On the provenience of the Portuguese in Saramacca tongo

Abstract

The great number of Portuguese words in the language of the Saramacca tribe of Bush-Negroes has been noticed by all those who have studied the speech of these people. As one penetrates deeper and deeper into the interior of the Suriname bush, along the upper Suriname River to the region where the Saramacca people live, the language of the coast, „taki-taki, or „Negro-English, as it is called, becomes less and less spoken, and the dialect heard takes on a character peculiar to itself. This dialect, as is well known, is not understood by the people of the coastal region. This is due to the fact that in spite of the basic similarity in structure and historical development of the two dialects, the speech of the interior contains not only many Portuguese terms not found in the coastal speech, but, what is more, a great number of African words, something that has not been as generally realised. The question of the provenience of these Portuguese words has, in the main, been accepted as solved when it was said that they were introduced by Jewish refugees who, driven from Brazil in the middle of the seventeenth century, settled in Suriname and brought with them their Negro slaves. These slaves, it is held, took with them the Portuguese expressions they had learned from their Jewish masters when they fled to the bush with other insurgents among the Negroes, and incorporated these expressions in the language which later became the „Saramacca tongo' ' . So strongly has this hypothesis been accept-