Multilingual language contact in the Guianas

Abstract

A few dozen languages are spoken across the Guianas (eastern Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and Amapá). With over twenty languages, Suriname, the focus of this talk, is the linguistically most heterogeneous of the five territories and epitomizes the situation in the region: dramatic demographic, economic, and socio-cultural changes have taken place in a short time, leading to equally substantial linguistic reconfigurations; there are multilevel interactions between languages, and simultaneous multidirectional transfer and change; the languages in contact are typologically and genetically highly diverse and include Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles, Indo-Germanic, Indic, Austronesian, Sinitic, Arawakan, and Cariban; we find a concentration in a small territory of contact processes like creolization, koineization, borrowing and codemixing. The Surinamese linguistic ecology is best characterized as one of a dynamic, yet hierarchically layered multilingualism. Speakers for whom Dutch, the language with the highest prestige, is the primary language of socialization, show a tendency towards monolingualism. With primary speakers of the Creole language Sranan, the country’s lingua franca, the tendency will be towards Dutch-Sranan bilingualism. Members of other ethno-linguistic groups, e.g. the Indo-Surinamese or Kar’ina, are potentially characterized by trilingual (or more) patterns of multilingualism. On this backdrop, I explore structural aspects of language contact, focusing on the emergence of a Surinamese linguistic area characterized by convergence in grammar, lexicon and pragmatic practices. Suriname can provide empirical and theoretical insights into the study of language change, with respect to issues such as the speed and extent of the diffusion of linguistic features and innovations. The situation in Suriname also has a potential for generalization to other linguistic ecologies characterized by a similar degree of socio-cultural and linguistic heterogeneity (e.g. West Africa, Indonesia, the Amazon, South-East Asia, India, Melanesia).