh parcai kare
senwe mare
‘be nervous’
Sranan
ghabaṟáe
bewonder kare
‘admire’
Dutch
parsansá kare
klap kare
‘clap’
Dutch
táli bajáwe
froiti bajáwe
‘whistle’
Sranan
siṯi bajáwe
aanval kare
‘attack’
Dutch
hamlá kare
leun howe
‘lean (against)’
Dutch
sahárá lewe
fanga/vang kare
‘catch’
Sranan/Dutch
pakaṟe
123
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
It is interesting that (3) contains four aspectual verbs (a) and mental activity verbs (b) that seem to
have quite basic meanings. This may point to a more pervasive lexical presence of Sranan and Dutch
in Sarnami than first meets the eye. The verbs grouped under (c) have been included to show how
semantically diverse other types of non-native predicates are in the corpus.
We have seen that (3) above exclusively contains bipartite expressions featuring a Sarnami
element on the one hand, and a Sranan or Dutch element on the other. These complex verbs may
serve to shed light on the fuzzy boundary between codeswitching and lexical borrowing in
contemporary Sarnami. Complex verbs in Sarnami come in two guises. One type is a "compound
verb" involving a two-verb string in which a non-finite lexical verb is followed by an inflected
member of a circumscribed group of light verbs. In (4) the Sranan verb senwe ‘be nervous’ combines
with the Sarnami light verb máre, which literally means ‘hit’, but indicates rashness of action when
used as an aspectual verb. Also note the presence of the inserted Dutch compound noun schooltoets.
In the following, Dutch and Sranan items are in bold:
(4)
senwe
bahut
very
már-e
hai
be.nervous ‘hit’-INF be.PRS
school-toets
school-exam
á-we.
come-INF
‘(They) are suddenly very nervous (that) the school exam is coming.’
The other type of complex verb is often referred to as a "conjunct verb" in Indic linguistics (e.g.
McGregor 1995: 63). It involves a nominal element in place of the lexical verb, followed by one of the
two generic verbs kare 'do' and howe 'be(come)'. Mixed conjunct verbs are a particularly productive
means of integrating Sranan and Dutch lexical material into Sarnami structures, and in this way,
constitute the principal means of deriving new verbal meanings. The phenomenon of mixed
conjunct verbs is also well known from contact situations involving other Indic languages (e.g.
Borowiak 2007). The following sentence is an example of a mixed conjunct verb: the Dutch noun
aanval ‘attack’ appears as the object of the Sarnami generic verb kare 'do' to render the translation
equivalent of 'to attack'. Once again, note the presence of additional Dutch items, namely the noun
uil and the pragmatic element toch:
(5)
auro bai-wá
ke
uil
and boy-DEF ACC/DAT owl
aanval kar-il,
toch?
attack
right
'do'-PFVP
'The owl attacked the boy too, right?'
The use of mixed conjunct verbs gives Sarnami speakers quite some leeway with respect to phrasal
constituency. The following example illustrates the great liberty with which speakers may
manipulate morphosyntactic relations in code-mixed utterances:
124
Language change in a multiple contact setting
(6)
kar-ilá
over
1-people ACC/DAT already busy make
'do'-PRS.1
about
ham-ár
báp
ke
gezondheid
pe.
1-POSS
father
ACC/DAT
health
on
ham-log
al
ke
druk maken
'We are already stressed about our father's health.'
In (6), the Dutch compound verb druk maken is integrated into a conjunct verb structure featuring
the Sarnami generic verb kare 'do'. The Dutch verb is carried over into the code-mixed utterance
along with its argument structure, however only partially. In Dutch, druk maken selects a
prepositional phrase introduced by over 'over, about' containing the stimulus NP. This feature is
retained in the Sarnami sentence above. At the same time, the additional use of the Sarnami
postposition pe 'on' after the stimulus NP replicates the semantics of the Dutch prepositional
phrase, while retaining Sarnami (postpositional) constituent order – a more Sarnami-like structure
would have involved the use of the ablative postposition se instead of pe. What is not transferred
into Sarnami from Dutch are argument structure features relating to the experiencer role. In Dutch,
druk maken is a reflexive verb, like many experiencer verbs. But in (6) there is no reflexive
construction and the experiencer is marked for accusative-dative case by the postposition ke, hence
in the conventional Sarnami way (Kishna 1981).
Similarly complex patterns of contact and strategies of integration of non-native material into
Sarnami structures are found with the way the language treats Dutch verb-particle combinations.
Here too, we find the replication of lexical as well as morphosyntactic patterns of Sranan and Dutch
in Sarnami. Consider the following Sarnami sentence, elicited through the frog story:
(7)
ego kaháni
hai,
u
já
haigá
ego
laṟká ke
over.
a
be.PRS
DIST
go
be.PRS
a
boy
over
story
ACC/DAT
‘(It) is a story, it is about a boy.’ (Sarnami)
Example (7) above features a verb-particle combination, a type of bipartite complex predicate
commonly found in Dutch and other Germanic languages. The verb já ‘go’, while clad in a Sarnami
phonological shape, reproduces argument structure features of its Dutch equivalent gaan ‘go’:
Firstly, an inanimate noun like kaháni ‘story’ is not normally employed in a Theme semantic role in
Sarnami. Secondly, the complex predicate additionally features the Dutch clause-final
adverbial/preposition over. The two elements together form an idiom, a calque from Dutch gaan over
'(to) be about', which is common as an introductory line of narratives in Dutch (i.e. 'this story is
about’, lit. ‘goes over'). Constructions like the one in the Dutch near-equivalent sentence in (8)
below, are the source of the Sarnami structure in (7):
125
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
(8)
dit verhaal
gaat over een
jongen
en
zijn
kikker.
this story
goes over a
boy
and
his
frog.
‘This story is about a boy and his frog.’ (Dutch)
Yet Sranan might just as well provide the model for structures like já – over in (7) above. Compare
(9), taken from the frog story rendered by a speaker of Sranan. The example involves the Sranan
verb-particle sequence go - abra ‘go over’. This structure, though ultimately of Dutch origin, has
been nativized in Sranan and is not considered a Dutch calque by our informants:
(9)
disi
e
go abra wan
a
tori
DEF.SG
story PROX IPFV go over one
boi
nanga
en
dagu.
boy
and
3SG
dog
‘This story is about a boy and his dog.’ (Sranan)
The presence of the Dutch item over in (7) above, rather than a Sarnami equivalent indicates that we
are dealing with a combination of pattern and matter borrowing. There is nevertheless an
important difference in the syntactic behaviour of over in (7) above and its Dutch and Sranan
equivalents in (8) and (9). The Dutch element over is not an adverbial/particle in the Sarnami
example above. Instead it functions as the head/possessed noun in a possessive structure in which
the NP laṟka is a possessor/dependent noun. This is evidenced by the presence of the postposition
ke, which functions as the ACC/DAT case marker and possessive linker. The Dutch element over has in
fact been relexified. It features exactly the same syntagmatic relations with adjacent elements as the
Sarnami locative noun uppar ‘top, upperside’. The process of relexification hinges on the
interlingual identification of the spatial meanings of Dutch over and Sarnami uppar rather than the
more abstract meaning of ‘about’. Compare (10):
(10)
cer-wá
ke
uppar
ab
ego
chair-DEF ACC/DAT upper.side now a
doos
dhar-al
hai.
box
put-PFVP
be.PRS
‘A box is now lying on top of the chair.’
Such combinations of matter and pattern borrowing of predicates and resulting adaptations are
common in our data. Many of these adaptations result from the differing argument structures of
Sarnami and Dutch. The former language has no complex predicates, in which an adverb/particle
with spatial semantics collocates with verbs to render all sorts of spatial and metaphoric meanings
as in the Germanic languages (cf. e.g. Müller 2002). The semantic overlap between Sarnami and
Dutch is, in this respect, the spatial meaning that the Dutch particle has.
The examples in this section seem to suggest that Dutch/Sranan contact in Sarnami approaches a
situation referred to by Van Coetsem (2000) as the “extended mode of borrowing” or by Auer (1999)
as the mode of “language mixing”. In this situation, bi- or multilingual utterances become a default
126
Language change in a multiple contact setting
speech form, a phenomenon that has been observed in African high contact settings as well
(Blommaert 1992; Auer 1999). Rather than involving a single base language into which non-native
material is inserted or as in conventional codeswitching, speakers navigate back and forth with
considerable ease between the grammatical systems of the languages in contact and adapt
grammatical structures of the languages in contact to each other in flexible and innovative ways.
Such contact strategies appear to be possible due to widespread multilingualism in the Sarnamispeaking community, and it also seems to provide the backdrop to the kind of structural borrowing
that we now turn to.
5.3 Structural borrowing: from SOV to SVO
We now turn to clausal word order, a grammatical domain in which language contact is very likely
to be responsible for an ongoing change in Sarnami. Pragmatically unmarked word order of basic
clauses is generally Subject – Object – Verb (SOV) in Sarnami (Marhé 1985: 26). Compare the
following sentence (O set in bold in the examples in this section):
(11)
ego
ego manai
a person
a
dosu
box
lá-il
hai
bring-PFVP be.PRS
‘A person has brought a box.’ (Sarnami)
Sarnami shares SOV basic word order with other Indic languages. SOV is found in languages of the
same genetic sub-grouping like Maithili, Magahi and Bhojpuri, cf. (12), as well as more distantly
related ones such as Hindi, cf. (13):
(12)
kuttaa bhii
dog
beng ke
khoje
lag-lak
also frog ACC/DAT look.for begin-PFV
‘The dog also began to look for the frog.’ (Bhojpuri)
(13)
pita
jī
father HON
əxbar
pəɽʰ
rəhe
newspaper.M
read PROG.M.PL
hɛ̃.
PRS.PL
‘Father is reading the newspaper.’ (Hindi; Kachru 2006: 251)
Word order is nevertheless quite flexible in many Indic languages, and may vary in accordance with
syntactic and pragmatic factors. In Hindi, for example, nominal constituents immediately preceding
the finite verb receive new information focus by default (Kachru 2006: 251). In turn, word orders
that diverge from the SOV basic pattern are exploited for the expression of contrastive focus. SVO
word order is therefore associated with contrastive focus of the object in Hindi (ibid. 159f):
127
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
(14)
d! ̄̃
Mohən ne
de
Mohan ERG
give give.PRF.F.PL
ə pnī
kitabẽ
self.F.PL book.F.PL
ʃyam
ko.
Shyam
ACC/DAT
‘Mohan has given his books to Shyam.’ (Hindi; Kachru 2006: )
SVO word order is also attested in our Sarnami field data. Compare the following sentence (15):
(15)
tab
u
dekh-il
ego
hol
jamin
meṉ.
then
DIST
see-PFVP
one
hole ground in
‘Then he saw a hole in the ground.’ (Sarnami)
Our data indicates, however, that Sarnami enjoys a much higher frequency of SVO than that
observed in our Indian control group. The high frequency of SVO in Sarnami is subject to little
variation between speakers and higher than could plausibly be attributed to the pragmatic function
of focus alone. Instead, SVO seems to be competing with SOV as an unmarked basic word order. We
suggest this development is induced by contact with Sranan and Dutch.
For the purposes of this study, we looked at the distribution of SVO word order in a sub-corpus of
frog stories in Sarnami, Bhojpuri and Maithili. The Sarnami sample (speakers indicated by an initial
‘S’) has a total of 4.995 words. It consists of eight speakers in the age cohorts of 15-20(S6), 21-30 (S2,
S3), 31-40 (S4), 41-50 (S1, S5, S7), 51+ (S8). The sample is balanced with respect to the socio-economic
backgrounds of speakers. It contains speakers from middle-school (S6), blue collar (S1, S2), lower
white collar, non-university educated (S3, S7, S8), and upper white collar, university educated (S4,
S5) occupational backgrounds. The Sarnami sample has an even geographical spread ranging from
Paramaribo (S1, S2), Wanica (S4, S5) and Commewijne (S7), to Nickerie (S3, S6). The sample consists
of three male (S2, S5, S7) and five female speakers (S1, S3, S4, S6, S8).
The Indian control group sample consists of four frog stories each in Bhojpuri (indicated by an
initial ‘B’, B1–B4) and Maithili (indicated by an initial ‘M’, M1-4). With a total of 5.058 words the
Indian sample is approximately the same size as the Sarnami sample. The speakers of this sample
are more homogenous in socio-economic terms as well as age-wise: They are all university students
between 21 and 25 years. There is however, a good geographical spread encompassing speakers
from rural and urban districts of the Indian federal states of Uttar Pradesh (B1), Bihar (B2, B4, M1,
M2, M3) and Jharkhand (B3, M4). Five speakers are male (B1, B2, M2, M3, M4) and three female (B3,
B4, M1).
Table 6 below presents the absolute (provided as a number) and relative (expressed as a
percentage over the total number of transitive clauses featuring overt objects) frequencies of SVO in
both samples. Total absolute and relative frequencies are given in the last row. Only prototypically
transitive clauses are considered in Table 6, excluding clauses involving Goal objects of the verb já
‘go’, inherent complements of conjunct verbs as well as object interrogative pronouns. Both
nominal and pronominal objects are counted. We also excluded clauses that were formally SVO, but
128
Language change in a multiple contact setting
in which the transitive object was separated from the rest of the clause by a prosodic break, since
such occurrences of SVO may be instances of afterthought topicalization of O.
At first glance, the relative frequencies in parentheses already point to a significant difference in
occurrences of SVO between Sarnami and the two Indian samples. The lowest individual relative
frequency of SVO in Sarnami (SP7 and SP8, 28%) is still more than twice as high then than that of
the highest score in the Indian sample (SP5, 12%). The relative frequency of the total in Sarnami
(36%) is nine times higher that of Bhojpuri/Maithili (4%). Furthermore, there is no Sarnami frog
story with no occurrence of SVO at all, while the Indian sample contains three stories with an SVO
relative frequency of 0%.
Table 6. Frequencies of SVO in "frog stories" compared
Sarnami
SVO/Total
N words
Bhojpuri/
SVO/Total
N words
1/13 (8%)
1/37 (3%)
1/36 (3%)
3/31 (10%)
3/26 (12%)
0/23 (0%)
0/24 (0%)
0/12 (0%)
9/202 (4%)
599
753
983
621
790
503
432
377
5.058
Maithili
S1
S2
S3
S4
S5
S6
S7
S8
Total
4/9 (44% )
7/16 (44%)
5/12 (42%)
9/22 (41%)
9/23 (39%)
10/32 (31%)
5/18 (28%)
5/18 (28%)
54/150 (36%)
434
778
544
569
601
820
563
686
4.995
B1
B2
B3
B4
M1
M2
M3
M4
Total
Two sided p-value (Fisher’s exact test): p<.0001
We subjected the total scores of the Sarnami vs. the Indian samples to Fisher’s exact test in order
to determine a two sided p-value4. Our research hypothesis is that the proportions of SVO differ
significantly from each other. Fisher’s exact test renders a p-value well below a significance level of
0.05.We conclude that our sample shows a significant difference in the frequency of SVO between
Sarnami and Bhojpuri/Maithili, hence the Surinamese and Indian subcorpora.We further
hypothesize that language contact is responsible for the larger degree of word order variability in
Sarnami than in its Indian sister languages.
4
Fisher’s exact test is used to examine the significance of the association (or contingency) between two kinds of
classification (in this case SVO and SOV). This test renders more exact results than the chi-square test when sample sizes
are relatively small, as in the present case. The relevant figures are placed in a 2x2 contingency table, hence four cells. In
our case the labels of the two columns are “Sarnami” and “Bhojpuri/Maithili” respectively (from left to right); the labels of
the two rows are SVO and SOV respectively (top to bottom). The entries into the four cells of the contingency table are the
following (from left to right and top to bottom), using the common notation: a=54, b=9, c=96, d=193, where a and c are the
total of occurrences of SVO and SOV respectively in Sarnami; and b and d are the total occurrences of SVO and SOV
respectively in Bhojpuri/Maithili. In a 2x2 contingency table the number of degrees of freedom is always 1 (hence there
are no degrees of freedom to report in Fisher's exact test).
129
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
The statistical evidence from our corpus is corroborated by other types of evidence: South African
Bhojpuri, an overseas Indic variety closely related to Sarnami, is also reported to have had a higherthan-usual presence of SVO clauses due to extensive contact with, and shift of the speaker
community to English (Meshtrie 1991: 183ff.). Further evidence that the higher occurrence of SVO in
Sarnami is likely to be contact-induced comes from word order in Sranan and Surinamese Dutch. In
the former language, SVO is the only acceptable word order in basic and complex clauses:
(16)
dan a
boi si
then the
boy
wan olo
see
a
hole
‘Then the boy saw a hole.’ (Sranan)
Both Surinamese and Metropolitan Dutch (as spoken in The Netherlands) feature an SVO word order
in basic clauses, cf. (17), albeit with a qualification: In periphrastic tenses and moods Dutch has SAUX-O-V word order, cf. (18). Since the transitive object still follows the inflected (auxiliary) verb
Dutch constructions like (18), we do not have a strong manifestation of SOV here either (the
auxiliary verb is heeft ‘has’):
(17)
het jongetj
ziet
een
gat
in een
boom
the boy
sees
a
hole
in a
tree
‘The boy sees a hole in a tree.’(Surinamese Dutch)
(18)
het jongetje heeft
een
gat
in een
boom
gezien.
the boy
a
hole
in a
tree
seen
has
‘The boy has seen a hole in a tree.’(Surinamese Dutch)
In Dutch complex clauses, however, the subordinate clause features a word order that is
unequivocally SOV in nature, as exemplified by (19), provided by a speaker of Surinamese Dutch:
(19)
ik
hou
deze vast
I
hold this
tot
ik die
tight until I
ball
that ball
terugkrijg.
get.back
‘I’ll hold on to this until I get back that ball.’
Interestingly, our Sarnami data does not feature any example of SVO word order in a subordinate
clause either. Subordinate clauses are invariably constructed with clause internal objects as in (20).
However, our subcorpus of frog stories contains too few subordinate clauses to allow any
conclusions in this respect at this point:
130
Language change in a multiple contact setting
(20)
elke
keer
jab
muṟ
ke
every time then head ACC/DAT
adami-yá luká-i
já
hai
man-DEF
go
be.PRS
hide-CONP
dekh-e
hai
tab
see-INF
be.PRS
then
'Because every time when he sees the (other's) head, the man goes into hiding.'
(Sarnami)
In sum, we have made the following observations regarding word order: Sarnami and its Indian
relatives both manifest SOV and SVO in main clauses. In the Indian languages, SVO is a
pragmatically marked word order employed to signal focus of the object and averages at 4% of all
main clauses featuring overt objects across the texts analyzed here. With an average percentage of
36%, Sarnami shows a much higher frequency of SVO than the Indian languages and we are led to
believe that this indicates two things: (1) SVO is no (more) a pragmatically marked word order in
Sarnami, and is instead competing with SOV as an unmarked word order; (2) contact with Sranan
and Dutch, both of which feature SVO in main clauses, is responsible for the higher frequency of
SVO in Sarnami main clauses. This kind of distributional extension of a once functionally more
specialized structure due to language contact is well known from other contact settings (cf. Matras
and Shabibi 2007 for similar changes in constituent order in Khuzistani Arabic).
Further analyses of our corpora should be able to establish whether this development is
parallelled by corresponding changes in constituent order in other syntactic units, e.g. verb-object
order in subordinate clauses, the order of head noun and relativizer in relative constructions, the
order of verb and adverbial phrase as well as main and auxiliary verb. But with respect to word
order in main clauses alone, the development in Sarnami is already a good example of the kind of
convergence that typifies Suriname as a linguistic area, in which pressure for change on a third
language is particularly strong when the two dominant languages Sranan and Dutch already
converge in their typological make-up.
6.
Discussion and conclusion
In section 5, we described some of the many changes that Sarnami has undergone, as illustrative of
the Asian immigrant languages of Suriname. We are currently investigating the same or very similar
phenomena in Surinamese Javanese and Surinamese Hakka. One question may be asked with respect
to Sarnami and its status as a product of language contact. Do the effects of koineization in Sarnami
have something in common with other language creation scenarios and creolization in particular?
131
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
To begin with, Sarnami has principally retained characteristics of its (Eastern) Indic typological
profile, which we only refer to in passing, e.g.:
−
the use of retroflex consonants and stress;
−
a TMA system that relies on inflection and the use of auxiliaries and generic verbs
−
a nominal system featuring long and short forms of nouns, prenominal adjectives as well as
the use of a classifier and postnominal determiners;
−
last but not least, we have shown that the language still features SOV word order, albeit in
competition from SVO.
In contrast, the Afro-Caribbean English lexifier Creoles spoken in Suriname and elsewhere in the
Atlantic basin show far more ingenious mixing of typological features from their European and
African source languages, as well as varying degrees of restructuring that appear to be the result of
the work of general cognitive principles of language acquisition. Some of these features are:
−
the existence of tone systems in some languages (e.g. Nigerian Pidgin, Faraclas 1985;
Saramaccan, Good 2004) next to English-like stress in others (e.g. Jamaican Creole, Gooden
2007);
−
TMA markers that are functionally reminiscent of the systems of the West African littoral
(Ameka and Kropp Dakubu 2008), grafted on to English-derived forms like ‘go’ and ‘done’
(e.g. Yakpo 2009: 191ff.);
−
the structure of English determiner phrases combined with the semantics of substrate
determiner systems (e.g. Aboh and Ansaldo 2007).
Nevertheless, there are also similarities. Both koineization and creolization involve a systemic
restructuring to varying degrees, often at the expense of inflectional and derivational morphology
of the input languages (cf. Plag 2003 for an overview). In Sarnami, we have seen the partial demise of
a multi-layer honorificity distinction expressed in verbal inflection and dedicated personal
pronouns. But such changes do not wholly call into question the genealogical link of Sarnami with
its contributing languages in the way that many Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles do, at least
with respect to their lexifier English.
A main cause of the less radical departure of a koine like Sarnami from its contributing languages
appears to be the structural and lexical similarity of these languages among each other. The high
degree of typological proximity, structural equivalence and mutual intelligibility would have made
it possible for the speakers of the different Indian varieties to codeswitch without significant
structural constraints, and swap lexical items and function words with each other (as captured by
the mechanism of ‘congruent lexicalization’, cf. Muysken 2000; Deuchar, Muysken and Wang 2007).
132
Language change in a multiple contact setting
In contrast, the emergence of the Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles of Suriname with their
English lexifier-superstrate and their Kwa and Bantu substrates involved typologically far more
disparate languages.
At the same time the socio-economic circumstances of the rise of the koine Sarnami were quite
different from those under which the Surinamese creole languages came into being. Despite the
difficult working conditions on the sugar estates, indentured labourers enjoyed a fair degree of
social and economic self-determination and could maintain their cultural and religious institutions
in Suriname including the use of their traditional languages. There was therefore far less of the
cultural, social, political and economic alienation and upheaval that Africans were subjected to
when they were deported to Suriname, and which the creation of creole languages with largely
European lexicons vividly attest to.
A characteristic that nevertheless sets Sarnami apart from its Indian input languages is the
amount of contact with Dutch and Sranan, both in the extent of codeswitching as well as in the
more lasting changes we have described.
There are two possibilities how Sarnami will develop in the Surinamese context. One is that
Sarnami shares the fate of its Caribbean relatives in Guyana and Trinidad and falls into disuse with
speakers eventually shifting to Sranan and Dutch. As pointed out in section 2, the initial stage of
language shift may at first not be discernible in its symptoms from extensive language contact in a
maintenance situation. Only time will tell whether some of the contact phenomena observed in
Sarnami are actually symptoms of a beginning language shift. Assessing the vitality of Sarnami will
crucially depend on whether we are able to identify significant age-related differences in the
language practices of Sarnami speakers.
The second possibility is that Sarnami is maintained as one of the languages of the Indiandescended population of Suriname. If this is the case, it is, however, also very likely that the
influence of Dutch and Sranan on Sarnami will continue to grow. As a consequence, larger parts of
the Indic lexicon might eventually be replaced and (certain subsystems of) the grammar may end up
being restructured more fundamentally. The end result may well be a language that will have
diverged more radically from its Indian relatives and may thus be more similar in nature to the
Surinamese creoles in the extent of restructuring involved. This shows that traditional labels are
not always adequate when we go beyond the realm of the canonical creoles involving European
lexifiers and (West) African substrate languages.
The present chapter illustrates the rich possibilities that Suriname offers with respect to the
study of creolization, koineization and other forms of language creation and contact-induced
change. In Yakpo and Muysken (in prep.), we bring together some of the strands of research in this
domain, interpreting them in a single comprehensive framework. To mention just a few, it is
necessary to compare the dynamics of Sarnami with that of the other languages of Asian origin, i.e.
Javanese, as well as Hakka. Furthermore, the Amerindian languages in Suriname (from the Arawak,
133
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
Cariban, and Warao families) have interacted with each other, with the Creole languages, and with
the colonial language Dutch.
Third, the various maroon Creole languages amongst them Ndyuka and Saramaccan, are
undergoing complex processes of koineization among each other, as well as convergence towards
the dominant coastal Creole language Sranan. Sranan has become a very diverse and possibly
“diffuse” language (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). Finally, Dutch itself has diversified in the
Suriname context, interacting with the other languages of the country, notably Sranan.
Abbreviations:
1 = 1st person; 3 = 3rd person; ACC/DAT = accusative-dative marker; COMP =
complementizer; CONP = conjunctive participle; DEF = definite article/marker; DIST = distal
demonstrative; ERG = ergative case; F = feminine gender; HON = honorific pronoun; HHON = high
honorific pronoun; INDF = indefinite article; INF = infinitive; IPFV = imperfective aspect; LOC =
locative preposition; M = masculine gender; MHON = mid-honorific pronoun; NEG = negator; OBJ =
object; PL = plural; POSS = possessive; PFVP = perfective participle; PRF = perfect tense/aspect; PROX
= proximate demonstrative; PROG = progressive aspect; PRS = present tense; PST = past tense; QUOT
= quotative marker; REFL = reflexive pronoun; REL = relative pronoun; SG = singular; SBJ = subject.
References
Abbi, A. 1997. Languages in contact in Jharkhand: A case of language conflation, language change
and language convergence. In Languages of Tribal and Indigenous Peoples of India: The Ethnic
Space, A. Abbi (ed), 131–148. Delhi: Motilal Benarsidass.
Aboh, E.A. and Ansaldo, U. 2007. The role of typology in language creation: A descriptive take. In
Deconstructing Creole,U. Ansaldo, S. Matthews and L. Lim (eds), 39–66. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Aikhenvald, A.Y. 2012. Language contact in language obsolescence. In Dynamics of contact-induced
language change, C. Chamoreau and I. Léglise (eds), 77–110. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Alleyne, M.C. 1980. Comparative Afro-American: An Historical-comparative Study of English-based AfroAmerican Dialects of the New World. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers.
Ameka, F.K. and Kropp Dakubu, M.E. 2008. Aspect and Modality in Kwa Languages. Vol. 100. (Studies in
Language, Companion Series). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Arends, J. 1995. Demographic Factors in the Formation of Sranan. In The early stages of creolization, Jacques
Arends (ed). 233–285. (Creole Language Library). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Arends, J., van den Berg, M. and Cardoso, H.C. (eds). 2009. Gradual Creolization: Studies Celebrating
Jacques Arends. (Creole Language Library). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Auer, P. 1998. Dialect levelling and the standard varieties in Europe. Folia Linguistica 32(1-2): 1–9.
134
Language change in a multiple contact setting
Auer, P. 1999. From codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects: Toward a dynamic typology of
bilingual speech. International Journal of Bilingualism 3(4): 309–332.
Backus, A. 2004. Convergence as a mechanism of language change. Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition 7(2): 179–181.
Barz, R. and Siegel, J. (eds). 1988. Language Transplanted: The Development of Overseas Hindi. Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz.
Bersselaar, D. van den, Ketelaars, H. and Dalhuisen, L.G. 1991. De komst van contractarbeiders uit Azië :
Hindoestanen en Javanen in Suriname. Leiden: Coördinaat Minderhedenstudies, RUL.
Bhatia, T.K. 1982. Trinidad Hindi: Three generations of a transplanted variety. Studies in the Linguistic
Sciences 11(2): 135–150.
Bickerton, D. 2009. Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bies, R. de , Martin, W. and Smedts, W. 2009. Prisma woordenboek Surinaams Nederlands. Houten:
Prisma Woordenboeken en Taaluitgaven.
Blommaert, J. 1992. Codeswitching and the exclusivity of social identities: Some data from Campus
Kiswahili. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 13(1-2): 57–70.
Boer, W. de. 1998. Het overzeese Bhojpuri in Guyana, Trinidad en Suriname. In Grepen uit 125 jaar
maatschappelijke ontwikkeling van Hindostanen: van Gya en Boodheea tot Lachmon en Djwalapersad,
M.S. Hassankhan and S. Hira (eds), 190–201. Paramaribo: IMWO Nauyuga and Amrit.
Boretzky, N. 1985. Regelentlehnung und Substrateinfluss in Kreolsprachen. In Akten des 2. Essener
Kolloquiums über ‘Kreolsprachen und Sprachkontakte’, N. Boretzky, W. Enninger and T. Stolz
(eds), 9–39. (Bochum-Essener Beiträge Zur Sprachwandelforschung (BEBS): 2). Bochum:
Brockmeyer.
Borowiak, T. 2007. Mixed conjunct verbs and other manifestations of Hindi Englishization.
Investigationes Linguisticae 5: 1–13.
Braunmüller, K. 2009. Converging Genetically Related Languages: Endstation Code Mixing? In
Convergence and Divergence in Language Contact Situations, K. Braunmüller and J. House (eds),
53–69. (Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism: 8). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bubenik, V. 1990. Structural influence of Arabic and Persian on the North-Western Indo-Aryan
languages. Journal of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association 14: 11–20.
Carlin, E.B. 2006. Feeling the need: the borrowing of Cariban functional categories into Mawayana
(Arawak). In Grammars in contact: A cross-linguistic perspective. A.Y. Aikhenvald and R.M.W.
Dixon (eds), (Explorations in Linguistic Typology). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carlin, E.B and Arends, J. (eds). 2002. Atlas of the Languages of Suriname. (Caribbean Series). Leiden:
KITLV Press.
Charry, E., Koefoed, G. and Muysken, P. 1983. De talen van Suriname: Achtergronden en ontwikkelingen.
Muiderberg: Coutinho.
Coetsem, F. van. 2000. A General and Unified Theory of the Transmission Process in Language Contact.
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.
135
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
Damsteegt, T. 1988. Sarnami: A living language. In Language transplanted: The development of overseas
Hindi, R.K. Barz and J. Siegel (eds), 95–119. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
Damsteegt, T. 1990. Hindi and Sarnami as literary languages of the East Indian Surinamese. In
Language versus dialect, M. Offredi (ed), 47–66. New Delhi: Manohar.
Damsteegt, T. and Narain, J. 1987. Ká Hál: Leerboek Sarnami (Surinaams Hindostaans). Den Haag:
Nederlands Bibliotheek en Lektuur Centrum.
Deuchar, M., Muysken, P. and Wang, S-L. 2007. Structured variation in codeswitching: Towards an
empirically based typology of bilingual speech patterns. International Journal of Bilingual
Education and Bilingualism 10(3): 298–340.
Faraclas, N.G. 1985. River Pidgin (Creole) English: Tone, stress or pitch-accent language? In Papers
from the 15th African linguistics conference, vol. ppl. 9 to Studies in African linguistics, R. Galen
Schuh (ed), 111–113. (Suppl. 9 to Studies in African Linguistic). Los Angeles: African Studies
Center and Dept. of Linguistics, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
Gambhir, S. K. 1981. The East Indian Speech Community in Guyana : A Sociolinguistic Study with Special
Reference to Koine Formation. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Gobardhan-Rambocus, L. and Sarmo, J. 1993. Het Surinaams Javaans. In Immigratie en ontwikkeling.
Emancipatieproces van contractanten, L. Gobardhan-Rambocus and M.S. Hassankhan (eds), 184–
201. Paramaribo: Anton de Kom Universiteit.
Gómez-Rendón, J. 2007. Grammatical borrowing in Paraguayan Guarani. In Grammatical borrowing in
cross-linguistic perspective, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 523–550. (Empirical Approaches to
Language Typology 38). Mouton de Gruyter.
Gómez-Rendón, J. 2008. Typological and Social Constraints on Language Contact: Amerindian Languages in
Contact with Spanish. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam.
Good, J.C. 2004. Tone and accent in Saramaccan: Charting a deep split in the phonology of a
language. Lingua 114: 575–619.
Gooden, S. 2007. Morphophonological properties of pitch accents in Jamaican Creole reduplication.
In Synchronic and diachronic perspectives on contact languages, M. Huber and V. Velupillai (eds),
67–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Haugen, E. 1972. The Analysis of Linguistic Borrowing. In The ecology of language. essays by Einar
Haugen, A.S. Dil (ed), 79–109. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Heine, B. 1990. Language policy in Africa. In Language policy and political development. B. Weinstein
(ed), 167-184. Norwood NJ: Ablex Publ.
Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2003. On contact-induced grammaticalization. Studies in Language 27(3): 529–
572.
Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2010. Language contact and grammatical change. In The Handbook of language
contact, R. Hickey (ed), , 529–572. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heinold, S. 2009. Derivational morphology under the influence of language contact in French and
German. Journal of Language Contact 2(2): 68–84.
136
Language change in a multiple contact setting
Hira, S. 1998. 125 jaar sociaal-economische ontwikkeling van de Hindostanen in Suriname. In Grepen
uit 125 jaar maatschappelijke ontwikkeling van Hindostanen: van Gya en Boodheea tot Lachmon en
Djwalapersad, M.S. Hassankhan and S. Hira (eds), 10–24. Paramaribo: IMWO Nauyuga and
Amrit.
Hoff, B.J. 1995. Language, contact, war, and Amerindian historical tradition: The special case of the
Island Carib. In Wolves from the sea: Readings in the archaeology and anthropology of the Island
Carib, N. L Whitehead (ed), 37–60. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Horstmann, M. 1969. Sadani: Bhojpuri Dialect Spoken in Chotanagpur. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Hout, R. van and Muysken, P. 1994. Modeling lexical borrowability. Language Variation and Change
6(01): 39–62.
Huttar, G.L. 1983. On the study of Creole lexicons. In Studies in Caribbean languages, L.D. Carrington
(ed), 82–89. St. Augustine, Trinidad: Society for Caribbean Linguistics.Huttar, G.L, Essegbey, J.
and Ameka, F.K. 2007. Gbe and other West African sources of Suriname creole semantic
structures. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 22(1): 57–72.
Huttar, G.L. and Velantie, F.J. 1997. Ndyuka-Trio Pidgin. In Contact languages: A wider perspective, vol.
17, S. Grey Thomason (ed), 99–124. (Creole Language Library). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kachru, Y. 2006. Hindi. (London Oriental and African Language Library). Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Kale, M. 1998. Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British
Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kerswill, P. 2002. Koineization and accommodation. In The handbook of language variation and change,
J.K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, N. Schilling-Estes and P. Kerswill (eds), 669–702. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Kishna, S. 1979. Lexikale interferentie in het Sarnami: Een sociolinguistische benadering. MA thesis.
University of Amsterdam.
Kishna, S. 1981. The Recipient State construction in Sarnami. Perspectives on functional grammar. 135–
156.
Kleine, C.M. de. 1999. A Morphosyntactic Analysis of Surinamese Dutch as Spoken by the Creole Population of
Paramaribo, Suriname. City University of New York.
Klerk, C.J.M. de. 1953. De immigratie der Hindostanen in Suriname. Amsterdam: Urbi et Orbi.
Koning, A. de. 1998. Als jij Ram bent... : veranderingen in het leven van Hindostaanse vrouwen in
Paramaribo vanaf de jaren vijftig. In Grepen uit 125 jaar maatschappelijke ontwikkeling van
Hindostanen: van Gya en Boodheea tot Lachmon en Djwalapersad, M.S. Hassankhan and S. Hira
(eds), 159–189. Paramaribo: IMWO Nauyuga and Amrit.
Kühl, K.H. and Petersen, H.P. 2009. Converging verbal phrases in related languages: A case study
from Faro-Danish and Danish-German language contact situations. In Convergence and
divergence in language contact situations, K. Braunmüller (ed. and introd.) and J. House (eds),
101–124. (Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism: 8). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
137
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
Lefebvre, C. 1993. The role of relexification and syntactic reanalysis in Haitian Creole:
Methodological aspects of a research program. In Africanisms in Afro-American language
varieties. S. Mufwene (ed), 254-279. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Lefebvre, C. 1998. Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of Grammar: The Case of Haitian Creole. (Cambridge
Studies in Linguistics 88). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marhé, R.M. 1985. Sarnami byakaran: Een elementaire grammatica van het Sarnami. Leidschendam:
Stichting voor Surinamers.
Masica, C.P. 1993. The Indo-Aryan Languages. (Cambridge Lamguage Surveya). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Matras, Y. and Sakel, J. (eds). 2007. Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. (Empirical
Approaches to Language Typology 38). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Matras, Y. and Shabibi, M. 2007. Grammatical borrowing in Khuzistani Arabic. In Grammatical
borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 137–149. (Empirical
Approaches to Language Typology 38). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Mayer, M. 1969. Frog, Where Are You? New York: Dial Press.
McGregor, R.S. 1995. Outline of Hindi Grammar. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McWhorter, J.H. 2005. Defining Creole. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meakins, F. 2011. Case-Marking in Contact: The Development and Function of Case Morphology in Gurindji
Kriol. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Meshtrie, R. 1991. Language in Indenture: A Sociolinguistic History of Bhojpuri-Hindi in South Africa.
Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
Meyerhoff, M. 2009. Replication, transfer, and calquing: Using variation as a tool in the study of
language
contact.
Language
Variation
and
Change
21(03).
297–317.
doi:10.1017/S0954394509990196.
Migge, B. 2007. Code-switching and social identities in the Eastern Maroon community of Suriname
and French Guiana. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(1): 53–73.
Migge, B. and Léglise, I. 2011. On the emergence of new language varieties: The case of the Eastern
Maroon Creole in French Guiana. In Variation in the Caribbean: From Creole Continua to
Individual Agency, L. Hinrichs and J. Farquharson (eds), 181–199. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mohan, P. 1990. The rise and fall of Trinidad Bhojpuri. International Journal of the Sociology of Language
85: 21–30.
Müller, S. 2002. Complex Predicates : Verbal Complexes, Resultative Constructions, and Particle Verbs in
German. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Muysken, P. 1981. Halfway between Quechua and Spanish: The case for relexification. In Historicity
and variation in creole studies, A. Valdman and A. Highfield (eds), 52–78. Ann Arbor: Karoma.
Muysken, P. 1997. Media Lengua. In Contact languages: A wider perspective, vol. 17, S. Grey Thomason
(ed), 365–426. (Creole Language Library). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Muysken, P. 2000. Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
138
Language change in a multiple contact setting
Myers-Scotton, C. 1993. Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa. (Studies in Language
Contact). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Omondi, L.N. and Sure, E.K. 1997. The Kenyan language policy: A historical review and research
agenda. In Proceedings of the LiCCA Workshop in Dar es Salaam, vol. 2, B. Smieja (ed), 97–118.
(LiCCA Papers (LiCCAP)). Duisburg: Languages in Contact and Conflict in Africa (LiCCA),
Gerhard Mercator University.
Le Page, R.B. and Tabouret-Keller, A. 1985. Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and
Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plag, I. (ed). 2003. Phonology and Morphology of Creole Languages. (Linguistische Arbeiten 478).
Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Poplack, S. 2012. What does the Nonce Borrowing Hypothesis hypothesize? Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition 15(3): 644–648.
Poplack, S, Zentz, L. and Dion, N. 2012. Phrase-final prepositions in Quebec French: An empirical
study of contact, code-switching and resistance to convergence. Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition 15(02): 203–225.
Postma, J. 1990. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Roberts, S.J. 2005. The Emergence of Hawai’i Creole English in the Early 20th Century: The
Socialhistorical Context of Creole Genesis. PhD thesis, University of Stanford.
Ross, M.D. 1996. Contact-induced change and the comparative method: Cases from Papua New
Guinea. In The comparative method reviewed: regularity and irregularity in language change, M.
Durie and M. Ross (eds), 180–217. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rybka, K. 2009. Semantics of Topological Relators in Lokono and a Sketch of Their Morphosyntax.
MA thesis, University of Amsterdam.
Sakel, J. 2007. Types of loan: Matter and pattern. In Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic
Perspective, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 15–29. (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology
(EALT): 38). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Saksena, B. 1971. Evolution of Awadhi (a Branch of Hindi). 2nd ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Santokhi, E. and Nienhuis, L.J.A. 2004. Sarnami woordenboek: Een tweetalig woordenboek van het
Surinaams Hindostaans. Den Haag: Communicatiebureau Sampreshan.
Saunders, K. 1984. Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834-1920. London: Croom Helm.
Schuchardt, H.E.M. 1914. Die Sprache der Saramakkaneger in Surinam. Amsterdam: J. Müller.
Shukla, S. 1981. Bhojpuri Grammar. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Siegel, Jeff. 1985. Plantation languages in Fiji. Ph.D dissertation, Australian National University.
Smith, N. 1987. The Genesis of the Creole Languages of Surinam. PhD thesis, University of
Amsterdam.
Smith, N. 2002. The history of the Surinamese creoles II : Origin and differentiation. In Atlas of the
languages of Suriname, E.B. Carlin and J. Arends (eds), 131–151. Leiden: KITLV Press.
139
Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken
Taylor, D.R. and Hoff, B.J. 1980. The linguistic repertory of the Island-Carib in the seventeenth
century: The men’s language: A Carib Pidgin? International Journal of American Linguistics
46(4): 301–312.
Thoden van Velzen, H.U.E. and Wetering, W. van. 1988. The Great Father and the Danger: Rreligious Cults,
Material Forces, and Collective Fantasies in the World of the Surinamese Maroons. Dordrecht: Foris
Publications.
Thoden van Velzen, H.U.E. and Wetering, W. van and Elst, D. van der. 2004. In the Shadow of the Oracle:
Religion as Politics in a Suriname Maroon Society. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press.
Thomason, S.G. and Kaufman, T. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkley:
University of California Press.
Thomason, Sarah Grey. 2001. Language contact: an introduction. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press.
Thurgood, G. and Li, F. 2007. From Malay to Sinitic: The restructuring of Tsat under intense language
contact. In SEALS XII Papers from the 12th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society
2002, R. Wayland, J. Hartmann and P. Sidwell (eds), 129–136. (Pacific Linguistics Series E, vol.
4). Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
Tiwari, U.N. 1960. The Origin and Development of Bhojpuri. Calcutta: The Asiatic Society.
Tjon Sie Fat, P.B. 2002. Kejia: A Chinese language in Suriname. In Atlas of the languages of Suriname,
E.B. Carlin and J. Arends (eds), 233–248. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Tjon Sie Fat, P.B. 2009. Chinese New Migrants in Suriname: The Inevitability of Ethnic Performing.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Veiga, M. 1999. Language Policy in Cape Verde: A Proposal for the Affirmation of Kriolu. Praia: Capeverdean
Creole Inst. (CCI).
Verma, S. 1966. The Structure of the Magahi Verb. Delhi: Manohar.
Vruggink, H. 1987. Het Surinaams Javaans: Een introduktie. OSO 2. 35–48.
Winford, D. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Winford, D. and Migge, B. 2007. Substrate influence on the emergence of the TMA systems of the
Surinamese creoles. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 22(1): 73–99.
Wolfowitz, C. 2002. Javanese speech styles in Suriname. In Atlas of the languages of Suriname, E.B.
Carlin and J. Arends (eds), 233–248. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Yadav, R. 1996. A Reference Grammar of Maithili. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Yakpo, K. 2009. A Grammar of Pichi. Berlin/Accra: Isimu Media.
Yakpo, K. and P. Muysken (eds). In prep. Boundaries and Bridges: Language contact in multilingual
ecologies. (Language Contact and Bilingualism [LCB]). Berlin: De Gruyter.
140