Ebook: Loanwords in Saramaccan, an English-based Atlantic Creole of Suriname

Saramaccan is an Atlantic creole spoken primarily in Suriname, though there are also speakers in
French Guiana as well as a substantial diaspora population in the Netherlands. The fifteenth edition
of the Ethnologue estimates that there are about 26,000 speakers of the languages. It is a maroon
creole—that is, a creole spoken by descendants of slaves who escaped from plantations (see
Price 1976 for an overview of the history of the maroons of Suriname). Accordingly, most
Saramaccan villages lie in the Surinamese rain forest away from the coast which was the center
of the colonial plantation economy. These villages are situated along two rivers, the Suriname
River and Saramacca River. (The populations found along the Saramaccan River, speaking the
Matawai dialect, are sometimes classified as a distinct group from the Saramaccans.) All of the
data discussed here, and included in the loanword database, comes from dialects spoken along
the Suriname River, of which two are traditionally distinguished, a Lower River dialect, spoken
closer to the coast, and an Upper River dialect spoken further in the interior.