Talk:Saramaccan language

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Number of Speakers

Why do so many places list the number of speakers as 90,000. Looking at the source for the population statistics on this Wikipedia page, I think it is pretty clear that those are numbers of Saramaka people, not people who speak the language. Maybe we can assume that every Saramaka person speaks the language, and nobody else does, but I think it is foolish to use that as a source.--137.43.183.225 (talk) 16:33, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Linguistic interest

This language is interesting to some people because it derives more from English than it does from any other single language, yet it has zero mutual spoken intercomprehensibility with any form of standard English... AnonMoos (talk) 04:01, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

foreign relations

And by the Surinamese people who are living in the 12 English-speaking Caribbean nations of which all 12 have a foreign relationship with the Republic of Suriname:

What, if anything, does this mean? —Tamfang (talk) 19:52, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Percentage of African derived vocabulary

Price's estimates cited here about the percentage of African derived vocabulary are extremely high compared to other scholars' estimates. The section referred to in citation [3] is a list of vocabulary items in various esoteric languages (not a study about Saramaccan lexicon) provided by his informant and the speculative statement he provides introducing this list on page 310 is what is referenced in this wikipedia entry

The lexicon of standard (everyday) Saramaccan, for example, is something like 35% English-derived, 25% Portuguese-derived, 5% derived from Amerindian, Dutch, or French, and 35% derived from one or another African language, though a complete dictionary of Saramaccan (including esoteric languages) would raise the African contribution to 50%. [My emphasis]

Does not provide any estimate, methodology, or reasonable explanation for 35% African Derived words. Smith 1987 calculates something like 50% English, 35% Portuguese, and 15% for the rest base on the Swadesh list -- of course this is problematic due to the size of the list (200ish items), but at least the estimate has a clear empirical basis. BobBorges (talk) 00:21, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]