Less Commonly Taught Language of the Month: Sranan Tongo

They have been called “broken languages” and “bastard tongues.” Only in the past fifty years has the study of pidgins and creoles been taken seriously. For the first part of linguistics young history, they have been ignored as beneath the dignity of scholars versed in Latin and Greek and Sanskrit. They have been dismissed as the fumbling attempts of laborers, camp followers and slaves to learn the language of their civilized masters. All of which makes pidgins and creoles the perfect candidates for the triumphant return of Schendo's LiCTLe of the Month Club!

Part of the difficulty of talking about pidgins and creoles is defining what exactly they are. They could be languages with reduced grammars, ad hoc codes for communication. Or, they could be manifestations of a universal, genetic language program that emerges under the right circumstances. Or, they could be mixed languages, European branches grafted upon African or Asian roots.

We'll deal with these possibilities at another time, but for right now let's establish some basic definitions. A pidgin is nobody's native language. They are created spontaneously due to the demands of communication (and perhaps a little of the Elevator Effect), when speakers of mutually unintelligible languages are forced to try to talk to one another. Pidgins take the language of the socially dominant group as a point of departure, “simplify” the grammar, mix a few native words and generally disappear when they're no longer needed.

Sometimes, however, the pidgin does not fade away. It gets picked up by the children, who learn it just like a native language. Linguists refer to these newly formed languages as creoles. These pidgins-gone-native (that is those who have been learned by a child as a first language) gradually become more and more “complex” as the first generation of speakers collectively round out the vocabulary and grammatical constructions.

Sranan Tongo (also known as Surinamese Creole or simply Sranan) is spoken by 300,000 to 500,000 people in the former Dutch colony of Suriname. Although it has been heavily influenced by Dutch (which remains the language of prestige in Suriname), Sranan is an English-based language which is used as a common tongue among Suriname's many different linguistic groups. But, the history of Sranan actually starts some 600 of miles to the North, on the island of Barbados.

During the so-called Age of Exploration (Exploitation?), this Caribbean island was claimed by the British in 1625. Shortly thereafter, sugarcane production began. Europe had an insatiable sweet tooth for Caribbean sugar, as well as the rum that could be produced from the left over molasses. There was soon more sugarcane than could be harvested just by rounding up homeless Irish kids and shipping them off as indentured servants. The plantation economy needed human flesh, and Africa was an all-you could eat buffet.

Eventually, Barbados would become the biggest English slave colony in the New World. Too big, in fact, for such a small island. Thus, in 1650, Lord Willoughby rounded up a crew of settlers and slaves and set sail for the northern coast of South America, to the mouth of the Orinoco river. The settlers brought three ships, 20 cannons and all the things needed for a new colony. The slaves brought with them the language of convenience learned on Barbados, a pidgin based on English.

Geopolitical envies and intrigues a continent away would ultimately doom this English attempt to colonize South America and save the globe the indignity of having a country named “Willoughbyland.” During the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665-1667, the Dutch occupied Willoughbyland and the English took the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. A couple of peace treaties made this swap official, and Willoubyland became Suriname and New Amsterdam became New York.

And Sranan became an English-based creole in a Dutch speaking world.

Part of the bad PR of creole languages like Sranan is that speakers of the languages they are based upon know enough of the words to understand what's being said, but not the rules of grammar that puts them together. The resulting melange of familiar words and unfamiliar rules strikes the ear as “broken” or simply “bad” grammar.

Imagine, for example, a person walks up to you on the street and says: “Well, listen bro, you no have money for lend me?” (Sranan: “Wa yere ba, yu no abi moni fu leni me?”). Let's just say, I hope the next person he asks isn't a high school English teacher....

This stereotype is quickly contradicted, however, when one considers the complexity of the Sranan verb. With just three “helper verbs” (called auxiliaries in fancy-linguist speak), a Sranan speaker can convey a wide variety of subtle meanings:

Anterior	Irrealis	Non Punctual	Sranan Sentence	Approximate English Translation
			a waka	He walked
		e	a e waka	He is walking OR He was walking
ben			a ben waka	He had walked
ben		e	a ben e waka	He was walking OR He had been walking
	sa		a sa waka	He will walk OR He would walk
	sa	e	a sa e waka	He will be walking OR He would be walking
ben	sa		a ben sa waka	He would have walked
ben	sa	e	a ben sa e waka	He would have been walking

Linguists who specialize in Creoles call this kind of helper-verb + main-verb paradigm a TMA System because the three words (“ben”, “se” and “e”) indicate by their presence or absence three shades of meaning:

1. Tense: Whether something happened in the past or not
2. Modality: Whether something actually happened or not
3. Aspect: Whether something happened at once or over a period of time

In the sentence “a ben se e waka” (he would have been walking) we have all three helper verbs in the order: Tense + Modality + Aspect. Hence, TMA system.

It is important to note the ambiguity in the English translations of these Sranan verbs, because the Sranan TMA system does not correspond exactly to the way English conveys the same sorts of meanings. This system is entirely new, created during the process which turned Sranan from a pidgin into a creole.

And that's when it get's weird... Because Surinamese Creole isn't the only language to use this TMA system. Hawaiian Creole does too. So does Haitian Creole. Not to mention creole languages in India and Asia and Papua New Guinea. Creoles based on Portuguese and Spanish and French all follow the Tense + Modality + Aspect order. Sure, the words that go into the TMA columns are different, but the order of the helper verbs and their meanings are the same in most Creoles.

The sheer number of different creoles worldwide that use this TMA system can't be a coincidence. According to Derek Bickerton, one of the founding fathers of pidgin and creole linguistics, creoles around the world look similar because humans have an innate language “bioprogram” that kicks in whenever children are forced to create their own languages. It's like a default setting that is hard wired into the brain and takes over when pidgins become creoles.

Of course, there are no such things as “broken” languages, there are only fractured societies. The dialects of the lower classes are as robust examples of the art and science of speaking as those of our kings, politicians and English teachers. Attitudes towards speech, however, mirror attitudes towards the speakers, and language often becomes as a surrogate for race and class.

While I personally think its too early to declare the bioprogram theory the last word on creole formation, it goes to show that these once reviled languages may provide keys that unlock at least some of the mysteries of human Language.

LiCTLe for May 2010: Hixkaryana

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Sranan examples were taken from this folk story, published by Marilyn Nickel and John Wilner, and from Derek Bickerton's 1983 Scientific American article. The rest of the information in this article was vacuumed off the internet floor If you would like to suggest a language (lowly or not) to be the subject of a future Less Commonly Taught Language of the Month club entry, visit the Bad Grammar Facebook page and leave a message.