Out of India: Language contact and change in Sarnami (Caribbean Hindustani)

Abstract

Sarnami, spoken in Suriname, is the only variety of Caribbean Hindustani that still has a sizeable speaker community. Sarnami is the result of the koineization of several northern Indian languages during Dutch colonial rule. A comparison of Sarnami with its closest Indian relatives suggests that contact with Sranan and Dutch has led to syntactic change, with an inherited head-final order giving way to head-initial order. SVO is far more frequent in Sarnami than in the Indian control group and. In relative constructions and with certain types of modal and aspectual auxiliary constructions, the transition has been made to NRel (postposed relative clauses) and AuxV (auxiliary-verb order). However, diachronically more stable constituent orders like noun vs. adjective, noun vs. adposition and noun vs. genitive have not been affected by change. Constituent order change in Sarnami is an example of the kind of convergence that characterises Suriname as a linguistic area, where the two dominant languages Sranan and Dutch simultaneously exert pressure toward typological change.