This volume constitutes what is perhaps the most thorough description of a creole language to date. Following the Descriptive Grammar Series outline, it provides detailed coverage of a full range of grammatical, phonological and lexical information, written with the interests of formalists and functionalists, creolists and students of language universals and typology in mind. Expressions of lin-uistic judgements by both native and trained native speakers of Ndyuka combine with close study of texts to provide a solid basis for the work. More than two thousand examples of constructions and forms are considered in context and these give the careful reader a rich picture of all the stuctural and functional aspects of this radical creole. The authors' close acquaintance with the Ndyuka language community spans more than 25 years and allows the intuitions of Ndyuka speakers to show through clearly. Numerous cross references and an index of forms and topics of special interest supplement the detailed table of contents, facilitating the testing of hypotheses on language universals, typology, creolization, and processes such as clefting, relativization and verb serialization.

This book is the first publication originating from the conference Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour: Past, Present and Future, which was organised in June 2013, by the Institute of Graduate Studies and Research (IGSR), Anton de Kom University of Suriname.

This title will be available online in its entirety in Open Access In and Out of Suriname: Language, Mobility and Identity offers a fresh multidisciplinary approach to multilingual Surinamese society, that breaks through the notion of bounded ethnicity enshrined in historical and ethnographic literature on Suriname.

Multidirectional language contact involving more than two languages is little described. However, it probably represents the most common type of contact in the world, where colonization, rapid socioeconomic and demographic change, and society-wide multilingualism have led to dramatic linguistic change. This book presents fascinating cases of multidirectional contact and convergence between highly diverse languages in an emerging linguistic area in Suriname and the Guianas and proposes a framework for comparable studies.

This is a new contribution to a theory of reiteration in natural languages, with a special focus on creoles. Reiteration is meant to denote any situation where the same form occurs (at least) twice within the boundaries of some linguistic domain. By including two case studies bearing on Hebrew and Breton alongside five chapters on creole languages (Surinam creole, Haitian, Mauritian, São Tomé and Pitchi), this volume brings counter-evidence to the claim that reiteration phenomena are particularly typical of creoles. And by exploring the syntax of reiteration alongside its morphology, the authors are led to challenge the 'iconic' theory of 'reduplication' proposed in several other studies of similar phenomena. This volume will be relevant for creole studies, but also for readers more generally interested in language universals and the architecture of grammars.

Suspect Others explores how ideas of self-knowledge and identity arise from a unique set of rituals in Suriname, a postcolonial Caribbean nation rife with racial and religious suspicion. Amid competition for belonging, political power, and control over natural resources, Surinamese Ndyuka Maroons and Hindus look to spirit mediums to understand the causes of their successes and sufferings and to know the hidden minds of relatives and rivals alike. But although mediumship promises knowledge of others, interactions between mediums and their devotees also fundamentally challenge what devotees know about themselves, thereby turning interpersonal suspicion into doubts about the self. Through a rich ethnographic comparison of the different ways in which Ndyuka and Hindu spirit mediums and their devotees navigate suspicion, Suspect Others shows how present-day Caribbean peoples come to experience selves that defy concepts of personhood inflicted by the colonial past. Stuart Earle Strange investigates key questions about the nature of self-knowledge, religious revelation, and racial discourse in a hyper-diverse society. At a moment when exclusionary suspicions dominate global politics, Suspect Others elucidates self-identity as a social process that emerges from the paradoxical ways in which people must look to others to know themselves.

Proposing a new methodological approach to documenting languages spoken in multilingual societies, this book retraces the investigation of one unique linguistic space, the Creole varieties referred to as Takitaki in multilingual French Guiana. It illustrates how interactional sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic, discourse analytical and quantitative sociolinguistic approaches can be integrated with structural approaches to language in order to resolve rarely discussed questions systematically (what are the outlines of the community, who is a rightful speaker, what speech should be documented) that frequently crop up in projects of language documentation in multilingual contexts. The authors argue that comprehensively documenting complex linguistic phenomena requires taking into account the views of all local social actors (native and non native speakers, institutions, linguists, non-speakers etc.), applying a range of complementary data collection and analysis methods and putting issues of ideology, variation, language contact and interaction centre stage. This book will be welcomed by researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, fieldwork studies, language documentation and language variation and change.