I am a native Dutch speaker and lived in Suriname for several years. I am particularly interested in adding and documenting Surinamese Dutch lemmas and meanings, and in adding quotations and non-Indo-European etymologies to Sranan Tongo lemmas. Unfortunately, my knowledge of other languages spoken in Suriname is extremely limited.
Disclaimers and clarifications:
- I am not a native speaker of Sranan Tongo and therefore welcome constructive comments/edits from native speakers.
- When transcribing spoken and sung Sranan Tongo from audiovisual sources, I avoid contracted forms or pronunciation spellings, for clarity and consistency.
- Saramaccan/Saamaka, Aukan/Ndyuka and Kwinti are descended from (early) Sranan Tongo. So per Wiktionary's policy on creole languages, fensee, for instance, is derivation rather than a borrowing. In many Dutch lemmas, this is shown incorrectly in the descendants tree. This also applies to most Sranan Tongo words taken from Dutch, English, and African languages, except arguably for modern words like demokrâsia (“democracy”), which could be considered a borrowing.
- According to the 1986 official spelling, diphthongs "ai", "ei", "èi", "oi" and "ui" are spelled with an -i. As this still reflects Dutch orthography, there have been proposals to switch this to -y, but as far as I know, this has never been made official. So, for instance, ay could be considered an alternative/progressive spelling. For the sake of consistency, I'd propose we keep the lemma forms in the 1986 spelling, so for instance ai.
- I would warn against using the Sranan Tongo Wikipedia as a source of either words or quotations. It's the origin of a few dodgy neologisms that seem to have been created expressly for it. Notably, I haven't been able to document *ripoliku, which is supposed to mean republic, outside of the Wikiverse. There is therefore no guarantee that the texts on the Sranan Tongo Wikipedia reflect real language use.
- Sranan Tongo loanwords in Dutch are consistently included as unadapted borrowings in the Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal, i.e. in the official Sranan Tongo spelling, for instance markusa. In a number of such cases, however, the spelling based on Dutch orthography is (still) dominant in written Surinamese Dutch, for instance markoesa. I lean towards keeping the lemma form in the spelling that is currently dominant in Suriname itself.
