Kwinti language

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Kwinti
Native toSuriname
EthnicityKwinti
Native speakers
250 (2018)[1]
English Creole
  • Atlantic
    • Suriname
      • Kwinti
Language codes
ISO 639-3kww
Glottologkwin1243

Kwinti is an

English-based creole of Suriname closely related to Ndyuka.[2] The language has less than 300 speakers,[3] and split from Plantation Creole which is nowadays known as Sranan Tongo in the middle 18th century.[4] Code-switching with Sranan Tongo and Dutch was common among the younger generation in 1973,[5] and about 70% of the tribe have moved to the urban areas.[6] UNESCO considers the language endangered.[7]

In the 1970s, Jan English-Lueck collected a vocabulary of 500 words. Unlike the Ndyuka languages, the letter r is spoken in a similar way to Sranan Tongo and Dutch, although speakers without r have been discovered later. About three quarters of the words were cognate to Sranan Tongo, very few (circa 3%) were cognate to

Witagron had a good command of both Dutch and Sranan Tongo.[9]

References

  1. ^ Kwinti at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  2. ^ Hoogbergen 1992, p. 123.
  3. ^ Borges 2014, p. 195.
  4. ^ Borges 2014, p. 188.
  5. ^ Elst 1973, p. 14.
  6. S2CID 140546216
    . Retrieved 25 July 2020.
  7. ^ "Kwinti". The University of the West-Indies, Jamaica. Archived from the original on 29 October 2021. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  8. ^ Borges 2014, pp. 188–189.
  9. ^ Borges 2014, p. 191.

Bibliography