Hey, Check Out This Language!—#1, Sranan Tongo, a.k.a. Surinamese Creole
Trying out a new format for my next series of posts.
My language learning interests have always been torn between two competing tendencies. On the one hand, the foreign relations/history junkie in me has always wanted to go for the “big” languages, whether in terms of geopolitical significance or just the raw number of people who speak it —like Russian, French, Arabic, or Indonesian, for example. On the other hand, I did also major in linguistics, and sometimes I would like nothing better than to nerd out over a less-studied language purely for linguistic curiosity. (Obviously it's not always an either/or choice, fortunately.)
Information on the first kind of language is relatively easy to find elsewhere, so I’ll be devoting this new series to the other kind — the less well-known, more obscure languages that I’ve dabbled in. To start off, I’ll be taking a look at Sranan Tongo, an English-based creole language and the lingua franca of Suriname, which I’ve been interested in for quite some time now.
Wait, what is Suriname?
This is Suriname:
In terms of land area, Suriname isn’t a particularly small country, but its population is only about half a million, concentrated along the coast. Although it doesn't border the Caribbean Sea at all, it's generally considered a Caribbean country rather than a South American one, and the language situation is a big reason for that. (Suriname plays in the North American soccer confederation, for example.)
Ok. So Sranan Tongo the language of Suriname?
Well, it’s one language of Suriname. It’s the language of everyday communication on the street in Suriname, but:
- The only official language of Suriname is Dutch, since Suriname used to be a Dutch colony.
- The country has large Hindustani and Javanese communities (each making up about one-third of the total population) that speak their own languages.
- Other English-based (and mixed-English/Portuguese-based!) creoles — e.g. Saramaccan and Ndyuka — are spoken by Maroons (escaped slaves and their descendants) who historically lived in the interior rainforest (which cover over 90 percent of the country).
- Indigenous languages — e.g. Arawak — are also spoken in the interior.
- Portuguese and various Chinese dialects have become increasingly common in recent years, brought in by Brazilian gold-miners and Chinese merchants.
- Furthermore, Sranan-speakers can also be found in the Netherlands, as well as in other parts of the Caribbean which are still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, such as Aruba and Curacao.
This New York Times articles from 2008 has a nice overview of the overall language situation in Suriname. But for this post, I'll just be focusing on Sranan Tongo.
What is the Language Like?
Well, as you might expect, it’s a bit like English. This is what it sounds like:
And here’s an example of what Sranan Tongo looks like written down — this is the beginning of a Surinamese folktale (with West African origins), plus translations that I made myself:
As you can see from the middle column, the majority of words in Sranan Tongo (literally “Suriname Tongue”) can be traced back to English, and there’s also a sprinkling of Portuguese and Dutch words. (Dutch and English are similar enough — especially after undergoing Sranan sound-changes — that some of the “English words” in Sranan might as well be Dutch words too.) The “unknown” words are mostly grammatical particles, and it’s not clear if they can traced to a specific language.
How I Got Into Sranan Tongo
A couple of years ago, I went through a creole language phase. First, I stumbled across a book on Cape Verdean creole while exploring other African languages. I skimmed through that book, and then moved on to another Portuguese-based creole on the other side of the Atlantic — Papiamentu. After that, in what was probably the high point of this entire “phase”, I studied Haitian Creole for a few months and then went to Haiti over winter break, having a number of successful conversations with people on the street there.
After doing Portuguese-, Spanish-, French-based creoles (and Dutch-based ones, if you can count Afrikaans as a creole?), I decided it was time to learn a bit more about English-based creoles as well. I’d been a bit hesitant to study them earlier, since most English creoles in are uncannily close to English (I’m also quite bad at English accents, for similar reasons), but in the end, learning English creoles was absolutely worth it.
There’s quite a bit of material for learning Jamaican patois out there, as well as the creoles of West Africa like Sierra Leone Krio and Cameroonian Pidgin English. (The BBC also recently started a Pidgin service, by the way!) Even though I’ve basically never had to actually speak these languages, just being able to understand them better has noticeably increased my enjoyment of the lyrics in dancehall, reggae, and afropop, musical genres which are all becoming more and more influential in pop music as a whole.
Learning these languages also helped give me a better understanding of the complex and often sordid history of colonialism in the Americas and West Africa, from the initial formation of these languages as a result of the Atlantic Slave Trade, up until the present day.
Among all the English-based creole languages, though, I found Surinamese creole to be particularly strange and interesting. (It also helped that I was responsible for researching Surinamese-Venezuelan oil relations for a group project in journalism school.)
What’s So Special About Sranan Tongo?
Sranan Tongo started out much like other English-based creoles in the Caribbean, in places like Jamaica, Barbados, or Guyana (which is right next door to Suriname) — a creole language that developed among enslaved Africans on plantations run by English-speaking slaveholders. Some features that Sranan shares with other Atlantic creoles include:
- den/dem (“them”) as both a pronoun and a plural marker
- go (or a go/e go/o) as a future tense marker
- nyan/nyam as the verb “to eat”, apparently of West African origin
- bari/baal (from “bawl”) as the common word for “to shout”
- pikin for “small” and “child” and sabi for “to know”, both from Portuguese (these words also appear in Papua New Guinea as pikinini and save!)
But then, the Dutch and the British fought a war, and somehow ended up swapping Suriname and Manhattan — so Nieuw Amsterdam became New York, and Suriname became Dutch. This had a major impact on the development of Sranan Tongo: obviously, Sranan Tongo ended up picking up a lot of Dutch loan words, but more significantly, near-total isolation from the influence of standard English meant that Sranan Tongo never became “decreolized” the way Jamaican or Barbadian have, for example. As a result, Sranan Tongo is in some ways a “living fossil” of what all Atlantic English creoles looked like in the beginning.
For example:
- Sranan Tongo really doesn’t like to end words with consonants, except for “n” (which is pronounced like “ng”). So “walk more far” is waka moro fara. Other Atlantic creoles have only preserved traces of this in low-register speech — waka for “walk” is still used in Jamaican and Nigerian (partially to distinguish it from the word for “work”, probably), and laka for “like” (the preposition) appears in Jamaican once in a while.
- Sranan Tongo frequently turns long vowels into a short “e” sound— “make” becomes meki, “fight” becomes feti, etc. This is preserved in a few words in other Atlantic creoles — for example mek wi (“make we”) means “let’s (do something)” in Nigerian and Jamaican — but it appears much more widespread in Sranan.
- Sranan Tongo has also preserved slightly more Portuguese loanwords (besides pikin and sabi mentioned earlier), another relic of early colonial history. For example, bun (from bom)is the usual word for “good”, and the words acabar (“to stop, end”) and pasar (“to pass, happen”) have entered Sranan Tongo as kba and psa:
Apparently, Jamaican Maroon Spirit-Possession Language also has a lot of these features, since it also developed in isolation from standard English (for somewhat different reasons). The same thing is true of the maroon creoles of Suriname, like Ndyuka and Saramaccan, but there’s unfortunately even less material out there on those languages than there is for Sranan, and I don’t know much more about them.
(Although I did just recently stumble across this French-language textbook for a few related English-based creoles that are spoken across the border in French Guiana, such as Ndyuka. Might be worth checking out.)
How You Can Get Into Sranan Tongo
It’s true that there isn’t exactly a huge amount of Sranan-learning material out there. But there’s more than you might think, and Sranan’s relationship with English makes it easier to get by with a limited amount of material.
One of the best resources for getting started with Sranan Tongo is the “Languages of Suriname” website run by SIL International. Specifically, the “Sranan Tongo Interactive Library” has a great selection of stories in Sranan, and clicking on any word in the text will automatically look it up in the accompanying dictionary:
Since Sranan grammar is relatively straightforward, I’d argue that this is all you really need to get started. But if you want to ease yourself in to the language a bit more slowly with some common phrases, SIL also has a “Wakaman Buku” (“Walk-Man Book”, i.e. travelers’ phrasebook) just for that. The phrases are presented in Saramaccan, Sranan Tongo, Dutch, English, and French. This’ll help you pick up some common phrases, words, and sentence structures before you try to tackle more complex texts.
You might have noticed that SIL calls itself a “faith-based” nonprofit. SIL’s materials don’t have much explicit religious content, but it’s definitely true that a lot of material on “small” languages like Sranan is disproportionately provided by organizations with religious/missionary motivation. If you don’t mind explicitly religious content, the Global Recording Network also provides a lot of audio material in Sranan, such as bible stories, sermons and gospel music.
For some more advanced and culturally-relevant reading, you can also check out “Creole Drum: An Anthology of Creole Literature in Surinam.” I got this book from Columbia University’s library a while ago, but it’s apparently also freely available online! It has a rich collection of folk songs, folk tales, historical narratives and short stories, all in the original Sranan (sometimes with old Dutch-style spelling) along with English translations.
There are also a few Surinamese radio stations you can listen to online, like SrananPoku and CaribbeanFM. These tend to be in a mix of Dutch and Sranan (and sometimes Hindi and Javanese and English and Spanish and Papiamentu…) and are intriguing to listen to, but a bit less helpful for learning.
Finally, if you listen to Dutch hip hop or EDM these days, you’ll occasionally run into random Sranan lyrics as well. Like, um, this:
Suriname seems like a fascinating place to me, and not just because of Sranan Tongo. I am definitely considering trying to visit Suriname some time in the near future, although my other travel plans probably mean I won’t get around to it until next fall at the earliest. Hopefully I’ll have a lot more to write about whenever that happens!
