Review Essay:
Atlas
of the Languages of Suriname
Edited by Eithne B. Carlin and Jacques
Arends
Published by KITLV Press, Leiden, The
Netherlands.
ISBN 90 6718 196 X. Price: 37.50 Euros
by
Janette Bulkan Forte
Georgetown, Guyana
This Review Essay is also available, with
numbered pagination in Adobe
PDF (310 Kb).
2002 has been a landmark year for the publication of studies on the
languages of the Guianas. In addition to the
Atlas of the Languages of Suriname, volumes 26/27 of the journal
Amerindia were issued, devoted to the
languages of French Guiana. In Guyana, to which belongs the distinction of
having “the highest number of Amerindian groups in one country in the entire
Caribbean,” (and the greatest indigenous population), and not Suriname, as
asserted by Atlas editor, Carlin
(43), publications during the year included a
Scholar’s Dictionary and Grammar of the Wapishana Language, and the
on-going compilation into booklets of Makusi-English stories by Makusi
teachers, disseminated also on Radio Paiwomak, a community radio station
located in Annai, North Rupununi.1
More recent additions (2003) to publications on Makusi are
Let’s Read and Write Makusi: A Transition
Manual and My First Grammar Book
by Miriam Abbott. Some of the contributors to the
Atlas (K. Boven, M. Patte) and Amerindia
(F. Grenand, M. Patte, F. Queixalós, O. Renault-Lescure) were also contributors
to a seminal collection of papers on indigenous languages of Amazonia,
As línguas amazônicas hoje, that came
out in 2000, and which included reviews of the status of indigenous languages
in the three Guianas.
Suriname’s linguistic diversity, however, encompasses not only Old
and New World languages but seven original creole languages. The
Atlas’s nine contributors comprehensively
document this small nation’s polyglot status. Nineteen languages survive in the
present, though Carlin is not sanguine about the prospects for survival of four
of the eight remaining Amerindian languages:
…Akuriyo, Tunayana, Sikiiyana and Mawayana will die out
in the coming two or three decades, since they are no longer being
transmitted to children. Rather, their children learn Trio, the dominant
languages in the villages, Kwamalasamutu and Tepu, where these languages are
spoken. [Carlin:43]
It is a measure of the world dominance of the English language,
however, that although it is not listed as one of Suriname’s 19 languages,
English is the medium for all 11 essays/chapters in the
Atlas. This is not hard to understand since, as the chapters by
Arends, Smith and Bruyn document, the bulk of the vocabulary of ‘Sranan tongo’,
Suriname’s lingua franca, and of four
of the six Maroon languages, derives from the English language. In addition,
English is everywhere:
On television, programmes
such as sports shows and the daily news are presented in Dutch, but foreign
(especially North American) programmes are broadcast in the original language,
that is, without any subtitling or synchronization. The effect of this
situation has become evident over the last few years, since English is gaining
popularity, and competence in English within the general Surinamese public has
increased dramatically. [Carlin and Arends:285]
Evidence of Suriname’s linguistic diversity abounds in the pages of
the Atlas. Another
Atlas contributor, Tjon Sie Fat, declares
that, “Paramaribo, with up to a dozen languages, is a sociolinguist’s paradise.
Sranan and Dutch dominate, with Dutch being used in formal and Sranan in
informal situations. Stylistically simplified Sranan is also the main
inter-ethnic language” (237).
Both specialists and generalists interested in the history, culture
and linguistics of the Guiana Shield countries will delight in the
Atlas, since much of the information
contained in this volume is not only pertinent to Suriname. Readers familiar with
the pre-colonial and colonial history of the other nation states within this
geopolitical region will note many parallels with Suriname’s, and in this lies
the Atlas’ comparative value. The
book also contains 20 maps, and 50 photographs and illustrations, drawn from
archival and contemporary sources, bibliographies, a glossary of linguistic
terms and an index. It is an invaluable source of information for students and
researchers, and Surinamese at home and in the diaspora, interested in their
country’s checkered history and its links with the circum-Caribbean area in
general.
The volume is divided into three parts, arranged chronologically
from indigenous to invented and finally to imported and adapted languages. The
first part consists of three chapters on the eight surviving Amerindian peoples
and their languages; the four chapters in part two focus on the seven creole
languages; while Part III contains four chapters on the four Eurasian
languages.
In the Introduction by Eithne B. Carlin and Jacques Arends, they
explain that the aim of this volume is twofold: “first, to introduce the reader
to the linguistic complexity that abounds in Suriname, and second, to afford
him/her insight into the genesis, evolution, and salient linguistic features of
the languages and language families that are represented there” (1). They note
that while much has been written on Suriname, especially on its political and
economic developments, “few exhaustive studies have been carried out on the
multi-facetted cultural aspects of Suriname”. In compiling this atlas, Carlin
and Arends note, “the authors were often faced with gaps in information–only
few of the Surinamese languages can boast a descriptive grammar or up-to-date
dictionary” (1). The hope of the editors is that others will take it upon
themselves to fill in these gaps by means of future research.
Chapter I, The Native
Population: Migrations and Identities by Eithne B.
Carlin and Karin M. Boven is an historical-anthropological account of
Suriname’s first peoples. Through historical and ethnographic sources, they
reconstruct and chronicle the indigenous experience from first Contact to the
present. This opening chapter sets the stage for the more focused linguistic
discussions of Cariban and Arawakan languages in the following two chapters. It
is invaluable also for its comprehensive listing of sources for the early
history of Suriname (and Guyana). The text is elegiac in parts–including a roll
call of 13 named nations encountered by Europeans, but who did not survive “the
collision of cultures” (12) and were rendered extinct by the 19th
century. Carlin and Boven trace the main lines of this collision, through which
indigenous peoples here, as everywhere else, were destined to suffer the impact
of colonialism, some of the survivors becoming its agents over time.
On the Amerindian side, they learned from both first hand and
related encounters to differentiate among the European nations seeking a
foothold on the ‘Wild Coast’ as the Guiana shoreline was called. From the rate
at which small European outposts were raided and razed by rivals, the
Amerindians would have guessed that these skirmishes were part of a larger
geopolitical battle, which they might have hoped to turn to their benefit. In
Chapter IV, Arends mentions the so-called ‘Indian wars’ (1678-1684) when “the
Amerindians, sensing an opportunity to get rid of the colonizing power, started
attacking them fiercely” (121). The colony was reduced to “a state of complete
chaos” (122), giving an impetus to marronage in that period.
However, the terms of trade, then and now, were stacked in favour of
the economically powerful: non-timber forest products and gold ornaments, later
Amerindian slaves, were bartered for European manufactured goods and trinkets,
while at the same time, the traders were firmly establishing a more permanent
foothold within indigenous territories, starting the process of displacement of
local peoples that continues into the present.
Marronage or the establishment of
villages in the forest by escaped African slaves began in the 17th
century, also resulting over time in pushing Amerindian groups further inland.
The Maroons monopolised trade between the interior Amerindians and the coastal
Europeans and, in one of many fascinating vignettes in the
Atlas, Carlin presents an excerpt from an almost extinct “pidgin
language that was based on Ndyuka, itself a creole language” which evolved in
order to facilitate trading between the Maroons, and the Trio, Wayana, and
Caribs” (24-25). Many invaluable excerpts by the leading authorities in the
field are included as boxes in all chapters: in this chapter, one on ceremonial
dialogue among the Trio, others on the classification of animal and vegetable
food in Wayana, and participant identification in Carib.
For the eight indigenous nations that have survived into the
present, the colonial and post-colonial legacy has been bitter: displacement
from their territories, socio-economic and political marginalisation,
replacement of their belief systems by a proselytising Christian faith,
disease, and, more recently, the futile war waged in the interior from 1986 to
1991, in which the Amerindians were used as pawns in a larger power struggle.
The chapter hints at the limitations of development aid projects, and the
continuing failure by the State to address the centuries-old demand for
recognition of indigenous land rights. The pitfalls in attempting to
communicate across languages and distinct philosophical systems, the disconnect
between coastal and interior Amerindians, and the positioning of various
interest groups makes for a fascinating read. For example, Carlin and Boven
illustrate “a veritable Babel” that ensued at a meeting convened by the
Government in 2000 to discuss the question of land rights:
The Trio and
Wayana formed one group with one spokesman, the granman (paramount chief) of the Trio. Indeed great was the shock
and indignation when the president announced the
granman of the Trio to be the head of all the Amerindians in
Suriname, a decision that after the meeting was quickly reversed for the
Kari’na and Arawaks… Since the Trio interpreters are more competent in Dutch
than in Sranan, they used Dutch, which then had to be translated into Sranan
before being translated into Ndyuka or Saramaccan for the Maroons who use less
Dutch: the Trio, for example, in contrast to the Wayana, consider Sranan to be
a low prestige language… The coastal Kari’na and Arawaks, with the exception of
the leadership of the Amerindian organisations, are more competent in Sranan
than Dutch. [41]
One small
correction should be made however: Note 45, on page 45 states that “Warao is,
however, still spoken in Venezuela and possibly by a few old speakers in
neighbouring Guyana.” There are approximately 5,000 Warau in Guyana, of whom at
least one-third speak their language.
Chapter II, Patterns of
language, patterns of thought: The Cariban languages, by Eithne B. Carlin is
another of the many gems in this volume. It presents a synoptic overview of the
six Cariban languages spoken in Suriname: Kari’na, Trio, Wayana, Akuriyo,
Tunayana and Sikiiyana, and discusses the underlying philosophy and structural
properties that distinguish the 34-60 Cariban languages that have been studied.
Carlin reminds us that areal culture patterns are not matched by linguistic
similarities. The reader can marvel at the complex indigenous world in which
very dissimilar languages are spoken by neighbouring groups, a phenomenon that
is as true of coastal Amerindians (Arawaks and Kari’na and the now extinct
Warao) as of the interior peoples.
Carlin’s discussion of ‘evidentiality, truth and knowledge,’ and of
the linguistic underpinning of indigenous philosophy should be read by anyone
who questions the intrinsic value of preserving languages spoken by small
numbers of marginalised indigenous people. In this world, a constant delicate
balance has to be negotiated between the fierce individualism of autonomous
adults and communal responsibility, all encoded in language. This essay
complements Peter Riviere’s groundbreaking corpus
on lowland tropical Amazonian societies, and some of his insights are discussed
by Carlin.>>>
The richness of Cariban languages, ranging from marking how an
object is located in space, the expression of discrepancy between appearance and
reality by means of a grammatical marker, the verbalising of nouns, the
nominalising of verbs, the distinctions between a third person coreferential
and non-coreferential possessive form, the marking of tense not only on verbs
but on nouns and nominal subcategories, to sound symbolism are a treasure trove
for linguist and layman alike. Consider the following linguistic feature of
nouns, and its implications for the way the world is viewed:
Thus while we
easily assign to a noun in English such features as time-stable, concrete or
abstract, a noun in the Cariban languages may have quite different properties,
that is the semantic equivalents of many nouns are not definable in the same
way. In these languages there exists an all-pervading idea of causation:
objects do not just exist, they are caused to be there, or they are the result
of a process: for example, where we see the noun phrase ‘my child’ as an entity
in and of itself, the Trio, for one, see it as a result of the process of
conceiving and giving birth and encode it accordingly as
ji-n-muku (literally: my borne one). [50-51]
The contrast with Indo-European languages and Western philosophical
notions is most evident in notions of soul and being. Carlin provides the linguistic
evidence to support the assertions of Viveiros de Castro (1998) on the
integrity of the spirit/soul as the unifying element that is manifested in
physical diversity. That is, the outer casing of an anima can have various
forms, that of a human or of a range of animals. The ecological implications of
a world view that is respectful of all manifestations of life are increasingly
being explored by a range of disciplines, from natural resources management to
medicine.
Another minor caveat: Carlin’s claim for Hixkaryana, (“Amazonian
languages in general exhibit typological features that are found but seldom in
the languages of the world – the Cariban language Hixkaryana of Brazil shot to
fame because of its unusual basic word order, Object-Verb-Subject (OVS)” [47])
holds true also for Makushi, another Cariban OVS language spoken in Guyana and
Brazil and described by Miriam Abbott (1991, see also Emanuele Amodio and
Vicente Pira 1996).
Chapter III, The Arawak
Language, by Marie-France Patte is a synchronic
descriptive linguistic piece on the coastal Arawak (lokono) language. A final
inset box on Mawayana is included: an Arawakan language discussed by Carlin.
The two editors’ notes at the end of the chapter are intriguingly cryptic,
hinting at the battles that rage in the world of academia. Patte’s description
is enriched by her on-going research among Arawak speakers in French Guiana and
Guyana. Lokono Arawak is closely related to Garifuna, spoken in Honduras,
Guatemala and Belize, and to Guajiro spoken in Venezuela (Payne:374). The
geographical range of Arawakan languages extends from central America to Guaná
in Paraguay and Terena in southern Brazil. Patte concludes:
The Arawak language, which
was attested early on in the conquest is among the few survivors of the
indigenous languages of the Caribbean area. It shows a rich grammatical
structure and specific semantic categories that are prevalent in other
Amazonian languages too. Its original predicative strategy, with different
marking for the core arguments, appears to be sensitive to the active/stative
parameter. The other participants, as well as the circumstantial complements,
are introduced in the sentence by means of a postposed relational element, or
relator. A basic word order can easily be identified, but it can be modified in
various ways for discourse strategic purposes. [110]
Chapter IV, The history of
the Surinamese creoles I: A sociohistorical survey
by Jacques Arends moves the story to the sui
generis creole languages of Suriname, principally the development of
Sranan, the lingua franca. The four chapters in this section are a
must-read for any introductory class on the ethnogenesis of creole languages or
on marronage in the New World. Remarkably, not one, but seven creole
languages, were invented in Suriname, six by the Maroons or escaped African
slaves, and one by plantation slaves. Here is Adrienne Bruyn’s deft summary of
the linguistic history of creole languages in Suriname:
The various creole languages
of Suriname are assumed to have a common origin in a contact language in use on
the plantations in the coastal area of Suriname in the latter half of the 17th
century. The lexicon of this variety consisted for the larger part of words
derived from English, or more specifically, 17th century dialects of
English. Over the course of time, it developed into present-day Sranan on the
one hand, and, on the other hand, various language varieties spoken among
Maroon or Bush Negro groups, made up of former slaves who had escaped from the
plantations and settled in the forests of the interior. [155]
Paralleling the chronology set out in the first chapter, the
colonial history recounted in Chapters IV and V – that included traffic in
human bodies, both Amerindian and African; the switch to an ‘agro-industrial
economy’ underpinned by a harsh slave labour system with resulting high
mortality rates, insurrections and marronage; free movement of the
planter class; extensive layovers in various ports by English sailors; and
Moravian and other missionary activity – extended beyond the geographical
boundaries of present day Suriname. Taken together, these chapters also provide
a comprehensive listing of the major historical and linguistic sources on the
period.
The first settlers in Suriname date back to 1651 when 100 English
settlers arrived from Barbados to begin a colony along the Suriname River.
However, Africans were in Suriname before 1651–“In the first half of the 17th
century there were at least 13 attempts at settlement in the ‘greater Guiana’ area”
(115). In consequence, Arends hypothesises that “there is a possibility that
some form of creole had started to develop prior to the arrival of the English
in 1651” (116). Be that as it may, Arends notes that “as far as the lexicons of
the Surinamese creoles are concerned, it is an undisputed fact that English has
played a major role in their composition. The proportion of English-derived
basic vocabulary has been calculated at some 75% for Sranan and some 50% for
Saramaccan” (117). The Portuguese-based lexical element in the Surinamese
creoles… has been calculated at some 4% for Sranan and some 35% for
Saramaccan (118).
Among the many linguistic and other influences on creole languages
mentioned are regional dialects of English until the 1690s, Sephardic Jews from
Brazil, Guyana and Europe between 1665 and 1667, the Dutch religious sect, the
Labadists, and French Huguenots.In
terms of the Jewish population, Arends notes, “from the 1670s until the second
half of the 18th century, the Jews formed no less than one-third of
the entire European population” (119). Although the Dutch conquered the colony
in 1667, the Dutch did not form a majority of the European population until
well into the 19th century. English continued to be spoken until
well into the 18th century, and, as mentioned earlier, English
sailors apparently spent considerable periods in Suriname.
While European languages influenced the lexicon, African languages
spoken along the Slave Coast (the coastal areas of Togo, Benin and Eastern
Ghana) and ‘Loango’ (the coastal areas of Zaire, Congo and Northern Angola)
provided the template of the creole languages. Arends notes that in an
eight-year period, the slave population had increased ten-fold: in 1683, there
were an estimated 1,000 African slaves in Suriname. By 1691, almost 10,000 more
had been transported to Suriname. The forced system of labour made Suriname
(and all plantation colonies) a veritable death factory: while an estimated
215,000 Africans were transported to Suriname between 1651 and 1830, the Black
population did not exceed 50,000 at the time of emancipation in 1863. Arends
writes that “even as late as 1750, three out of every four blacks in Suriname
(apart from the Maroons) had been born in Africa. This means that one hundred
years after the beginning of the colony, Sranan was still a second rather than
a first language for three quarters of the population” (123). Given this rate
of population turnover, it was no wonder that “in the early 18th
century, Sranan had not yet crystallized into a fully stabilized creole” (124),
a development Arends dates to around 1775.
The uniqueness of Suriname is that while slavery was equally harsh
everywhere, Maroons established successful strongholds in the Guiana forests.
The existence of Maroons in the Suriname interior was recorded from the 1670s.
In 1700 there were an estimated 1,000 Maroons, a number that had increased to
an estimated 6,000 by 1750.By 1765,
the Maroons had been pacified and peace treaties signed. From that time on, the
reporting of escaped slaves became obligatory. Emancipation did not come for
Surinamese slaves until 1863, thirty years after abolition in the English
colonies.
There are many similarities between the colonial history of Dutch
and British Guiana – including the system of sugar production based on
plantation slavery, Moravian missionary work among indigenous and later other
groups in both colonies, the importation of indentured labour from Asia (which
began earlier in British Guiana), and the declaration of compulsory primary
education in 1876 in both territories. On that date, Dutch was officially
designated as the language of instruction in Surinamese schools. Between the
1880s and 1940s, an ‘anti-Sranan’ campaign was in force, reinforcing the
language’s low social status. In 1954, Suriname was granted partial autonomy,
followed in 1975 by independence. An exodus of 200,000 Surinamese to Holland
followed, and the import of that development for language change is explored in
Part III of the Atlas.
Chapter V, The history of
the Surinamese creoles II: Origin and Differentiation by Norval Smith is written in a didactic ‘Frequently Asked
Questions’ style. It covers the same ground as the preceding chapter, but
assumes the stance of an investigative reporter on the issue of the putative
origins of these creole languages. It also alludes to some scholarly
disagreements. Both writers explore the genesis of Sranan: Arends sees it as
sui generis, emerging in Suriname, while Smith explores the
sociohistorical context in more detail. Smith posits that Sranan had its roots
in a pan-Caribbean English-derived pidgin, containing African lexical items,
that was creolised during the 30 years between 1651 and 1680. He supports his
arguments for an original pidgin language by referring to the use of Kari’na by
the earliest group of Maroons (around 1660), and a parallel phenomenon in the
genesis of the Garifuna language, originally of St Vincent, but now spoken by
the transported Garifuna population in Central America. All this scholarly
speculation suggests that the jury is still out on whether the substrate
language of these creoles was English or African.
Smith has an investigator’s bent, and comes up with racy
formulations, enclosed in quotation marks, perhaps because his hypotheses are
not yet part of the dominant narrative: in addition to ‘Caribbean Plantation
Pidgin English,’ ‘Ingredient X’ is the term he uses to describe ‘a sizable
group of African lexical items’, and so on. Smith posits that Sranan, ‘Jamaican
Maroon Spirit Language’ and Krio in Sierra Leone are all derived from
‘Caribbean Plantation Pidgin English’ (134). He argues:
Virtually all the
creoles spoken in the Caribbean area, together with Guyanese, and the various
creoles of Suriname, share such a number of striking features of grammar,
phonology and lexicon, that these parallels cannot be explained as accidental.
[134]
The two writers
also disagree on the provenance of the Jewish migration into Suriname, with
Smith maintaining that the linguistic evidence points to Pernambuco in Brazil
being the point of origin. He argues convincingly that “a solid linguistic
piece of evidence must always take precedence over a sociohistorical construct”
(137), particularly since archival sources are few. Smith sets out the seven
named forms of creole, into three groups:
1. the language of the former plantation
area – Sranan;
2. the language of Maroons who fled
between 1712 and 1800 – Ndyuka, Aluku, Paramaccan and Kwinti; and
3. the language of Maroons who fled
between 1690 and 1710 – Saramaccan and Matawai.
Saramaccan and
Matawai described by Smith as ‘Western Maroon’ languages have many words
derived from Portuguese, while the other four, ‘Eastern Maroon’ languages,
closely resemble each other and are also referred to as Ndyuka (155).
Smith lists two other Maroon groups: Karboegers later called
Muraato, who spoke Kari’na (the first Maroon group) and Brosu-nengre or
Brooskampers. Smith notes that the word kabúgru
was glossed in a 1779 Saramaccan vocabulary as ‘nation living on the Coppename,
which is derived from Indians and Negroes’ (142), and that its etymology
perhaps goes back to a Tupi word. Corroboration for its Brazilian derivation
comes from the fact that this word also appears in a number of travellers’
accounts of the interior peoples on the British Guiana/Brazil frontier, and was
used to describe the same inter-ethnic mixture. ‘Cobungrus’ were described by
Everard Im Thurn as “half-breeds between negroes and Indians… These latter
retain the many good qualities of the Indian, and to these they add the few
good qualities, such as physique and strength of the West Indian negro” (1883:
8). Im Thurn’s unabashed racism was common in the writings of the colonial
period.
Chapter VI, the structure
of the Surinamese creoles by Adrienne Bruyn is an
excellent linguistic piece in which she focuses on “the historical orgins of
the lexicon and to structural aspects in which the creoles differ from their
main lexifier language, English, while occasionally pointing out similarities
with the main African sub-strate languages–Gbe and Kikongo” (p, 154-155). As
might be expected, Amerindian words for items of material culture and
biodiversity were adopted into the creole languages. She demonstrates, however,
that these creole languages, whether English or Portuguese-influenced, have
very similar syntactic structures. Bruyn also alludes to Guyanese creolese:
“another English-based creole spoken by a substantial number of people in
Suriname” (156), particularly in the western rice growing district of Nickerie.
Bruyn’s text is rich with examples that illustrate how “as a result
of the interplay of simplification of the lexifier input, phonological
characteristics of the African substrate languages, and internal developments,
the phonological shapes of words in the present-day creole languages often
differ considerably from the source forms” (162). She, and other contributors
allude often to the fluid language situation that prevails in Suriname:
In the languages as they are spoken today, it
is not always easy to distinguish between full borrowing, involving established
incorporation and adaptation of a word from another language – be it Dutch,
English, Sarnami, Guyanese, or any other language – and code-mixing, where,
rather, a speaker uses a word or a larger unit from another language
incidentally and without fully adapting it to the phonological and
morphological rules of the recipient language. [165]
Bruyn concludes:
Influence from the
substrate languages appears undeniable, not only with regard to vocabulary and
phonology but also certain aspects of morphology and syntax. That is not to
say, however, that the creole languages are more or less straightforward
continuations of substrate languages, just as they are not straightforward
continuations of the lexifier languages. They are new languages, created around
items deriving from the lexifier languages but lending those items new
functions. The substrate languages may have provided models for certain aspects
of the grammar and the function words playing a role therein, but they
constitute only one component in the linguistic edifice constructed by people
who were in need of a new language as part of a new culture because they had been
torn away from their own. [181]
Chapter VII, Young
languages, old texts: Early documents in the Surinamese creoles by Jacques Arends is a bibliophile’s delight. Its documentation of
the admirable linguistic work in Sranan and Saramaccan of the Herrnhuter or
Moravian Brethren, particularly Christian Schumann, complements the work on the
Guyana side of the late Joel Benjamin (1988, 1991). These Moravian
missionaries, a German-speaking group of dissenting Protestants,
came to Suriname in 1735,
during the first three decades they confined their missionary activities to the
Amerindian population, extending it to the Saramaka Maroons in 1765 and to the
slave population even later. As a prerequisite for their missionary work they
not only learned the local languages but they also translated religious texts
and compiled dictionaries and grammars. As a result, they left us an extremely
valuable legacy of documents in and on the Surinamese creole languages, from
the second half of the 18th century onwards. [183]
Arends also pays tribute to three visionaries in this story: the
missionary Schumann in the 18th century, the Moravian convert,
Johannes King in the 19th century and teacher Jacques ‘Papa’
Koenders in the 20th century. On Schumann’s pioneering linguistic insights,
Arends writes that,
He was ahead of his time in using native
speaker informants for his lexicographical work. He was also a very acute
observer of sociolinguistic phenomena, which appears from his observations on
the differences between nengre tongo and bakra tongo, between the urban and the
rural varieties, and between the language of the older and more recently
established plantations. Apart from his gift for sociolinguistic observation,
Schumann also had a keen insight into purely linguistic phenomena. To give just
one example, he was the first to observe the phenomenon of logophoricity in
Sranan, something which seems to have gone completely unnoticed ever since. Put
simply, a logophoric language uses two different pronouns to indicate whether
the subject of a main clause containing a verb of saying is identical to the
subject of the embedded clause or not. [192-3]
Arends notes
further that “logophoric pronouns are also a feature of Ewe, the major West
African language spoken by slaves brought to Suriname” (193).
The reader too can contemplate with respect Johannes King (c.
1830-1890),
the first truly Surinamese
author… a mixed Matawai-Ndyuka Maroon who became a member of the Moravian
Church in 1861. King, who reputedly taught himself how to read and write, is a
most intriguing figure, standing with one foot in the world of Christianity and
with the other in that of Maroon culture. In his writings, parts of which have
been published, King deals not only with the story of his life, travel reports,
and Maroon history, but also… with more personal topics such as his dreams and
visions. He also wrote a Dresi boekoe ‘Book of medicine’, a book which is still
privately owned, which includes secret knowledge of certain medicinal herbs and
plants. [197]
In this chapter, Arends also presents excerpts from texts from the
late 17th to the early 20th century left by travellers,
colonial administrators, soldiers, planters, poets, even some Maroons and
slaves. There is also the iconoclastic African Surinamese teacher, Jacques
‘Papa’ Koenders, who challenged the social stigmatization of Sranan, which
continued until after the Second World War, in his monthly publication,
Foetoeboi, a one-man production written
in Sranan (129, 189).
Part III. The Eurasian languages. The linguistic and social history of the Eurasian languages
presented in Part III display many fascinating similarities. As with the creole
languages, all four – Surinamese Dutch, Kejia, Sarnami Hindi and Javanese – are
regarded as inferior to the mother tongues, particularly by their own speakers.
Nevertheless, the contributors in this section show that these are all
languages in their own right, spoken today by significant minorities or, as in
the case of Surinamese Dutch, as a second language acquired in school by all
Surinamese.
Between 1863 and 1942 some 70,000 Asian contract labourers were
brought to Suriname, only a minority of whom returned to their home countries
after their contracts had expired (127). Dutch colonialism was tolerant when
compared with the British variety so the story of commercial and socio-cultural
associations, education and schools and publications in these imported Asian
languages will remind readers in the English speaking Caribbean of how
hegemonic and narrow minded British colonialism was in comparison. The
influence of Suriname’s other languages, particularly Sranan on Surinamese
Dutch, and such sociolinguistic processes as ‘levelling’, ‘simplification’ and
code switching are explored in these chapters. Sarnami and Javanese show
minimal influences from Sranan or Dutch: these were the latest migrations,
dating from the 1870s to the beginning of the Second World War, and their
speakers tended to be isolated in discrete rural, agricultural settings in
coastal Suriname.
Today, the Asian languages are spoken by sizable minorities: the
Sarnami-speaking population is estimated to be between 180,000, and 230,000 in
both Suriname and The Netherlands; the Javanese Surinamese population was
62,000 in 1997, or 14% of the population of Suriname; while the number of Kejia
speakers in Suriname today is estimated to be 6,000 out of 12,000 ethnic
Chinese. Wolfowitz’s summary of the situation of Surinamese Javanese resonates
with that of the other language groups, as detailed in these chapters:
For the Javanese speakers of
Suriname, the repertoire of Javanese speech style forms only a part of the
total speech repertoire. Sranan, the English-based creole language, is used for
most dealings outside the Javanese community, and most of the young-adult
generation also use Dutch, having learned it in school. The use of Javanese
thus represents a choice among alternative codes. As in the case of immigrant
groups elsewhere, the use of the ‘home language’, in any politeness style,
itself expresses a sense of community, an echo of close politeness. In business
and official settings, typically associated with a distant-polite style of
speaking, Dutch or Sranan is normally required (particularly, of course, if
non-Javanese speakers are present). Conversely, to senior kin, or fictive kin,
appropriate respect requires the use of Javanese, even if at the most minimal
level of respect style. [277]
Chapter VIII, Surinamese
Dutch, by Christa de Kleine is as much sociological
as linguistic as it turns the lens on issues of class and urban/rural divides,
‘old’ families speaking Dutch versus Asian newcomers speaking Chinese, Hindi
and Javanese, and the place of the mother tongue in this story from 1667 to the
present. De Kleine argues that Surinamese Dutch (SD) is a truly distinct
language variety in its own right, with its own distinct grammar, phonology,
pronunciation and semantics. She lists the contributing factors – not only
geographical distance from the mother tongue, but the influence of Suriname’s highly
multilingual environment, and the fact that Surinamese Dutch is an acquired
second (or third) language for many speakers. Wisely, the Ministry of Education
declared Dutch officially to be a second language in schools and urged
educators to treat it as such (216), an approach that should be emulated in
neighbouring Guyana with respect to English.
In common with most of the contributors to this volume, she combines
history and linguistics in a seamless narrative. We learn that throughout most
of the 17th and 18th century, Sranan, and not Dutch, was
used as the medium of social interaction by most of the nationally diverse
white population. Dating from late in this period, however, use of Dutch became
a marker of social class, particularly among the growing numbers of free Blacks
and Mixed people. By the 19th century, “an elite social class had
started to form among the non-whites, who without any doubt were native
speakers not only of Sranan, but also of Dutch” (213). After the introduction
of compulsory primary education in 1876, Dutch was made the only medium of
instruction in schools, accelerating the process of structural influences from
the other languages, particularly Sranan, on Dutch as well as “features
typically associated with second language learning” (214).
At the same time, de Kleine outlines the hegemonic role of Dutch in
Suriname, reinforced among other ways by the large Surinamese diaspora in The
Netherlands, transmission of Dutch television and radio programmes and tertiary
education in Europe.
Chapter IX, Kejia: A
Chinese language in Suriname by Paul Brendan Tjon
Sie Fat moves the story from Europe to Asia, and the place of the more recent
incoming languages in the Surinamese patchwork. His essay concentrates on
distinct waves of Chinese migration in the 19th and 20th
centuries while providing at the same time confirmation of de Kleine’s
arguments on the indexing of class by language use, code switching and the
ghettoized nature of in-group use of ethnic languages. In his words,
The Chinese for the
most part are described as detached from the class consciousness of Paramaribo.
They are “not interested in acquiring Dutch, since they are focussed on the
social order of Chinese culture rather than on social mobility within
Surinamese society as a whole” (237). They learn Sranan and code-switch in a multi-lingual context.
The first wave of overseas Chinese in Suriname tended to come from
the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. Most of them were of Hakka origin and
many still speak Kejia, the Chinese language strongly associated with the Hakka
ethnic group (233). Chinese migration from the Middle Kingdom had been impelled
by economic and social upheavals in the homeland:
In China, the period of the
1850s and 1860s was dominated by the Second Opium War (1856-1860) and the
Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864). Faced with such social conditions, in the 19th
century about two and a half million Chinese left China for overseas
destinations. While the vast majority migrated to South East Asia, about
270,000 went to Latin America and the Caribbean as indentured labourers; 87 %
of these went to Cuba and Peru, while 6 % went to Panama, Costa Rica, the Dutch
and French Caribbean, Brazil and other places. [233]
The Chinese were the first Asian immigrants into Suriname following
Emancipation, a trajectory similar to Guyana’s, one important difference being
that abolition had been decreed thirty years earlier in the British overseas
colonies. As in Guyana, the Chinese did not remain on the plantations, quickly
moving into commercial activities:
The planned
abolition of slavery in Suriname in 1863 made it necessary to find ways to make
up for the predicted labour shortage on the sugar plantations, sugar being the main
crop there. Indentured labour was considered the solution, and a number of
unsuccessful trials were made with labourers of a number of different
nationalities. As a result of privatization of labour recruitment in 1862, at
that time China remained as the sole source of indentured labour for Suriname.
More than 2,500 Chinese were brought to Suriname between 1853 (the year of the
first experiments with Chinese indentured labour from Java) and 1870. Virtually
all of the first immigrants were men, and all were assigned to the sugar
plantations. Chinese indentured labour in Suriname was stopped in 1870 because
most migrants failed to extend their contracts, and none of those who stayed in
Suriname worked in agriculture…Those who stayed, moved to the capital Paramaribo,
and many took wives from other ethnic groups, in particular from the majority
Creole sector. While some sent their sons to Guangdong to receive a Chinese
education, most of the children from these mixed marriages were absorbed into
the urban Creole group, starting the long ethnic association of Creoles and
Chinese in Suriname. [233-4]
The majority of former British colonial subjects will probably
involuntarily compare the results of the rigid imposition of monolingualism by
the British on their subjects to Tjon Sie Fat’s summary of Chinese migration in
the 1870-1939 period, a comparison in which the British experience falls far
short of Dutch tolerance across the Corentyne River. In Suriname, on the other
hand,
After 1870, a broader migration of Hakkas…to
Suriname took hold. The Chinese community in Suriname grew through chain
migration from a core of indentured labourers…By the time of the Japanese
invasion of China, before World War II, a thriving Chinese speaking community
existed in Suriname. This can be inferred from the fact that Chinese script was
used on gravestones and Chinese was spoken during funeral ceremonies, and from
the existence of Chinese commercial and socio-cultural associations, Chinese
churches, Chinese-language education (written Chinese, taught in the Kejia
vernacular) for Chinese children in Chinese schools, Chinese-language media,
and at least two consecutive generations with a basic passive and active
knowledge of Kejia. Due to the chaos before World War II, migration to Suriname
came to a virtual halt, and from then on Surinamese Chinese became relatively
isolated from linguistic and cultural developments in China, in particular
those in the eastern Pearl River Delta. [234-5]
Suriname and Guyana have had the same experience with the most
recent waves of Chinese immigration which began between 1963 and 1970. This
grew mainly through immigration from southern China via Hong Kong, and up to
1968,
as many as one in twenty Chinese in Suriname
was an immigrant. Many immigrants viewed Suriname as a stopover on the way to
other places…It was not uncommon for newcomers to identify themselves as
Cantonese speakers in order to differentiate themselves from the local, older
settled group of Hakka. [235-236]
The Peoples Republic of China eased barriers to emigration in the
1980s, at the time of the economic reforms, as a result of which, “Chinese
immigration to Suriname increased sharply in the 1990s, and Chinese immigrants
to Suriname were no longer exclusively Hakka… the number of non-Hakka ethnic
Chinese in Suriname is growing… While Kejia remains the dominant Chinese
language in Suriname, Mandarin (the mainland Chinese standard, Guoyu) is now
increasingly used as a lingua franca within the Surinamese Chinese community,
due to the significant, and apparently growing number of speakers of several
other Chinese languages and dialects…” (236).
The cultural hegemony of closer links with the mother country
prevails in the case of Chinese languages, as with European Dutch, and Sarnami
Hindi. Cantonese, the language of the newcomers, has now superceded Kejia as
“the public medium during gatherings and cultural events of ethnic Hakkas in
Suriname” (237).
Chapter X, Sarnami as an
immigrant koiné by Theo Damsteegt is a fascinating
account of East Indian migration to Suriname:
Between 1873 and 1916, some
34,000 indentured labourers left northern India for Suriname…the labourers
brought with them several mutually related languages (or dialects) from their
home country, amongst which Bhojpuri, Magahi and Avadhi. The ensuing
interaction among these migrants gave rise to a process of mixing of the
different languages that were their mother tongues, a process that eventually
resulted in a new, stabilised language which is not identical to any language
in India, and which nowadays is called Sarnami Hindi or Sarnami Hindustani.
[249]
Sarnami is a koiné type of language because it is “characterized …
by a mixture of forms of relatively closely related Indic languages. Koiné is
defined by Jeff Siegel as “a stable linguistic variety which results from
contact between varieties which are subsystems of the same linguistic system”
(254). The study of Sarnami and other koinés provides linguists with clues on
language formation and evolution. Neither Sranan nor Dutch is found to have had
much influence on the early development of Sarnami though there is intensive
code-switching in present day usage.
According to Damsteegt, from the mid 1970s, Sarnami speakers in The
Netherlands have been promoting its use “in more formal language domains, for
example, in written fictional and non-fictional texts” (251).
This chapter also includes a Box on the Telugu-speaking Madraji who
comprised a minority of the Indian immigrants to both Dutch and British Guiana.
Their language was unintelligible to the Hindi-speaking majority, and it died
out after two generations. In Suriname most Madraji converted to Catholicism.
Chapter XI, Javanese
speech styles in Suriname by Clare Wolfowitz gives us
a privileged peek into the complex, esoteric world of Javanese, with its
extensive repertoire of ‘ordinary’ versus ‘polite’ speech styles, and the
many-nuanced distinctions and levels between mere ‘speaking’ and ‘language’.
Javanese immigration into Suriname began in 1890 and continued until
1939. The move was essentially from one village context to another and
Wolfowitz argues that the less extensive range of their current speech styles
probably reflects the more egalitarian context of village life in Java and
Suriname as much as the half century’s isolation from the mother country. In
her words, “we perhaps see the use of speech styles fulfilling their core
social function – that of defining and ordering the relationships of family,
household, and neighbourhood” (280).
A good place to end this review is by presenting one final
illustration from Wolfowitz of the use of linguistics in social positioning and
in-group jostling, as the local and the global increasingly converge and clash:
The most striking feature of Javanese
cultural conservatism, however, has to do with religious practice. The first
mosques built by Surinamese Javanese immigrants were unadorned rectangular
structures which faced, not eastward toward Mecca, but westward – that is, as
mosques in Java are oriented. In the 1960s, the worldwide movement toward
‘purer’ Islamic practice had its impact on Surinamese Javanese religious life,
and reformist groups built temples of their own which faced eastward, while
adopting at the same time more orthodox Muslim forms of prayer. The
relationship between the traditional Javanese mosques and the reformist mosques
was characterized by mutual disdain and sometimes overt hostility. Language,
too, participates in this religious division: while the reformist mosques
emphasize the use of Arabic in prayer, the conservative, west-facing mosques
pray using an old-fashioned, literary Javanese, almost as impenetrable to the
congregation as Arabic would be. For these conservative adherents, the Muslim
rituals function not only as a form of religious worship but also as a gesture
of devotion to the homeland. [266]
The
Atlas is an excellent
omnibus volume for anyone interested in Suriname in particular or, more
generally, in exploring the linguistic responses of the subaltern colonised
world to the colonial project of domination. For the English-reading world, it
offers an unparalleled view through a linguistic exploration of this local to
global trajectory, set in one of the world’s lesser studied and traversed places,
the ancient pre-Cambrian landscape of the Guiana Shield.
If you want to order this publication,
please contact:
KITLV Press
Mrs E. Sitinjak
PO Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
Email: sitinjak@kitlv.nl
Tel: (31)-715272372
Fax: (31)-715272638
Notes:
1. Guyana is home to nine
Amerindian nations, totalling over 50,000 persons, as compared with Suriname’s
10,000. This includes 6 surviving Carib-speaking peoples, whose population
numbers follow their names (Makusi 9,000; Patamona 5,000; Karinya 5,000;
Akawaio 5,000; Arekuna 500 and Waiwai 200), 2 Arawakan-speaking peoples (Lokono
Arawaks 15,500 and Wapishana 7,000) and Warau 5,000 .
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Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum, eds. Handbook
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Amerindia. 2002.
Langues de Guyane. Paris: L’Association d’Ethnolinguistique
Amérindienne (A.E.A.)
Amodio, Emanuele and Vicente Pira. 1996.
Lingua Makuxi, Makusi Maimu. Roraima,
Brazil.
Benjamin, Joel. 1988. “The Arawak (Lokono) Language: The
Contribution of Anglican and Pymouth Brethren Missionaries to its Study and
Documentation in Guyana (1834-1870s)”. Proceedings
of the Conference on the Arawaks of Guyana 34-43. Georgetown: University of
Guyana.
---------- . 1991. “The Arawak Language in
Guyana and Adjacent Territories”. Journal
of Archaeology and Anthropology 8: 7-112. Georgetown: Walter Roth Museum of
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Carlin, Eithne B. and Jacques Arends, Eds.
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Leiden: KITLV Press.
Im Thurn, Everard F. 1967 [1883].
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Payne, David L. 1991. “Maipuran (Arawakan)
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Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Queixalós, F. and O. Renault-Lescure. 2000.
As línguas amazônicas hoje. São
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Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1996. “Images
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