In and Out of Suriname : Language, Mobility and Identity

In and Out of Suriname: Language, Mobility and Identity offers a unique multidisciplinary perspective on a multilingual society in the Caribbean and Guianan sphere. Breaking away from the view of bounded ethnicity, the authors address central theoretical issues of multilingual and multicultural societies including ethnicity as a social distinction, identity as the shifting construction of the self and others, and the role of language therein. They discuss the impact of contact and mobilities on language maintenance, expansion and change. Language, mobility and identity in Suriname are observed through the lens of the actors themselves, from the ever-mobile Amerindians and Maroons on the periphery of land and society through expanding urban societies enhanced by recent migration from Haiti, Brazil and China.

Eithne B. Carlin is Senior Lecturer at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. She is the author of A Grammar of Trio, a Cariban Language of Suriname (Peter Lang 2004), and has edited books and articles on the Amerindian languages of the Guianas.

Isabelle Léglise is Senior Research Fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Head of the SeDyL Laboratory in Paris. She has published widely on multilingualism in French Guiana, variation and change, mobility and language contact.

Bettina Migge is Associate Professor in Linguistics at University College Dublin, Ireland and associated with CNRS-SeDyL, France. She has published widely on language contact, sociolinguistic and descriptive issues pertaining to Maroons in Suriname and French Guiana.

Paul B. Tjon Sie Fat, PhD (2009), University of Amsterdam, has published several articles about language, identity, and social organization among the Chinese of Suriname.