A08
Speakers' choices in three Saamaka communities

The central aim of this project is to explore the general hypothesis that language separation/choice and language mixing function as register markers. It does so by investigating the situation-specific linguistic variation in Saamaka (Tongo), one of the major Maroon languages of Suriname and the project examines three Saamaka-speaking communities with different multilingual profiles, focusing on spoken language in different settings of formality, addressee and majority language. We investigate the distribution and properties of lexical as well as grammatical phenomena.