Sranan Tongo

Sranan Tongo
Sranantongo
Native toSuriname
Native speakers
L1: 520,000 (2018)[1]
L2: 150,000
English Creole
  • Atlantic
    • Suriname
      • Sranan Tongo
Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-2srn
ISO 639-3srn
Glottologsran1240
Linguasphere52-ABB-aw

Sranan Tongo (Sranantongo "Surinamese tongue", Sranan, Surinaams, Surinamese, Surinamese Creole)[2] is an English-based creole language that is spoken as a lingua franca by approximately 519,600 people in Suriname.[1]

Developed originally among enslaved Africans from Central and West Africa in Suriname, its use as a lingua franca expanded after the Dutch took over the colony in 1667. 85% of the vocabulary comes from English and Dutch. It also became the common language among the Indigenous peoples and the indentured laborers imported by the Dutch; these groups included speakers of Javanese, Sarnami Hindustani, Saramaccan, and varieties of Chinese.

Sranan Tongo is commonly but incorrectly cited as "having a vocabulary of only 340 words"; in fact, contemporary Sranan Tongo dictionaries have several thousand word entries.[3]

  1. ^ a b Sranan Tongo at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  2. ^ "Sranan | language | Britannica".
  3. ^ "The Sranan Tongo language". suriname-languages.sil.org. Retrieved 2023-12-01.