Tiny Suriname, the smallest country in South America, punches far above its weight in linguistic diversity. Many people speak Dutch, but if you visit, you're also likely to hear Hindi, Javanese, a variety of indigenous languages, Portuguese, Cantonese, and possibly others. This real-world Babel, in a country of fewer than 600,000 people, is a relic of Suriname’s colonial history.

The language that enables everyone to communicate is Sranan. It's a creole that serves as a linguistic time capsule, capturing Suriname’s brief tenure as a British colony before the territory was ceded to the Dutch in 1667. This time capsule status has allowed a group of researchers to use Sranan to reconstruct details about migration to the colony from England in the 1600s. Their results show how cultural artifacts could be used to trace human migration—and might one day help researchers trace the origins of enslaved people.

A living linguistic fossil

Creole languages arise in relatively extreme situations, when different groups of people find themselves in prolonged contact without a shared language—like in a young colony. People use bits of different languages to try to communicate, and over generations, these halting “pidgin” languages become fully fledged natural human languages: creoles.

Like many famous creoles, including its close relative Gullah, Sranan is English-based, meaning that the bulk of its vocabulary comes from English. It also has words that can be traced to Dutch and Portuguese and a tiny percentage that can be traced to African languages.

Both English and Sranan have changed markedly since the 17th century. But in one important way, Sranan is a “linguistic fossil,” said Nicole Creanza, one of the researchers involved in the Sranan study. In a phone call with Ars, she explained there was a “pulse of English influence” before the Dutch took over and most of the English speakers left. As a result, the English that influenced Sranan captures a very brief point in linguistic time.

To study this time capsule, André Sherriah and Hubert Devonish, two linguists at the University of the West Indies, teamed up with psychologist Ewart Thomas and Creanza, a biologist interested in applying methods from biology to languages. Their goal was to see if they could look at Sranan in a new way. They wanted to know if the forms of the English words that made their way into Sranan could tell them where in England the colonists had come from.

It’s possible to ask this question because there is a huge amount of data on English dialects. They’ve long been the subject of linguistic study—the Survey of English Dialects, conducted among older rural people in the mid-1900s, serves as a detailed snapshot of early 20th-century English variations. For example, one of the most obvious features of the archetypal English accent is that it is “non-rhotic”: it doesn’t pronounce the r in words like “car” and “burger,” whereas many US accents do. But there are plenty of regional varieties in England that are in fact rhotic, allowing it to be used to narrow down the language's sources.

The researchers gathered data on a huge number of features like these from dialects across England and compared them to Sranan words that held clues about the pronunciation in the original English, trying to infer which dialects may have been present in the mixture that gave rise to Sranan. Their results suggested that two dialects had contributed the lion’s share: one from the southwest of England, near Bristol, and another from the southeast, in Essex.

Tracing unknown influences

This result was actually not a big reveal. Historical records already told us where the majority of English people travelling to Suriname had come from, and “much investigation has been done on the African and English influences on Atlantic Creoles,” Devonish told Ars in an email.

But a big reveal wasn’t the point. The point was to see if this new statistical method could reliably detect the geographical fingerprints of the people who had contributed to Sranan—to see, said Creanza, whether “we can use cultural markers that exist today to say something about the past.”

Ideally, a method like this could be useful for helping to trace the African origins of the enslaved people brought to the West Indies. African languages have contributed a much smaller share of vocabulary in creoles, and they have been less intensively studied than English. But there are currently researchers studying the African origins of people in the Americas, as well as the African languages that contributed to the creoles that they passed down. Methods like these, says Creanza, might have a role to play in helping to narrow down which of the current hypotheses seems the most likely.

The paper is “very fresh and exciting,” said Damian Blasi, who studies creoles and language evolution but wasn’t involved with this research. “It shows how a successful collaboration between researchers from the humanities and the sciences can lead to a stronger account of a phenomenon beyond what they could have achieved individually.”

The “range of data they consider is impressive,” he told Ars. But because the colonial languages usually contributed so heavily to the vocabulary of creoles, this vocabulary-based method “might not have much to say about the other languages which played a role,” he added. “To me the most exciting open question has to do with grammar... can we recover the same genealogy for Sranan if we look at differences in the grammar of English dialects as well, or do the results point somewhere else?”

Sherriah and his colleagues don’t disagree; they are cautious about the possibilities for translating this method to other questions and other contexts. And comparing more recent historic forms of English and Sranan to get at centuries-old linguistic forms isn’t ironclad, Creanza pointed out. There’s work to be done. But the work drives home why creoles are so fascinating in the first place, said Blasi: “in spite of the adverse conditions in which creoles emerge, they manage to acquire and preserve the linguistic features of the languages that were spoken at the time of their development. This is one of the best cases I know of the outstanding ability humans have to learn and transmit language.”

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2018. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0055 (About DOIs).