Suriname creoles: phonology

The question of the origins of the English-lexifier creole languages spoken in Suriname, and also French Guyana, by several hundred thousand people is a controversial one. By origins we mean linguistic origins rather than population origins, although we have of course to take into account the influences of the languages spoken by the earliest African populations.

In the case of creole languages it is also controversial whether one can speak of a break in continuity or not. Did creole languages develop in a special fashion, or were normal processes of language change involved? With the Surinamese creole languages in mind, it appears patently ridiculous to envisage any direct continuity in the sense of normal complete language transmission between the kinds of (sub)standard English reflected in the segmental phonologies of Surinamese creole words and the Surinamese creoles themselves. Smith (1987) claims that there is a regular relationship between the forms of lexical items in the Surinamese creoles and the incidence of phonemes in the various forms of English – standard and substandard – spoken in mid-17^th century London. However, this is not the same as claiming that normal intergenerational language transfer took place. No kind of popular or colonial English is known which could fulfill the role of overall direct precursor to these languages. In regard to syntax, morphology, lexical semantics and even phonotactics all known varieties of popular/colonial English are far removed from the Surinamese creoles. The records of Sranan now go back to 1707 (Van den Berg 2000), a mere two generations after the settlement of Suriname by the English in 1651, and only three generations after the founding of the first Caribbean English colonies of St. Kitts and Barbados. The Sranan of the early 18^th century is not however radically different from present-day Sranan in respect of its distance from the standard Englishes of England and the United States.

Smith (2001) assumes the creation of a Proto-Caribbean Plantation Pidgin in the English colonies in the Caribbean in the first generation of slavery – roughly between 1625 and 1650. One reason for this is the existence of a common core of loans from a disparate selection of African languages, referred to by Smith (1987) as Ingredient X. Together with English vocabulary displaying common deviations from the regular Standard English developments in semantics and phonology, reconstituted function-words, and innovative syntactic constructions, these are shared by a considerable number of circum-Caribbean creole languages, such as St Kitts Creole, Jamaican Creole, Guyanese, Krio, Providencia Creole, Miskito Coast Creole, the Surinamese creoles and others. The conclusion seems to be warranted that there was some common linguistic stage showing a degree of stability underlying these creoles. The fact that some function-words and syntactic constructions are shared would also seem to rule out a pidgin of the most primitive type, a jargon pidgin.

This stable pidgin must have come into existence during this first generation of English plantation-holding in the Caribbean. This is guaranteed by the fact that Suriname was settled in 1651, and that the English colonial presence lasted only until 1667. The vast majority of the English population had left by 1675, so that all the ingredients of Sranan must have been in place before then.

This is not to deny that there are clear differences in type between the various English-lexifier creoles spoken in the Caribbean area. These are particularly observable in the typology of the vowel systems.