Chapter 10. Language variation in parliamentary speech in Suriname

Abstract

Surinamese Dutch is widely considered to be distinct from Netherlandic Dutch varieties, but grammatical differences remain understudied. The primary aim of this chapter is to explore some of the claims made in the literature about how the grammar of Surinamese Dutch differs from Netherlandic Dutch, using spoken data from the Surinamese parliament. We also introduce an exploratory method that uses automatic speech-to-text software to efficiently construct a corpus of spoken-language data, avoiding some of the pitfalls associated with working with spoken language data. We explore constructions involving the particle er ‘there’, word order, and non-standard imperfective constructions in the Surinamese Dutch data. Our analyses illustrate that pinpointing characteristic differences between Surinamese and Netherlandic Dutch is extremely nuanced.