This product of this project is a reference grammar of Ndjuka, a creole language of Suriname. It involves nine months of fieldwork with native speakers during which time their spontaneous language use will be observed and informants will also be asked to produce sentences and to make grammaticality judgements about sentences presented to them. A period for writing the grammar will follow the fieldwork. Ndjuka is a "radical creole," one whose structure differs markedly from the languages that contributed much of its basic vocabulary. For this reason it is potentially a major source of evidence for what the innate human language facility is like. The reference grammar of Ndjuka will facilitate the testing of linguistic hypotheses not only about Ndjuka and its neighbors but about languages in general and about the process of creolization.
