Kwinti is an
English-based creole
An English-based creole language (often shortened to English creole) is a creole language for which English was the '' lexifier'', meaning that at the time of its formation the vocabulary of English served as the basis for the majority of the cr ...
of
Suriname
Suriname, officially the Republic of Suriname, is a country in northern South America, also considered as part of the Caribbean and the West Indies. It is a developing country with a Human Development Index, high level of human development; i ...
closely related to
Ndyuka. The language has less than 300 speakers, and split from Plantation Creole which is nowadays known as
Sranan Tongo
Sranan Tongo (Sranantongo, "Surinamese tongue", Sranan, Surinamese Creole) is an English-based creole language from Suriname, in South America, where it is the first or second language for 519,600 Surinamese people (approximately 80% of the popu ...
in the middle 18th century.
Code-switching
In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. These alternations are generally intended to ...
with Sranan Tongo and
Dutch was common among the younger generation in 1973, and about 70% of the tribe have moved to the urban areas. UNESCO considers the language endangered.
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
Matawai, and about 17% were not found in the other creoles and mainly originated from Dutch. The differences can be explained by education, because according to a 2011 study the population of
Witagron had a good command of both Dutch and Sranan Tongo.
References
Bibliography
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Ndyuka language
Languages of Suriname
English-based pidgins and creoles
Creoles of the Americas
English language in the Americas
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