Creole Formation as Language Contact: The Case of the Suriname Creoles (review)

The Suriname creoles Bettina Migge treats are typologically ‘radical’. They arose suddenly and remained in relative isolation from their lexifier, not the case with most other creoles. Furthermore and perhaps complementarily, they have retained much more of their African-ness than other contact varieties outside the African context. Thus, these Suriname creoles serve as an important test case for determining the origin of creole structures. What makes this book so useful to the task is the clarity of presentation, the soundness of its argumentation, and the fullness of its documentation.

The varieties of interest here are those spoken today by the descendants of the Maroons, Africans who fled their enslavement on European lowland plantations of Suriname in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They established their own (covert) communities high in the hills or far upstream from those who sought their recapture. One present-day outgrowth from what M calls Surinamese Plantation Creole, the variety of those early plantations, is Sranan Tongo, the variety of the slaves who didn’t get away, now the lingua franca of Suriname. The other creoles are spoken today in relatively isolated pockets where the Maroons originally established their havens.

For those familiar with creolistics, particularly its preoccupation with creole origins, this book is a welcome antidote to the paltry sociohistorical research and top-heavy theory-driven research programs often found there. M spells out her goals, her methodology, and her findings without much ado. Her research is thoroughly documented and presented with great evenness. She stands within the current thinking about creoles—that they are just another contact phenomenon—and uses a familiar typological framework within which to situate her study.

Ch. 1 introduces the goal of the study, to understand creole formation, and sets forth M’s approach, indicating the weaknesses in other approaches. Ch. 2, ‘Current research on creole formation’, reviews the literature and ends with a blueprint of her methodology. Ch. 3, ‘The context of creole formation in Suriname’, begins the core of the study, providing a sociohistorical context for the formation of the Suriname creoles.

Ch. 4 discusses the superstrate side of the equation, the nature of the English input, how English was simplified in the context of the plantation creole’s birth. For those wanting to understand how creoles are formed, M presents many detailed examples, including stative verbs and the copula, serial verbs, and locational phrases.

The next two chapters discuss the other side of the input, how African structures also made their way into the creoles. Ch. 5 looks at lexical retentions from Gbe, which is not as interesting as Ch. 6, which considers structural ones. M finds few lexical retentions but many more in the way of retention or projection of Gbe structural and semantic properties. Speakers reinterpreted the reduced English input in terms of their own abstract structures, and if there was enough similarity, they shoehorned the English forms into pre-existent systems.

Ch. 7 compares present-day forms with what historical evidence exists, finding that attested language-internal processes have been at work producing synchronic forms. Besides summarizing the study, Ch. 8 considers the findings in terms of current theories, finding most satisfying those that base themselves on L2 acquisition.