The Life of Language dynamics of language contact in Suriname Published by LOT phone: +31 30 253 6111 Trans 10 3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: [email protected] The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl Cover illustration: Shrine in Bitagron ISBN: 978-94-6093-131-4 NUR 616 Copyright © 2013: Robert Borges. All rights reserved. The Life of Language dynamics of language contact in Suriname proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. mr. S.C.J.J. Kortmann, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 31 januari 2014 om 12.30 uur precies door Robert David Borges geboren op 16 oktober 1983 te Providence, Rhode Island (US) Promotor: Prof. dr. Pieter Muysken Copromotor: Dr. Margot van den Berg Manuscriptcommissie: Prof. dr. Roeland van Hout Prof. dr. Bettina Migge (University College Dublin) Prof. dr. Maarten Mous (Universiteit Leiden) for my parents for Asia for Agnieszka Acknowledgements No man is an island. Conducting research and writing a dissertation is really a community affair. It’s only fair that I acknowledge the contributions of others. In hindsight, it would have been wise of me to keep a running list from the beginning of the project in April 2009 of all those who have made a contribution. Alas, I didn’t have the foresight at the time and I’ll probably leave someone out inadvertently. So, if you’re reading along and think, “Hey, I sent Bob that article that one time” or “I gave feedback on his paper / presentation X, but Bob doesn’t thank me here”, I assure you, it was only an unfortunate oversight. Many people have made important contributions of all sorts: comments on my research, answers to questions, stimulating conversations and presentations, logistical and financial support, friendship. Thank you all. My promotors, Pieter Muysken and Margot van den Berg, warrant particular attention here. I want to thank Pieter, first of all, for hiring me to work on his project. At the time, I knew almost nothing about Suriname. Whether it was my fresh MA in African linguistics, keen interest in creole languages, or something else, Pieter saw that I would be a good fit to research languages in Suriname. From my perspective, it was indeed a perfect fit. I can’t imagine choosing any other place over Suriname to conduct research on languages and language contact. Over the past few years Pieter has patiently overseen my education and professional development and financed two trips for data collection in Suriname. This research certainly would not have been possible without him. A similar thanks to Margot for always taking time to provide critical and insightful comments on my work –and often other matters– throughout the various stages of the research project. Professors Bonno Thoden van Velzen and Ineke van Wetering are largely responsible for my successful acculturation in Suriname – in particular among the Ndyuka in the upriver villages of the Tapanahony river. Without them, data collection would have been, at best, more difficult, but probably less successful. I would also like to thank the various Surinamese informants and friends who provided language data and logistical support in: Diitabiki, Mainsi, Kisai, Godo-olo, Moengo, Paramaribo, Bitagron, Coronie, and Nickerie. A number of others have provided some bit of support or other, and are listed here in no particular order: Olga Krasnnoukhouva, Neele Müller, Linda van Meel, Benedicte Frostad, Robbert van Sluijs, Josh Birchall, Rick van Gijn, Loretta O’Connor, Gerrit Jan Kootstra, Pablo Irizarri van Suchtelen, Francesca Moro, Suzanne Aalberse, Hulya Sahin, Harald Hammarström, Kofi Yakpo, Roeland van Hout, Bettina Migge, Maarten Mous, Hella Jooren, Dirkje van der Aa, Chrietel viii Theunissen, Wies de Beijer, Kitty Rikken, Therese Brolin, Marjo de Theije, Isabelle Léglise, Stanley Hanenberg, Theo Damsteegt, Eithne Carlin, Marian Klamer, Peter Bakker, Norval Smith, Fund for Endangered Languages, Fiona Jordan, Michael Cysouw, Stuart Strange, Simeon Floyd, Cefas van Rossem, Gerald Stell, Jeanette Sakel, Sophie Villerius, Bart Jacobs, Peter Withers, Hilário de Sousa, Paul Tjon sie Fat, Michael Brannagan, Matthew Day, George Huttar, Dirk van der Elst, Jelmer Vos, David Eltis, Daniel Domingues da Silva. Last but not least, I’d like to thank my family –my parents Bob and Colleen Borges, my wife Asia Kulig, and our sweet little girl Agnieszka– for all the love, emotional, and moral support that they’ve provided while I’ve been busy with this project. Contents Introduction 1 The people and languages of Suriname 9 Kumanti: Ritual language formation and African retentions in Suriname 45 Linguistic Archaeology, Kinship Terms, and Language Contact in Suriname 79 Tense, Mood, and Aspect in Suriname 115 Particle verbs in Surinamese creoles 163 Coppename Kwinti: the influence of adstrate languages on a Surinamese creole 181 Conclusion 215 Nederlandse Samenvatting 223 Introduction Suriname is home to more than twenty languages, spoken among its approximately half million people. Given the high degree of multilingualism in the country (ABS 2006), it is not surprising that languages spoken in Suriname have influenced each other and continue to do so in some way. This dissertation reports on several ways in which languages interact and on the outcomes of this language interaction, including creation of new languages, changes to linguistic structures, and language death. Given that the majority of people in the world are multilingual, the study of the processes and outcomes of language contact have, and will likely continue to provide valuable insights beyond a traditional assumption in much of historical linguistics – that the main impetus for a language’s development is system internal. Although this assumption often holds for some aspects of some languages’ grammatical systems (e.g. regular sound changes well attested in the Indo-European family, or typical paths of grammaticalization, see e.g. Campbell 2004), a number of case studies (see Bakker and Mous 1994, Thomason 1997, Matras and Sakel 2007, to name but a few) have demonstrated that languages also influence each other in all areas of the lexicon and grammar. The efficacy of bi- or multilingual interaction in bringing some sort of permanent change to a language is often attributed to language external (i.e. sociocultural) factors of a particular speech community and the wider sociolinguistic context in which a particular speech community is situated (cf. Thomason and Kaufmann 1988). The study of language contact in Suriname is advantageous in that there are a variety of speech communities with drastically different sociocultural circumstances, whose languages fill different societal niches and fall into different relative sociolinguistic scenarios. In short, Suriname has a great deal to offer to current understanding of language contact. At the outset of this project, the range of possibilities for a research design seemed nearly endless. “Language contact in Suriname” was the point of departure which allowed for a rather free choice of languages to be included and methods to investigate issues pertinent to those languages. Since its inception as a subfield of historical linguistics, contact linguistics has diversified to include not only diachronic changes in grammatical systems as in historical linguistics, but also bilingual speech communities (sociolinguistics) and bilingual individuals (psycholinguistics). However, as Muysken (2013) notes, in academic practice, these assorted takes on language contact remain separate in terms of terminology, research questions, methodologies, conferences, etc., despite widespread agreement that individuals, speech communities, and linguistic structure all play an interrelated role 2 in the mechanisms and outcomes of language contact. In the following paragraphs, I will present the approaches of just a few scholars who have been most influential in both the field of contact linguistics and in my own approach to the topic. Haugen (1950) – Haugen defines borrowing as the process of attempted reproduction in one language of patterns previously found in another, which can take two forms: importation and substitution. A feature is said to be imported if it is similar enough to the model that a speaker of the source language would accept it as his own. Substitution refers to the reproduction of a foreign feature ‘inadequately’ based on patterns of the speaker’s own language. The results of borrowing are loanwords, calques, loanblends (combination of imported and substituted morphemes), loanshifts (morphemic substitution without importation), and creation of novel patterns. Haugen’s model also attempts to correlate the intensity of bilingualism (from less to more) with substitution and importation, respectively. And although he was concerned primarily with lexemes and their phonetic / phonological representations, his model should also be applicable to other areas of linguistic structure. Weinreich (1953) – In his pioneering work, Weinreich addresses contact in terms of interference (1950:1), ‘those instances of deviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with more than one language, i.e. language contact’. In Weinreich’s model, interference takes place in highly structured systems, e.g. most of morphology, syntax, and restricted areas of the lexicon (e.g. kinship terms), while changes in less structured subsystems (most of