The speakers are mostly descendants of fugitive slaves who were native to West and Central Africa; they form a group called Saamacca, also spelled Saramaka.
[3] The language is derived from Plantation Creole, which is nowadays known as Sranan Tongo, but the branches diverged around 1690 and evolved separately.
It has developed the use of tones, which are common in Africa, rather than stress, which is typical of European languages.
[10] About 50% of the vocabulary of Saramaccan is of African origin,[3] the largest percentage of any creole in the Americas.
A suku di soni te wojo fëën ko bëë.
Examples of words originally from Portuguese or a Portuguese creole are mujee (mulher) "woman", womi (o homem) "man", da (dar) "to give", bunu (bom) "good", kaba (acabar) "to end", ku (com) "with", kuma (como, cf.
"as, like", faka (faca) "knife", aki (aqui) "here", ma (mas) "but", kendi (quente) "hot", liba (riba) "above", and lio (rio) "river".
Saramaccan has a rich history of published works, including the following dictionaries: Christian Schumann's 1778, Saramaccanisch Deutsches Worter-Buch,[11] Johannes Riemer's 1779 Wörterbuch zur Erlernung der Saramakka-Neger-Sprache, a copied and edited version of Schumann,[12] Jan Voorhoeve and Antoon Donicie's 1963 wordlist, De Saramakaanse Woordenschat,[13] Antoon de Groot's, Woordregister Nederlands- Saramakaans met context en idioom (1977)[14] and his Woordregister Saramakaans-Nederlands (1981),[15] and Glock (ed) Holansi-Saamaka wöutubuku (Nederlands-Saramaccaans woordenboek)[16] The Instituut voor Taalwetenschap has published tens of literacy books and collections of folktales written by Saramaccans and a complete translation of the New Testament.
[17] Two books written by Richard Price have now been published in Saamakatongo: Fesiten[18] and Boo go a Kontukonde.
[19] Alison Hinds of Barbados based her up tempo soca song "Faluma" on the language.
[21] Linguist Vinije Haabo is developing a Saramaccan dictionary based on an improved orthography, which he intends to publish online.