On the linguistic consequences of language contact in Suriname: The case of convergence

Suriname is often represented as a stratified mosaic of cultures and languages. The country boasts languages from two major indigenous Amerindian families, several Afro-Caribbean English Lexifier Creoles and further dialectal varieties of Indo-European languages belonging to the Germanic cluster (English, Dutch) and the Italic cluster (French, Portuguese), and futher representatives of major linguistic families of the world, namely Indic (Sarnami), Austronesian (Javanese) and Sino-Tibetan (Hakka or Keija). In this chapter, we challenge this somewhat static view of Suriname’s cultural and linguistic diversity. The linguistic data that we present will show that languages in Suriname do not merely co-exist. There are ongoing changes in the distribution of languages across functional domains and new mixed codes are emerging. In this chapter, we focus on convergence, the emergence of (partial) similarities at the expense of diffferences between the languages in contact. Specifically, we look at language mixing phenomena and language change involving Surinamese Dutch, Sranan, Sarnami (Suriname Hindustani), the Maroon Creole language Ndyuka and Surinamese Javanese.