Sranan Tongo is the most widely spoken lingua franca in the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual South American country of Surinam, but as a creole, it has been stigmatized as a kind of "baby talk." Historically, Sranan is not only one of the oldest but also one of the most divergent of the Caribbean English creoles. This evolution is the ultimate outcome of an intriguing colonial history, involving a swapping of colonies between the English and the Dutch, which led English in Surinam to evolve under a complex web of influences, especially from Dutch and several African languages.
With support from the National Science Foundation, Ms. Jacqueline Bunting will conduct fieldwork in Paramaribo, Surinam's capital city, observing the language in its natural ecology. Narratives, some specific constructions, and translations will be elicited and recorded from native Sranan speakers in order to examine three areas where Sranan syntactic structures diverge from their English counterparts: case marking, comparative constructions, and serial verb constructions. These materials will be analyzed in comparison with the relevant structures in English, Dutch, Ewe, and Kikongo - all languages which bore heavily on the emergence of Sranan as a creole - in order to develop a clearer understanding of how the grammatical system of Sranan has evolved or been influenced by Dutch, the Gbe family of West African languages (notably Ewe), or Kikongo. The results of this dissertation research will bear on hypotheses about hybridization in language evolution.
