This is a very beautiful and useful book. It gives a lot of information which leads to a better knowledge of a linguistic area of major interest to typologists, sociolinguists, ethnolinguists, creolists, and all kind of theoreticians, but nevertheless largely underestimated in this respect. At the same time, the authors manage to avoid excessively technical references and terminology, so that beyond the linguistic point of view, the layman as well as the specialist should be able to understand what a country like Suriname, with its complex history and population, can bring to a better understanding of human societies in general.

Suriname is one of the “three Guianas,” which are very atypical countries in their South and Latin American environment. They remained outside of the Spanish-Portuguese colonial division, for the benefit of three northern European countries (Britain, France, and, later, the Netherlands in the case of Suriname). A relatively late colonization came across territories whose greatest part is made up of the Amazonian rain forest; this hinterland is hard to penetrate and to exploit, so the bulk of economic activity is confined to the coastal strip, leaving space for native Amazonian groups and fugitive slaves. Interbreeding and creolization occurred in a very different way from what happened in the rest of South America, and the formation of maroon (escaped slave) communities was far more important than elsewhere. The majority of post-slavery foreign workers came from Asia (northern India, southern China, and Java). The complexity of interethnic contacts always triggered social and linguistic dynamics, with a permanent restructuring of identities, and a permanent dialectic of integration and antagonism.

History and geography are thus essential to our comprehension of the sociolinguistic and even linguistic situation: why there are people speaking these languages in this place, and why these languages are as they are. This is obvious for creole languages, but also for immigrant languages – Dutch as well as Javanese or Sarnami Hindi – and even for native Amerindian languages. No wonder chapters or subchapters devoted to history account for nearly one-third of the book, which is adorned with quite a few maps (for the location of languages), but also with many well-chosen illustrations such as old maps, old pictures, and photographs of persons, books, and manuscripts.

Part I is devoted to the Amerindian peoples and languages. In chap. 1, “The native population: Migration and identities,” Eithne Carlin & Karin Boven present the various native peoples, and the various forms of their encounters with Europeans (warriors, planters, tradesmen, missionaries, explorers) since about 1600. The authors show that, tragic as it may be, this history is not only a history of subjugation and decimation, where entire tribes were lost, but also of movement and restructuring in order to survive.

In chap. 2, “Patterns of language, patterns of thought,” Eithne Carlin gives an overview of the most salient features of the Cariban languages of Suriname, or at least of three of them (Trio, Kari'na, and Wayana), the other three (Akuriyo, Tunayana, and Sikïiyana) being little documented and nearly extinct. Their linguistic closeness allows a common presentation of their phonology, their morphology, and some original categories such as classification, evidentiality, and person marking in relation to the active/stative parameter. Three short text excerpts are given as an illustration.

Chap. 3, “The Arawak language,” is a grammatical sketch by Marie-France Patte, with special emphasis on possession, gender, and verb valency. It ends in a short text excerpt of Mawayana, a language of the same family which has only four remaining speakers.

Part II presents the creole languages. In chap. 4, “The history of the Surinamese creoles I: A sociohistorical survey,” Jacques Arends distinguishes several phases in the birth and development of these languages, pointing out a few historical features which make the Sranan Tongo and Maroon languages so special among English creoles. The British occupation was short (1651–1667); the British settlers came from Barbados and almost immediately established a true plantation society (while elsewhere the initial stage, known as “settlement society,” lasted longer). After the Dutch takeover, Dutch speakers did not form a majority (there were remaining Englishmen, French Huguenots and Portuguese-speaking Jews), and many of them resided only temporarily in Suriname; and owing to a terrible death rate, by the end of the 18th century up to three-quarters of the slaves in Suriname had been born in Africa. Moreover, marooning (escape) was massive. These conditions yielded atypical creole languages, which are nevertheless the best historically documented ones, as seen in chap. 6. The chapter ends in an overview of the modern-day situation, with two major events: the beginning of compulsory education in 1876, with an anti-Sranan campaign, which in its turn led to a cultural defense in the middle of the 20th century; and a new literacy campaign which began after independence and was stopped by civil war in 1986.

Chap. 5, “The history of the Surinamese creoles II: Origin and differentiation,” is written by Norval Smith, who was in 1987 the author of a very important thesis on the same subject. Smith takes advantage of some new works, such as Van den Berg's archival research on court records (which contain Sranan fragments as early as 1707), to discuss with strong arguments the question of the birth of Sranan and also of Saramaccan. Smith warns us honestly that the formation of Surinamese creoles is still a controversial matter, but nonspecialists can at least realize that in the general area of creole studies, this unsettled debate rests on an older and more extended corpus, brings in more solid arguments, and offers deeper insights than most others do. One very interesting point is Smith's reminder that, besides the six present-day linguistic forms of creole (Western Maroon creoles with a strong Portuguese influence – Saramaccan and Matawai – ; and Eastern Maroon creoles with a more “purely” English vocabulary – Ndyuka, Aluku, Paramaka, and Kwinti), the first Maroons, around 1660 (the Karboergers or Muraato, these names being close to Portuguese Caboclo and Mulato) intermarried with Kali'na and adopted their language (in the same way as black slaves did on a broader scale in Saint Vincent, yielding the Garifuna or Black Carib people of Central America); and that the last Maroons, around 1820 (the Brosu), were Sranan speakers.

Chap. 6, “The structure of the Surinamese creoles,” by Adrienne Bruyn, adopts a more strictly linguistic point of view to present the phonology, lexicon, and grammar of what finally appear to be three languages (Sranan, and two Maroon languages with their variants, see above). The typical creole features are present (tendency to an isolating grammar with no inflection, and restructuring of grammatical categories such as tense-aspect-mood and determination). But the use of word compounding and agentive nominalization are a hint that at least a certain degree of morphology exists. And some African features (such as ideophones or labiovelar stops) seem more present than in most French or other English creoles; moreover, some other features, such as a strictly CV syllabic structure or a two-tone system, have been re-created. Two plates give interesting data about P-language, a cryptic code similar to English Pig Latin or French Javanais, and Wakaman tongo, a much-used slang.

In chap. 7, “Young languages, old texts,” Jacques Arends, to whom we owe an edition of Early Suriname Creole texts (1995), gives an extensive account of the existing writings in or about Surinamese creole languages. This begins as far back as 1688 (a few words in the novel Oronooko) and continues in various documents such as court records and slave letters, and in quite a few works of more linguistic scope like conversation books, grammars, and dictionaries. Special mention is made of the Moravian Brethren, who were both eager evangelists and good linguists, and of Creole grammarians (Helstone 1903) and lexicographers (Focke 1855). The overwhelming part of this literature is in or about Sranan, but Saramaccan is also present, in contrast to Ndyuka and Eastern Maroon, on which there is almost no publication. Strangely enough, Arends fails to mention the syllabic script “revealed” about 1900 in a dream to Afaka, a Ndyuka, and used afterwards by a small group of bukuman.

Part III, “The Eurasian languages,” examines languages born outside Suriname and brought into the country by different kinds of immigration. In chap. 8, “Surinamese Dutch,” Christa de Kleine gives both a historical and linguistic account of the official language, which, like all other and more widely spoken European languages transplanted in America, developed original and specific linguistic features.

In chap. 9, “Kejia: A Chinese language in Suriname,” Paul Brendan Tjon Sie Fat describes the historical and linguistic situation of Kejia, also known as Hakka, a language spoken in the area of the Pearl River Delta in southern China, and the native language of most Chinese immigrants in Suriname and French Guiana.

Chap. 10, “Sarnami as an immigrant koiné,” by Theo Damsteegt, is particularly interesting in that it gives a clear picture of the linguistic situation among Hindustanis in Suriname (and the Netherlands), who are mostly descendants of post-slavery indentured laborers from northern India. Speaking dialects of Hindi such as Bhojpuri, Magahi, and Avadhi, they developed a koiné called Sarnami, which owing to an active cultural movement emerged as a literary language. A half-page plate reminds us of the temporary (but unfortunately undated) existence of a small community speaking Telugu (a Dravidian language of southern India).

In chap. 11, “Javanese speech styles in Suriname,” Claire Wolfowitz, after a short historical sketch, focuses on a specific point of the language: how Javanese immigrants, in a new sociological context, restructured the traditional honorific system.

A prologue by André Kramp advocates a “project of sustainable language policy,” while an epilogue by Jacques Arends and Eithne Carlin assesses the mutual sociolinguistic relation and possible fate of languages in Suriname, with special attention to Dutch as an official language, Sranan as a strong lingua franca, and an increasing presence of English.

Since a review is also supposed to pinpoint flaws and drawbacks, the reader may regret that the book gives so few details about precisely the “lesser” languages, such as four of the eight Amerindian languages, and also Kwinti, the less-documented Maroon creole which is usually classified together with Eastern creoles (“with a slightly greater distance,” as Smith puts it on p. 149), but sometimes with Saramaccan (see Price & Price 2003). Even a rough estimate of the number of speakers is lacking for most languages. And speaking of figures, since Ndyuka, Aluku, Paramaka (and Kwinti?) on the one hand, and Saramaka and Matawai on the other, are clearly variants of the same languages, then there are only three creole languages (with Sranan), not seven, and fifteen languages, not nineteen, in Suriname.

A united terminology might have been useful for Amerindian languages. It is clear that Carlin's “postpositions” in Cariban languages and Patte's “relators” in Arawak refer to the same grammatical notion. One may also wonder why Eithne Carlin summons up Whorf's SAE (Standard Average European), a notion which lacks any content (see, for instance, the difference in the structure of verbal categories between European languages, and the use of the same historical forms between very closely related languages such as French, Portuguese, and Spanish, and even between European and American Spanish – a constant feature being that in none of them you would find a simple Present-Past-Future structure). For Cariban comparatism, it could have been useful to add to the bibliography Gildea's (1998) study, and to mention Sergio Meira's (2000) dissertation on Trio.

But in such an inclusive overview, the biggest gap again is the absence of any mention of the Afaka script. More than a mere shortcoming, it is a real mistake, leaving a flaw in this very interesting book which has not only a linguistic and sociolinguistic value, but also a cultural one, and which is a model for researchers in neighboring French Guiana.