Creoles are real languages

A. Creoles can seem to be lesser versions of the languages they take their words from, a major reason being that a creole has few or none of the gender markers and conjugational endings that European languages have. But creoles actually have complexities of their own.

B. Saramaccan was developed by African slaves who escaped plantations in Suriname and founded their own communities in the interior. Their descendants still live there today and speak a creole with words mostly from English, Portuguese, and Dutch and a grammar that splits the difference between English and Fongbe, spoken in West Africa.

C. Here is a sentence in the language:

Nɔ́ɔ hɛ̃ wɛ wã dáka tééé dí mujɛ̃ɛ-mií fɛ̃ɛ̃, de bi tá kái ɛ̃ Jejéta. then it-is one day long-ago the woman-child of-her they PAST “-ing” call her Jejeta

“Then one day long ago they were calling her daughter Jejeta.”

D. Vocabulary. There are words from five different languages in that one sentence. De is from they, wã is from one. But dáka is from Dutch’s dag. Mujέε is from Portuguese mulher. Wε is from Fongbe, and tééé is from Kikongo, a Bantu language.

E. Sounds.

1. The sound marked as e is pronounced “ay” and the one marked ε as “eh”; similarly, o is pronounced “oh” while ɔ is pronounced “aw.” Saramaccan does not have a basic pidgin-style sound system.

2. The accent marks indicate tone, which Saramaccan has. Sometimes, tone is the only way to distinguish otherwise identical words, as in Chinese. Kái is call, but kaí is fall.

F. Grammar.

1. Saramaccan has two verbs “to be” that work in a subtle way. Da is used to show that two things are the same thing: Mi da Gádu, “I am God.” Dέ is used to show where something is located—a different way of being, if you think about it—Mi dέ a wósu, “I am at home.” But then, this same dέ is used to show that one thing is a type of something else: Mi dέ wã mbéti, “I am an animal.” This is as if being a kind of something were to be “in” it.

2. I and my graduate students found that Saramaccan marks the end of a path an object follows after falling, being pushed, or jumping. The word túwέ comes from throw away, but it is used in ways that seem redundant at first, such as in this sentence:

Mi tɔ́tɔ    dí    dágu túwɛ         a        wáta.

I     push the dog   throw away in the water

“I pushed the dog into the water.”

We get a clue as to what its function is with another sentence:

Vínde   dí   biífi    túwε.

throw   the letter throw

“Throw the letter in” (the trashcan).

The túwε is not being used in a literal sense but as a marker that something “made it” where it was aimed or headed. This is like the difference between I threw it in the water and I threw it into the water—the first sentence technically could mean that I was in the water while I threw it. But Saramaccan marks this distinction more clearly and regularly than English does.

G. Change over time. Like all languages, once creoles emerge, they start undergoing the same processes we have seen in this series.

1. Transformation. In early Saramaccan, kái, “call,” was káli. The l dropped out over time.

2. Dialects. There are northern and southern dialects of Saramaccan. In the north, not is á. In the south, it is ã.

3. Mixture. The slaves who created Saramaccan were exposed mostly to English and Portuguese, but the Dutch took over the country soon afterward in 1667, and Suriname was a Dutch colony for the next three centuries. Today, Saramaccan has a layer of Dutch words threaded throughout the language. The numbers 3, 5, 9, 11, and 12 are from Dutch, for example.