Saramaccan isn’t just another creole. It’s a linguistic beast born in the humid interior of Suriname. This language belongs to the Saramaccan and Matawai peoples. It sits in northeastern South America. You might know the country as former Dutch Guiana.
What makes Saramaccan stand out? It shows much greater evidence of African influence and less Dutch influence than does Sranan, another creole of Suriname. The structure we hear today probably developed during the early 18th century. But its foundations? They lie in the nonstandard varieties of English spoken by British colonists. Those British held control from 1651 to 1667.
Shortly before the Dutch took over in 1667, something complex happened. About 200 Portuguese-speaking Jews from Brazil emigrated. They brought their slaves with them. They established plantations deep in the Surinamese interior. These settlers and enslaved people adopted the local English vernacular. That vernacular was then influenced by their own Portuguese speech.
How Did Saramaccan Emerge?
Saramaccan emerged primarily among the enslaved and Maroon, or escaped slave, populations. It arose from contact between English and African languages. Specifically, the Kwa and Bantu language families played a huge role. The Portuguese spoken by Sephardi Jews and their slaves from Brazil also heavily influenced the mix.
Like other Atlantic creoles, it gradually evolved. It became increasingly divergent from English during the course of the 18th century.
The Atlantic region saw a steady influx of Africans over time. Slave mortality rates were very high. Life expectancies were very short. Populations grew little through reproduction. These circumstances created a continuous demand for additional slaves. They were forced to perform the labour of the booming sugarcane industry.
Curiously, the literature on creole languages has traditionally associated the development of Saramaccan almost exclusively with the Maroon community. But this is where things get interesting. As with many other creoles, it was plantations that provided the requisite and sufficient conditions for its emergence.
Maroons lived in settlements isolated from plantations. It is implausible to assume that plantation slaves learned Saramaccan from Maroons. Escapees from among the enslaved must have taken the plantation varieties into the Maroon colonies. Not the other way around.
Why Is Saramaccan Considered a Radical Creole?
Saramaccan is considered to be among the most radical of English-based creoles in the Atlantic region. It is extremely divergent from English. It features a greater proportion of syntactic patterns that reflect the influence of the African substrate languages.
Also, Portuguese words make up almost 40 percent of its vocabulary. This includes some grammatical morphemes.
Like Papiamentu, Saramaccan also preserves an African system of pitches or tones. There is a high pitch marked by an acute accent. It is distinguished from a low pitch.
Consider this sentence: Mi tá tyá deésí dá dí ómi ‘I am taking medicine to the man.’
In this example, the morphemes tá for progressive aspect, dá ‘give’ (reanalyzed as ‘to’), and ómi ‘man’ are Portuguese. The pattern tyá -[noun]-dá for ‘give to,’ known as serial verb construction, is West African.
It’s a messy, beautiful collision of histories. English base. Portuguese glue. African skeleton.
