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Encyclopedia > Saramaccan

Saramaccan (autonym: Saamáka) is a creole spoken by about 24,000 people near the Saramaccan and upper Suriname Rivers in Suriname, and 2,000 in French Guiana. About 2,000 of the total speak a dialect called Matawari. The sources of Saramaccan vocabulary are English, Portuguese, Dutch, and Sub-Saharan African languages (20% of its vocabulary is African), especially Kongo and Gbe. Its phonology is closest to languages of Africa, and it has even developed tones, which are common in Africa. A creole is a language descended from a pidgin that has become the native language of a group of people. ... -1... French Guiana ( French: Guyane) is an overseas département (département doutre-mer, or DOM) of France, located on the Caribbean coast of South America. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Portuguese (português) is a Romance language predominantly spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and East Timor. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... The term African languages refers to the approximately 1800 languages spoken in Africa. ... Kongo is the Bantu language spoken by the Kongo people living in the tropical forests of Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo and Angola. ... Map showing the distribution of the various Gbe languages Introduction The Gbe languages form a dialect continuum stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. ... Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech) is a subfield of grammar (see also linguistics). ... Tone refers to the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. ...


Phonology

The language has two tones, "high" and "low".


Its vowel inventory, besides i, a and u, contains both open and closed e and o sounds, giving seven vowels in all. There is no r sound. Two phonemes that are very typical of West African languages, kp and gb, are also found.


There are nasal vowels, indicated in writing with an n or m at the end of a syllable. The syllabic structure is (C)V(V). Words that start with o are labialized.


Examples

To English speakers not familiar with it, the English basis of this language is almost unrecognizable. These are some examples of Saramaccan sentences (taken from the SIL dictionary):


De waka te de aan sinkii möön.
"They traveled until they were worn out."


U ta mindi kanda fu dee soni dee ta pasa ku u.
"We make up songs about things that happen to us."


A suku di soni te wojo fëën ko bëë.
"He looked for it in vain."


Mi puu tu dusu kölu bai ën.
"I paid two thousand guilders for it."


Examples of words originally from Portuguese or a Portuguese creole are: mujee (mulher) "woman"; womi (homem) "man"; da (dar) "to give"; bunu (bono) "good"; kaba (acabar) "to end"; ku (com) "with"; kuma (como) "as"; faka (faca) "knife"; aki (aquí) "here"; ma (mas) "but"; kendi (quente) "hot"; liba (arriba) "above"; lio (rio) "river".


External Links


  Results from FactBites:
 
Saramaccan language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (323 words)
Saramaccan (autonym: Saamáka) is a creole spoken by about 24,000 people near the Saramaccan and upper Suriname Rivers in Suriname, and 2,000 in French Guiana.
The sources of Saramaccan vocabulary are English, Portuguese, Dutch, and Sub-Saharan African languages (20% of its vocabulary is African), especially Kongo and Gbe.
Its phonology is closest to languages of Africa, and it has even developed tones, which are common in Africa.
abstracts3-2 (644 words)
Saramaccan, an Atlantic creole whose lexifier languages are Portuguese and English, has a “split” prosodic system wherein the majority of its words are marked for pitch accent but an important minority are marked for tone.
However, this complication of Saramaccan grammar does appear to be broadly consistent with the more general claim of McWhorter (1998) that creoles form an identifiable class of languages on typological, in addition to sociohistorical, grounds.
These observations are then analysed in the light of a possible scenario of the formation of Saramaccan involving the partial relexification of an earlier form of Sranan (the English-lexifier creole of the coast of Suriname) with Portuguese and/or a Portuguese-based Creole.
  More results at FactBites »


 

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