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Exploring Language and Society with Big Data: Parliamentary discourse across time and space
Edited by Minna Korhonen, Haidee Kotze and Jukka Tyrkkö
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 111] 2023
► pp. 277–307

Chapter 10
Language variation in parliamentary speech in Suriname

| Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences
| Utrecht University
Surinamese Dutch is widely considered to be distinct from Netherlandic Dutch varieties, but grammatical differences remain understudied. The primary aim of this chapter is to explore some of the claims made in the literature about how the grammar of Surinamese Dutch differs from Netherlandic Dutch, using spoken data from the Surinamese parliament. We also introduce an exploratory method that uses automatic speech-to-text software to efficiently construct a corpus of spoken-language data, avoiding some of the pitfalls associated with working with spoken language data. We explore constructions involving the particle er ‘there’, word order, and non-standard imperfective constructions in the Surinamese Dutch data. Our analyses illustrate that pinpointing characteristic differences between Surinamese and Netherlandic Dutch is extremely nuanced.
Keywords: Dutch, Sranan, Surinamese parliament, speech-to-text, imperfective, word order
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1A brief linguistic history of Suriname
    • 1.2Dutch in Suriname
    • 1.3De Nationale Assemblée
  • 2.Corpus construction and analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Overview of the dataset
    • 3.2The particle er ‘there’
    • 3.3Word order
    • 3.4Imperfective marking
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.111.10bor
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