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In and Out of Suriname – Language, Mobility and Identity

Edited by Eithne B. Carlin, Isabelle Léglise, Bettina Migge, and Paul B. Tjon Sie Fat

IN AND OUT OF SURINAME – LANGUAGE, MOBILITY AND IDENTITY

Language in Suriname is a vigorous obsession and has been an emotive topic since colonisation by the Dutch.

Today, Dutch continues to be the sole officially recognised and promoted language while the vast majority of the population speaks any number of the other 20 or more languages found in Suriname, though not necessarily including Dutch.

Popular and official discourse on language, in the main, revolve around language ideologies that are steeped in the colonised mindset of ethnicised inequality whereby the importance of knowing Dutch is regarded as having gate-keeping functions in Surinamese society.

The other languages tend to be associated with ethnic and social constructs that are not conducive to upward social mobility, but many of them are indispensable for managing everyday life and tend to have high covert prestige.

Previous scholarship on some of the individual languages of Suriname and on language in Suriname, has, in the main, focused on historical issues such as language genesis (see, for example, Arends 1995; Migge 2003; articles in Carlin and Arends 2002; Migge and Smith 2007 and in Essegbey, Migge and Winford 2013 for works on the creole languages of Suriname), the historical development of, in particular, Sranantongo (Arends 1989; Bruyn 1995; van den Berg 2007) and language description (Carlin 2004; Huttar and Huttar 1994; articles in Carlin and Arends 2002; Goury and Migge 2003; McWhorter and Good 2012).

Earlier work presented in Charry et al. (1983) provides some useful information about how Dutch, Sranantongo and Sarnámi were practised, including multilingual practices and contact patterns, language ideologies and their recent development.

There are also a few articles that examine the linguistic context of Suriname based on statistical (census) and socio-historical data by St-Hilaire (1999, 2001) who has argued that Dutch is gaining ground in Suriname due to a policy of linguistic assimilation.

Assimilation, however, for as far as it is taking place, has not proceeded at the same speed and in the same way for all Surinamese. Crucially, urbanised populations tend to have