Speakers: Sranan Tongo is a
creole language spoken by most people in Suriname. It is the mother
tongue of about 100,000 people in Suriname who are descendants of
slaves brought from Africa during the colonial period. It is also the
lingua franca between different ethnic groups in Suriname. Today many Sranan Tongo speakers also
live in the Netherlands.
Features of Sranan Tongo. Sranan
is similar to Aukan and Saramaccan. As a creole language it is
characterized by simple morphology and a relatively small vocabulary. There is
no inflection or declension in the words. Although it is impossible to
know for sure how many words there are in Sranan, they number in the
several thousand, rather than hundreds of thousands for major world
languages. These features make it a relatively easy language to learn.