Saramaccan language
Encyclopedia
Saramaccan is a creole language
spoken by about 24,000 people near the Saramacca
and upper Suriname River
s in Suriname
(formerly also known as Dutch Guyana), and 2,000 in French Guiana
. The speakers are mostly descendants of fugitive slaves; they form a group called Saramacca, also spelled Saramaka
.
Saramaccan is remarkable to linguists because of its unusual divergence from its source languages.
, English
, Dutch
, and Sub-Saharan African languages
, especially Fongbe, Akan
and Gbe
. The African component accounts for about 5% of the total.
Saramaccan phonology
has traits similar to languages of West Africa, and it even has developed tones
, which are common in Africa.
Over half of Saramaccan's words are from English. It is generally agreed that Saramaccan's Portuguese influence is because the language's creators lived on plantations with Portuguese masters, and possibly slaves speaking a Portuguese creole that the masters had brought with them while migrating to Surinam from Brazil. Saramaccan's creators started with an early form of Sranan Tongo
and transformed it into a new creole via this Portuguese influx, plus heavy influence from the grammars of Fongbe and Gbe
.
An earlier idea that Saramaccan was an offshoot of a Portuguese pidgin spoken by slaves who had learned it on the West African coast is no longer subscribed to by working creolists. See monogenetic theory of pidgins
for more information.
Certain common words in Sranan Tongo
, the most common creole spoken in Suriname, also derive from Portuguese words.
, while the Matawari tribe have their own dialect.
Each oral vowel also has a corresponding nasal vowel
. There are also three vowel length
s: e.g. is /bɛ/ "red" vs. /bɛ́ɛ/ "belly" vs. /bɛɛ́ɛ/ "bread".
/c ɟ ɲ ɲɟ/ are more specifically dorso
-postalveolar
, but the palatal fricative /ç/ is dorso
-palatal
.
, high and low. Stress
in European words is replaced by high tone in Saramaccan.
, while 35% is derived from Portuguese
. It is one of the few known creoles to derive a large percentage of its lexicon from more than one source (most creoles have one main lexifier
language), and it is said to be both an English-based creole
and a Portuguese-based creole
.
About 5% of the vocabulary of Saramaccan is of African
origin, the most of any creole in the Americas
. Source languages for these words include Kikongo, Gbe languages
, and Twi
.
De waka te de aan sinkii möön.
"They walked until they were worn out."
U ta mindi kanda fu dee soni dee ta pasa ku u.
"We make up songs about things that happen to us."
A suku di soni te wojo fëën ko bëë.
"He searched for it in vain."
Mi puu tu dusu kölu bai ën.
"I paid two thousand guilders to buy it."
Examples of words originally from Portuguese or a Portuguese creole are: mujee (mulher) "woman"; womi (homem) "man"; da (dar) "to give"; bunu (bom) "good"; kaba (acabar) "to end"; ku (com) "with"; kuma (como) "as"; faka (faca) "knife"; aki (aqui) "here"; ma (mas) "but"; kendi (quente) "hot"; liba (riba) "above"; lio (rio) "river".
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
spoken by about 24,000 people near the Saramacca
Saramacca River
Saramacca River is a river in Suriname . Arawaks named this river "Surama", and today's name "Saramacca" is probably derived from it. It originates in the Wilhelmina Mountains and flows northwards and enters the Atlantic Ocean together with Coppename River. It has a river basin of 9.400 km² and...
and upper Suriname River
Suriname River
The Suriname River is 480 km long and flows through the country Suriname. Its sources are located in the Guiana Highlands on the border between the Wilhelmina Mountains and the Eilerts de Haan Mountains...
s in Suriname
Suriname
Suriname , officially the Republic of Suriname , is a country in northern South America. It borders French Guiana to the east, Guyana to the west, Brazil to the south, and on the north by the Atlantic Ocean. Suriname was a former colony of the British and of the Dutch, and was previously known as...
(formerly also known as Dutch Guyana), and 2,000 in French Guiana
French Guiana
French Guiana is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department located on the northern Atlantic coast of South America. It has borders with two nations, Brazil to the east and south, and Suriname to the west...
. The speakers are mostly descendants of fugitive slaves; they form a group called Saramacca, also spelled Saramaka
Saramaka
The Saramaka or Saramacca are one of six Maroon peoples in the Republic of Suriname. The word "Maroon" comes from the Spanish cimarrón, itself derived from an Arawakan root; by the early 16th century it was used throughout the Americas to designate slaves who successfully escaped from slavery.-...
.
Saramaccan is remarkable to linguists because of its unusual divergence from its source languages.
Origins
The Saramaccan lexicon is largely drawn from PortuguesePortuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, and Sub-Saharan African languages
African languages
There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
, especially Fongbe, Akan
Akan language
Akan, also known as Twi and Fante, is an Akan language that is the principal native language of Ghana, spoken over much of the southern half of that country, by about 52% of the population, and to a lesser extent across the border in eastern Côte d'Ivoire...
and Gbe
Gbe languages
The Gbe languages form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widely spoken Gbe language is Ewe , followed by Fon...
. The African component accounts for about 5% of the total.
Saramaccan phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
has traits similar to languages of West Africa, and it even has developed tones
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
, which are common in Africa.
Over half of Saramaccan's words are from English. It is generally agreed that Saramaccan's Portuguese influence is because the language's creators lived on plantations with Portuguese masters, and possibly slaves speaking a Portuguese creole that the masters had brought with them while migrating to Surinam from Brazil. Saramaccan's creators started with an early form of Sranan Tongo
Sranan Tongo
Sranan is a creole language spoken as a lingua franca by approximately 300,000 people in Suriname...
and transformed it into a new creole via this Portuguese influx, plus heavy influence from the grammars of Fongbe and Gbe
Gbe languages
The Gbe languages form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widely spoken Gbe language is Ewe , followed by Fon...
.
An earlier idea that Saramaccan was an offshoot of a Portuguese pidgin spoken by slaves who had learned it on the West African coast is no longer subscribed to by working creolists. See monogenetic theory of pidgins
Monogenetic theory of pidgins
According to the theory of monogenesis in its most radical form, all pidgins and creole languages of the world can be ultimately traced back to one linguistic variety. This idea was first formulated by Hugo Schuchardt in the late 19th century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by and...
for more information.
Certain common words in Sranan Tongo
Sranan Tongo
Sranan is a creole language spoken as a lingua franca by approximately 300,000 people in Suriname...
, the most common creole spoken in Suriname, also derive from Portuguese words.
Dialects
Saramaccan is divided into three main dialects. The Upper Suriname River dialect and the Lower Suriname River dialect are both spoken by members of the Saramaccan tribeSaramaka
The Saramaka or Saramacca are one of six Maroon peoples in the Republic of Suriname. The word "Maroon" comes from the Spanish cimarrón, itself derived from an Arawakan root; by the early 16th century it was used throughout the Americas to designate slaves who successfully escaped from slavery.-...
, while the Matawari tribe have their own dialect.
Vowels
| Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also... |
Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark... |
|
|---|---|---|
| Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the... |
i | u |
| Close-mid Close-mid vowel A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel... |
e | o |
| Open-mid Open-mid vowel An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel... |
ɛ | ɔ |
| Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue... |
a | |
Each oral vowel also has a corresponding nasal vowel
Nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. By contrast, oral vowels are ordinary vowels without this nasalisation...
. There are also three vowel length
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
s: e.g. is /bɛ/ "red" vs. /bɛ́ɛ/ "belly" vs. /bɛɛ́ɛ/ "bread".
Consonants
| Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... |
Dental/ Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | Labial Labial-velar consonant Labial–velar consonants are doubly articulated at the velum and the lips. They are sometimes called "labiovelar consonants", a term that can also refer to labialized velars, such as and the approximant .... |
||||||||||
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | n | ɲ | ||||||||
| Plosive | plain | p | b | t | d | c | ɟ | k | ɡ | k͡p | ɡ͡b |
| prenasalized Prenasalized consonant Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent that behave phonologically like single consonants. The reasons for considering these sequences to be single consonants is in their behavior, not in their actual composition... |
mb | nd | ɲɟ | ŋɡ | |||||||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
f | v | s | z | ç | ||||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
l | j | w | ||||||||
/c ɟ ɲ ɲɟ/ are more specifically dorso
Dorsal consonant
Dorsal consonants are articulated with the mid body of the tongue . They contrast with coronal consonants articulated with the flexible front of the tongue, and radical consonants articulated with the root of the tongue.-Function:...
-postalveolar
Postalveolar consonant
Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate...
, but the palatal fricative /ç/ is dorso
Dorsal consonant
Dorsal consonants are articulated with the mid body of the tongue . They contrast with coronal consonants articulated with the flexible front of the tongue, and radical consonants articulated with the root of the tongue.-Function:...
-palatal
Palatal consonant
Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...
.
Tone
The language has two surface tonesTone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
, high and low. Stress
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
in European words is replaced by high tone in Saramaccan.
Lexicon
Fifty percent of the vocabulary of Saramaccan is derived from EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, while 35% is derived from Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
. It is one of the few known creoles to derive a large percentage of its lexicon from more than one source (most creoles have one main lexifier
Lexifier
A lexifier is the dominant language of a particular pidgin or creole language that provides the basis for the majority of vocabulary....
language), and it is said to be both an English-based creole
English-based creole languages
An English-based creole language is a creole language that was significantly influenced by the English language...
and a Portuguese-based creole
Portuguese Creole
Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have been significantly influenced by Portuguese.- Origins :Portuguese overseas exploration in the 15th and 16th century's led to the establishment of a Portuguese Empire with trading posts, forts and colonies in the Americas, Asia and Africa...
.
About 5% of the vocabulary of Saramaccan is of African
African languages
There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
origin, the most of any creole in the Americas
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
. Source languages for these words include Kikongo, Gbe languages
Gbe languages
The Gbe languages form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widely spoken Gbe language is Ewe , followed by Fon...
, and Twi
Twi
Asante, or Ashanti, is one of three literary dialects of the Akan language of southern Ghana, and the prestige dialect of that language. It is spoken in and around Kumasi, the capital of the former Ashanti Empire and current subnational Asante Kingdom within Ghana.Along with the Akuapem dialect,...
.
Examples
To English speakers not familiar with it, the English basis of this language is almost unrecognizable. These are some examples of Saramaccan sentences (taken from the SIL dictionary):De waka te de aan sinkii möön.
"They walked until they were worn out."
U ta mindi kanda fu dee soni dee ta pasa ku u.
"We make up songs about things that happen to us."
A suku di soni te wojo fëën ko bëë.
"He searched for it in vain."
Mi puu tu dusu kölu bai ën.
"I paid two thousand guilders to buy it."
Examples of words originally from Portuguese or a Portuguese creole are: mujee (mulher) "woman"; womi (homem) "man"; da (dar) "to give"; bunu (bom) "good"; kaba (acabar) "to end"; ku (com) "with"; kuma (como) "as"; faka (faca) "knife"; aki (aqui) "here"; ma (mas) "but"; kendi (quente) "hot"; liba (riba) "above"; lio (rio) "river".
External links
- Saramaccan Vocabulary List (from the World Loanword Database)
- SIL Saramaccan-English dictionary
- Entry for Saramaccan at Rosetta Project
- Saramaccan and Haitian as Young Grammars, John McWhorterJohn McWhorterJohn Hamilton McWhorter V is an American linguist and political commentator. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His linguistic specialty is creole and the process through which it forms.-Early life:...
- Saramaccan Grammar