Caribbean Hindustani, Pt. I - Introduction and Grammatical Sketch
The language of the oldest Indian diaspora in the Americas
In this post (the first in a three-part series), we will explore the history of Indian migration to the Caribbean and how this resulted in the synthesis of unique diasporic language called “Caribbean Hindustani.” After a brief account of the parent languages back in India, we will then explore similarities and differences between varieties of Caribbean Hindustani through a grammatical sketch and example sentences. If you like this post, check out Part II (translations of Caribbean chutney song lyrics) and stay tuned for Part III (tracing the development of Indo-Caribbean pop culture over the last half century).
The history of Indians in the Caribbean
Today, the Indian diaspora in the Americas is largely the result of recent immigration to the U.S. and Canada over the last few decades. However, there is a much older Indian community in the New World - the Indo-Caribbeans. These are mostly the descendants of Indian indentured laborers who were brought by the British to work in Caribbean plantation colonies after the British Empire abolished slavery in the 1830s. This policy started in 1838 in British Guiana, 1845 in Trinidad, and 1873 in Dutch Guiana (which later became Suriname), and continued in all three colonies until 1916. In this period, a total of 238,909 Indian laborers were sent to British Guiana, 143,909 to Trinidad, and 34,304 to Dutch Guiana. It should be noted that Indian laborers were also sent in large numbers to British colonies in Africa as well as the Pacific island of Fiji (Siegel p. 1).
While most of these indentured laborers returned to India, those that remained in the colonies developed unique forms of diasporic language and culture over multiple generations (Siegel p. 1-2). Trinidad and Tobago gained independence in 1962, Guyana in 1966, and Suriname in 1975, and the national identities of these countries are unique blends of Indian, African, European, and Indigeneous cultural elements. Today, the main ethnic breakdown of the three countries is approximately as follows:
Trinidad and Tobago: 1.5 million - 35% Indian, 34% African, 30% mixed1
Guyana: 0.8 million - 40% Indian, 30% African, 20% mixed, 11% Indigenous
Suriname: 0.6 million - 27% Indian, 37% African (Maroon/Creole), 14% Javanese2, 13% Mixed, 4% Indigeneous
Thus, there are in total about 1 million people of Indian descent in the Caribbean. That’s pretty sizeable, especially when you consider that the much larger United States has only 5 million Indian Americans.
The rise and fall of Caribbean Hindustani
What exactly is Caribbean Hindustani, and how does it fit into the linguistic landscape of the Americas? The vast majority of North and South America is dominated by the languages of the former European colonial powers: English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Throughout history, minority communities in the Americas have overwhelmingly adopted these languages - very few Americans today speak the German, Italian, Polish, or Chinese of their immigrant ancestors. In contrast, the Indian laborers who arrived in the Caribbean during the 19th century did not quickly adopt the colonial languages. Instead, they synthesized a number of Indian languages to create new, distinctly Caribbean varieties, collectively referred to as “Caribbean Hindustani.” While the Surinamese variety is still spoken, the Trinidadian and Guyanese varieties mostly died out in the 1980s due to language shift towards English.
The majority of Indians recruited by the British for indentured servitude came from what is now Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, meaning that they largely spoke dialects of Bhojpuri, as well as Awadhi, Maithili, and possibly other languages. Most of the migrants probably had some working knowledge of Standard Hindi (Siegel p. 3). What emerged in each colony was a synthesis of multiple dialects, remixed in unique ways unlike anything back in India (Siegel p. 7, 10). The uniqueness should not be overstated, however, because the resulting languages are all largely intelligible with Indian Bhojpuri. In the academic literature, the Indic languages of Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname are called Trinidad Bhojpuri, Guyanese Bhojpuri, and Sarnami, respectively, and the term “Caribbean Hindustani” refers to all three collectively. In linguistics, this type of language - a new, yet easily recognizable synthesis of multiple related dialects - is called a koine, named after Koine Greek (“Common Greek”), the lingua franca of the post-Alexandrian Hellenistic world. Linguists have proposed a number of specific koineization processes that gave rise to Caribbean Hindustani, which we will examine later in the post.
While Caribbean Hindustani persisted for multiple generations, two factors began contributing to its decline almost as soon as it formed. One was the prevalence of English, especially in Trinidad and Guyana. For Indians in these colonies, learning English was crucial for gaining higher socioeconomic status. Interestingly, the Sarnami language, which developed in a Dutch (rather than British) colony, has outlived its Trinidadian and Guyanese counterparts (Barz p. 199). The other factor contributing to the decline of Caribbean Hindustani was the constant presence of Standard Hindi in diasporic life. In a continuation of a very Indian dynamic, the Indo-Caribbeans continued to view Hindi as more prestigious than their own Bhojpuri-based languages. In the overseas colonies, Hindi, rather than Bhojpuri, was the language used for religious services and written documents (Siegel p. 8-9). None of these efforts resulted in mass adoption of Hindi, since most Indo-Caribbeans preferred the more useful English or Dutch. Nevertheless, the institutional promotion of Hindi at the expense of Caribbean Hindustani probably accelerated the decline of the latter (Barz p. 200). The Trinidad and Guyana varieties essentially died out by the late 1980s (Barz p. 198), while the Surinamese variety is apparently still spoken by ~150,000 people (both in Suriname and in the Surinamese diaspora).
The Indian origins of Caribbean Hindustani
Before diving into the grammar of Caribbean Hindustani, we ought to know a few things about the languages which gave rise to it. Specifically, we should understand how these languages are related to each other back in India. Most North Indians speak languages of the Indo-Aryan subfamily of Indo-European, and there are multiple competing models for how languages within Indo-Aryan are related to each other. Generally, it is thought that the Central Indo-Aryan subfamily can be split into Western Hindi (Standard Hindi and related dialects) derived from Shauraseni Prakrit, and Eastern Hindi (Awadhi and related dialects) derived from Ardhamagadhi Prakrit. Moving further east, one encounters the Eastern Indo-Aryan subfamily, descended from Magadhi Prakrit, and can be further divided into Western Magadhi (Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili) and Eastern Magadhi (Bengali, Assamese, Oriya). There are a lot of similarities between Eastern Hindi (i.e. Awadhi) and Western Magadhi (i.e. Bhojpuri, Maithili, and Magahi) languages, which are spoken in neighboring regions of the subcontinent (see map below).
This means that Bhojpuri, like Awadhi, feels somewhat like an interpolation between Hindi and Bengali. A good reference for getting an overall sense of the similarities and differences between all these languages is The Indo-Aryan Languages by Colin P. Masica (1991). As illustrative examples, let’s look at three linguistic features - one phonological, and two morphological - among languages that span the region from the Hindi Heartland to the Bay of Bengal.
The pronunciation of diphthongs: According to Masica (p. 110-11), in the western languages of Hindi and Punjabi, the vowels represented in Devanagari as ऐ and औ are pronounced almost like ē and ō, respectively. Moving east, the Bihari languages (Bhojpuri, Maithili, and Magahi) retain the original diphthongal (i.e. two-vowel) pronunciations of a-i and a-u, as in Sanskrit. Thus, a word like कैसे (“how”) would be pronounced like kē-se in Standard Hindi, but ka-i-se in Bhojpuri. As we will see later, the diphthongal pronunciation is also inherited in Caribbean Hindustani.
The first-person pronoun: Below is comparison between the first-person pronoun across several Indo-Aryan languages (Masica p. 252):
We see that ham means “we” in Standard Hindi, but “I” in Bhojpuri. Bhojpuri lacks an analogue of the Hindi singular pronoun mai. The Bhojpuri first-person plural pronoun is hamran, formed with an r-sound as in Bengali (where āmi=“I” and āmrā=“we”).
Future tense conjugation: The following diagram lays out the sounds appended after a verb root to mark the future tense, overlaid roughly on a map of North India (Masica p. 290):
Let’s follow this through with the Indo-Aryan verb root kar (“do”). In Hindi, the future conjugation is formed by appending a syllable starting with g- to the subjunctive tense, yielding, for example, the form karūṅgā (“I will go”). Moving east, the future marker switches to h or b. We’ve seen this already for Awadhi, which has the forms karihau̐ and karaba for “I will go.” Evidently, similar forms are found in Bhojpuri. Even further east, forms with b are used exclusively, as in Bengali korbo.
Hopefully these examples give a flavor of the grammatical landscape of North India. While it would be prudent at this point to study Bhojpuri grammar in some detail, it will suffice for our purposes to simply appreciate that Bhojpuri is somewhere on the east-west spectrum from Hindi to Bengali. In my mind, the ordering of Hindi-Bhojpuri-Bengali is analogous to English-Dutch-German. To extend the analogy, our goal of studying Caribbean Hindustani without first studying Bhojpuri is like learning Afrikaans before Dutch. That is to say, it should be possible with the help of high-quality reference grammars for the younger language variety. Luckily for us, such texts do exist for Caribbean Hindustani.
Comparing the Hindustani varieties of Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname
Our goal here is to systematically study a few aspects of the grammatical systems of Trinidad Bhojpuri, Guyanese Bhojpuri, and Sarnami. Ideally, we should get a sense of the common features between these varieties, as well as what makes each variety unique. The most thorough grammars of the Caribbean Hindustani varieties were all written in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and are as follows:
Trinidad Bhojpuri - Trinidad Bhojpuri: A Morphological Study by Peggy Ramesar Mohan (1978). This is Mohan’s PhD thesis while she was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. Mohan studied the speech of 25 Trinidad-born Bhojpuri speakers, aged 65-95. In order to control for external influences on the language used, she limited her study to speakers who did not know Standard Hindi or Tamil (p. 29). In order to generate spontaneous dialogue, speakers were not selected at random, but as a “convenience sample” including subgroups whose members already knew each other (p. 30). In her acknowledgements, she starts by dedicating the work to “Ajie, my grandmother, who taught me this dying language from my earliest childhood in solitary defiance of convention, and, more recently, helped me to decipher and transcribe all my recorded data” (p. iii). Thus, Mohan’s epic academic undertaking was also a tribute to her own dying heritage language.
Guyanese Bhojpuri - The East Indian Speech Community in Guyana: A Sociolinguistic Study with Special Reference to Koine Formation by Surendra Kumar Gambhir (1981). This is Gambhir’s PhD thesis from the University of Pennsylvania. Gambhir was a doctoral student of sociolinguist William Labov, and it shows in his work. He interviewed a total of 62 mostly elderly people in Guyana, of which 56 were from Crabwood Creek, a rural Indian community near the border with Suriname (p. 19). Interestingly, Mohan notes that “group interaction techniques did not succeed since Guyanese Bhojpuri was seldom the natural choice for interaction amongst its speakers” (p. 20). Mohan also did field work in northern India, interviewing people in places like Varanasi, Gazipur, and Gorakhpur to get first-hand data on Bhojpuri and Eastern Hindi dialects (p. 21). After sketching out the grammar of Guyanese Bhojpuri based on the speech of his subjects, Gambhir spends the second half of his thesis proposing specific koine-formation processes that may have played out in Guyanese Bhojpuri, and compares them to the situations in the other “transplanted” varieties of Bhojpuri from around the world.
Sarnami - Soere se soere kar: An audio-visual course in Sarnami Hindustani for beginners (Parts 1 and 2) by Anna B. Huiskamp (1978). As the title suggests, this is not an academic paper, but an intensive course in Sarnami published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. I’m not sure exactly what this course was used for, but I suspect that it was mostly for Christian missionaries. The 36 lessons have been written up along with detailed grammatical notes. The Sarnami text is written using Dutch orthography. In compiling my grammar tables below, I have taken the license to transcribe Huiskamp’s Sarnami text into the IAST convention generally followed by Mohan and Gambhir. Later, in the example sentences section, I will present the text as it originally appears, so that you can experience reading what is perhaps the only Indic language that uses Dutch spelling conventions.
Note: In citing Huiskamp, the page numbers will always refer to the Part 1 document, which is all we will be needing.
I have combed through these texts to present a comparative analysis of four grammatical features (phonology, personal pronouns, conjugation of “to be”, and conjugation of “to go”) between the three language varieties. For the pronouns and verbs, I have written up paradigm tables which include a subset of all forms reported, with a preference towards the forms that the respective authors claim are most common. For full details, refer to the original texts.
Let’s begin…
Phonology
Mohan does not explicitly discuss the pronunciation of the vowels ai and au in Trinidad Bhojpuri. However, Gambhir states that, “Guyanese Bhojpuri uses the diphthongs of Indian Bhojpuri and other eastern Hindi dialects more commonly, rather than their monophthongal counterparts in the western Hindi dialects” (p. 208). The diphthongs mentioned above are also reported by Huiskamp for Sarnami (p. 165). Thus, the diphthongs of the Bihari languages are generally carried over into the Caribbean varieties.
A more distinct feature of Caribbean Hindustani varieties is the pronuncation of certain consonants. According to Mohan, “most marginal speakers of Trinidad Bhojpuri consistently replace all retroflex and dental consonants with the corresponding alveolar consonants” due to influence from Creole English, which only has alveolars (p. 221). This phenomenon is also reported for Guyanese Bhojpuri (Gambhir p. 58). According to Huiskamp, retroflex consonants are only used by some speakers of Sarnami, and her usage of IPA for the consonant series indicates that alveolars are used otherwise, and that there are no true dentals in the language (Huiskamp p. 166-167).
Personal pronouns
Trinidad Bhojpuri: Mohan p. 80-93
Guyanese Bhojpuri: Gambhir p. 83
Sarnami: Huiskamp p. 168, 173, 179, 183-184
Tri. Bhoj. Guy. Bhoj. Sarnami --------------------------------------------1st Person--------------------------------------------- nom. sg. ham ham ham nom. pl. ham lōg/ham sabh ham lōg/hamin(i) ham log(an) acc./dat. sg. hamkē hamke hamke acc./dat. pl. ham lōg ke ham log ke / hamin ke - gen. sg. hamār hamār/hamre (obl.) hamār/hamre (obl.) gen. pl. ham lōg ke ham lōg ke - -----------------------------------------------2nd Person--------------------------------------------- nom. sg. tū/tũ/tum tū tu/āp nom. pl. tū lōg/tū sabh, etc. tū/tū log tu log(an)/tu sab(han) acc./dat. sg. tukē/tumkē tūke - acc./dat. pl. tū lōg ke, etc. tū lōg ke - gen. sg. tōhar/tohār tohār/tor/tohre (obl.) tor/āpke gen. pl. tū lōg ke, etc. tū lōg ke -----------------------------------3rd Person (proximate)---------------------------------------- nom. sg. ī ī/ē i nom. pl. ī sabh ī/ē sab/log i log(an)/i sab(han) obl. sg. ē ī/ē - obl. pl. - - - acc./dat. sg. ēkē īke/ēke - acc./dat. pl. ī sabh ke ē/ī sabh ke - gen. sg. ēkar ekar ekar/ekre (obl.) gen. pl. ī sabh ke inkar - -----------------------------------3rd Person (remote)-------------------------------------------- nom. sg. ū ū/ō/vō u nom. pl. ū sabh ū/ō sab/log, ū sabhan o log(an)/o sab(han) obl. sg. ō ū/ō - obl. pl. - - - acc./dat. sg. ōkē ūkē, etc. - acc./dat. pl. ū sabh ke ū sab ke, etc. - gen. sg. ōkar okar okar/okre (obl.) gen. pl. ū sabh ke unkar - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Overall, there aren’t any big surprises here. It’s notable that all 1st person forms (both singular and plural) are derived from ham, with no hint of Standard Hindi maiṅ/mujhe/mujhko. As we saw earlier, this was already the case in Indian Bhojpuri. The 2nd person forms are all basically derived from tu. The 3rd person proximate is derived from i/e rather than Hindi yah/ye, which makes it more reminiscent of Bengali (although Hindi does have i-forms in the indirect case). Similarly, the 3rd person remote forms come from o/u rather than Hindi vah/vo. Again, I think that these features are generally just inherited from Bhojpuri.
In several places, the plural is indicated by appending the words log (“people”) or sab(h) (“all”) in a quite modular way. While this can also happen in Standard Hindi, it is used much more extensively in the Caribbean varieties. For example, the 3rd person proximate genitive plural in Trinidad Bhojpuri is given as ī sabh ke, where Standard Hindi would have inkā. In linguistics, cases that are formed this way (i.e. by appending separate words rather than inflection) are called periphrastic. The prevalence of periphrastic cases in the Caribbean varieties is perhaps a result of simplification across multiple dialects.
Relative to Standard Hindi (and many other Indian languages), there seems to be a notable collapse in 2nd person honorific forms. In Trinidad Bhojpuri, tũ and tum were originally the honorific versions of tū, and tohār more respectful than tōhar. However, this distinction is lost among younger speakers (Mohan p. 80-81). In Guyanese Bhojpuri, tohār, inkar, and unkar are more respectful than tor, ekar, and okar, respectively, when used in singular contexts (Gambhir p. 85). Also, the periphrastic forms tend to be viewed as more prestigious (on the part of the speaker) than inflected forms (Gambhir p. 86).
The “to be” verb
Trinidad Bhojpuri - Mohan 1978: p. 161 (present), 164 (past), 165 (future)
Guyanese Bhojpuri - Gambhir 1981: p. 165 (present), 167 (past)
Sarnami - Huiskamp 1978: p. 173, 184 (present)
Tri. Bhoj. Guy. Bhoj. Sarnami ------------------------------------------Present tense-------------------------------------------- 1st pers. bā/bāṭī/hai (r*. hōī) he hai/bāṭi 2nd pers. bā/bāṭē/hai (r. hōwē) ho hai/bāṭe 3rd pers. bā/bāṭē/hai (r. hōwē) he hai/ba (pl. bāṭe) ------------------------------------------- Past tense--------------------------------------------- 1st pers. rahlī (r. bhaylī) rahi - 2nd pers. rahlē (r. bhaylē) rahe - 3rd pers. rahal (r. bhail) rahe - -------------------------------------------Future tense------------------------------------------ 1st pers. hōb - - 2nd pers. hōbē - - 3rd pers. hōī - - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ *=resultative, i.e. more with the meaning "become" rather than "be" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note that, like Bengali (but unlike Hindi), there is no distinction between singular and plural conjugations in these languages. In terms of the “to be” verb roots being used, we see something interesting. While a lot of the forms are obviously related to Hindi hōnā3 and rahnā, there are also several present-tense forms with bā(ṭ). While the latter forms don’t appear under Guyanese Bhojpuri in my table above, they are sometimes heard in that language as well, although rarely. They are inherited from Indian Bhojpuri, and are ultimately derived from the Sanskrit root vṛt (Gambhir p. 163).
According to Mohan, the multiple forms of the present tense “to be” conjugations in Trinidad Bhojpuri are the “result of incomplete convergence between the parent dialects” (p. 161). She also distinguishes between stative vs. resultative paradigms. She says that the preference for hai may come from exposure to Standard Hindi, but that it is also found in Western Bhojpuri (p. 162). Gambhir notes that in Guyanese Bhojpuri, the “to be” verb is not often used as auxiliaries, since the language tends to rely on fully inflected finite verbs rather than participle constructions, although there are exceptions (p. 161).
Lastly, we are starting to see l-endings in the past tense, and b-endings in the future. This will become more apparent when we look at finite verb forms below.
Finite verb conjugation - present, past, and future tenses
Trinidad Bhojpuri - Mohan 1978: p. 150-152 (present tense), 153 (past tense), and 157 (future tense).
Guyanese Bhojpuri - Gambhir 1981: p. 118 (present tense), 135 (past tense), and 146 (future tense).
Sarnami - Huiskamp 1978 (pt. 1), p. 176 (present and past tense) and 210 (future tense).
For simplicity, we will just look at a single verb root: jā (“go”), and sidestep the nuances of how different types of verb roots get slightly different endings.
Tri. Bhoj. Guy. Bhoj. Sarnami ------------------------------------------Present tense-------------------------------------------- 1st pers. jāīlā jāilā jāila 2nd pers. jāēlā/jāēhē jāo(ho)/jāe(he) ja hai / jāhe 3rd pers. jālā/jāēhē jāe(he) ja hai / jāhe -----------------------------------------------Past tense--------------------------------------------- 1st pers. gaylī gaili gaili 2nd pers. gaylē gail/gaile gaile 3rd pers. gail gail gail -------------------------------------------- Future tense-------------------------------------------- 1st pers. jāib jāb jābe 2nd pers. jaybē jāiho jāihe 3rd pers. jāī jāi/jāihe/jāiha jāiga -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here, we see the distinctive -lā ending for first person present tense, which is shared between all these languages. For the Trinidad Bhojpuri present tense, Mohan claims that the -h- paradigm is a “dialectal variant” of the -lā paradigm, which includes a rare 2nd person honorific form ending in -ha (this is not in our table above, but the form would be jāyaha), which was “occasionally used by elderly speakers in addressing their elders” (p. 151). Due to the retention of the -a before ha, Mohan says that -hē/-ha are only “partially bound” inflectional endings, maintaining semi-independence due to their resemblance to the copula hai (p. 152). For Guyanese Bhojpuri present tense, Gambhir notes that there is also a progressive construction [stem]+rahl+[pres. aux.], which is rare and is a “syntactic borrowing from Standard Hindi” (p. 114).
In all of the Caribbean varieties, all of the past tense forms involve an l-sound appended to the past stem. This is like Bengali, but unlike Standard Hindi. Compare, for example, the forms for “I went”: gaylī (Trinidad Bhojpuri), gelām (Bengali), but gayā (Hindi perfective participle).
The future tense forms show a mix of b, h, and g markers. This is most striking in Sarnami, which has all three: jābe (“I go”), jāihe (“you go”), and jāiga (“he goes”)!
Dynamics of Koineization in Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname
Trinidad Bhojpuri: Mohan notes that the first generation of Indian Bhojpuri speakers in Trinidad actually spoke multiple dialects of the language, which was still evident in “pockets of variants” among Trinidad Bhojpuri when she did her study in the 1970s (Mohan p. 12). In the plantation days, an elderly Indian woman would be in charge of babysitting the young children while the parents worked in the fields. Thus, the young children would spend most of their time talking to each other. Thus, they did not properly learn the distinct Bhojpuri dialects of their parents, but still needed to communicate with each other. This led to a natural koineization process, with the children spontaneously developing a more uniform version of Bhojpuri among themselves, which eventually coalesced into Trinidad Bhojpuri. Mohan adds that “there is a high degree of overlap in the processes of levelling which are characteristic of koinezation and those noted in the early stages of language loss” - that is, the dynamics of language death would have started even as the koine was forming (Mohan p. 13).
Guyanese Bhojpuri: Reviewing different definitions of koine in the literature, Gambhir says that koine languages “are primarily based on a particular linguistic variety, that they have incorporated features from other linguistic varieties which they come in contact with, and that they have become structurally simplified” (Gambhir p. 181). The majority of Indians who arrived at Guyana spoke dialects of Bihari and Hindi which were similar enough that they could communicate with each other with some adjustments which they figured out naturally. Over time, people abandoned local idiosyncrasies of their parent dialects and started converging on a common convention, which became the koine language of Guyanese Bhojpuri (Gambhir p. 190-191). The verb morphology of Guyanese Bhojpuri is very clearly derived from Indian Bhojpuri, its base language. At the same time, Guyanese Bhojpuri exhibits certain features not found in Indian Bhojpuri, which indicate influence with other dialects (Gambhir p. 201). For example, the h-future tense for 2nd person does not exist in any dialect of Indian Bhojpuri, which may only have h-future in the 3rd person (Gambhir p. 214-216). Gambhir concludes that the Guyanese Bhojpuri 2nd person h-future was adapted from speakers of western Awadhi, as well as Kannauji, Braj, and Bundeli. He notes that the developmental trajectories of the future tense endings have been slightly different in different diasporic communities, with Trinidad and Mauritius retaining the 2nd person b-future, and Sarnami and Fiji actually adopting the g-future of Standard Hindi in various places (Gambhir p. 221-222).
Sarnami: In a paper entitled “Sarnami: A Living Language” (1988), Theo Damsteegt argues that while it is impossible to know exactly how Sarnami developed, it is likely that Awadhi, Bhojpuri, and Magahi played major roles (p. 109). While Mohan and Gambhir generally believe that Bhojpuri was the dominant contributor to the koines of Trinidad and Guyana, respectively, Damsteegt argues that Sarnami exhibits some features that are distinctly Awadhi rather than Bhojpuri. In particular, he says that the “to be” verb bā and its conjugations may come from eastern Awadhi and transitional Awadhi/Bhojpuri regions in India. Additionally, the Sarnami construction [verb stem]+e khoī, as in cale khoī (“let’s go”), might derive from an oblique use of the Awadhi infinitive, i.e. calai ka hoī (lit. “of going, let it be”). If true, this would be another evidence of Awadhi influence (p. 107). Damsteegt also points out that Sarnami has two features in common with Western Hindi and Awadhi, but not with Bhojpuri/Maithili/Magahi: the verb ending -o, and the oblique case of the verbal noun ending in -an (p. 104-105).
In terms of koineization outside of India, Damsteegt lists several Sarnami features that are not found in Indian languages, but are shared across multiple varieties of “Overseas Hindi,” i.e. Trinidad Bhojpuri (TB), Guyanese Bhojpuri (GB), and Fiji Hindi (FH). These include the wide usage of the verb ending -o (shared with GB), the usage of -iye to indicate future tense rather than imperative (shared with GB and FH), and the khoī construction (shared with FH). There’s also the plural marker -jā for verbs, mostly for first person plural (shared with GB), and the usage of māñg as an auxiliary verb (shared with GB and TB). A curious syntactical feature is that auxiliary verbs may precede the main verb, rather than following it as is the case in almost all Indian languages. This leads to sentences like ājī to gail hai mar (“grandmother has died”), instead of ājī to mar gail hai. This feature is shared between Sarnami, TB, GB, and FH, suggesting that it may be due to influence of the European colonial languages (Dutch for Sarnami, English for the other three). Lastly, innovative features found only in Sarnami are the 3rd person future tense ending -īgā, the -be ending for emphatic 1st person future tense, the 3rd person present tense “to be” conjugation haigā (“he/she/it is”), and the usage of past tense endings used in present tense context for the verb “to be,” ex. ham hailī, tu haile (specifically in the Nickerie district of northwestern Suriname)4.
Example sentences
Trinidad Bhojpuri (from Mohan 1978):
kaun bayān tū jānēlā? (“which version do you know?”) - p. 150
thōṛā din sē dēbī kē pūjā laglī karē (“a few days ago I began to perform devotions to Devi”) - p. 156
ēgō bāt tukē bōlab jē tū nā khisiyaybē (“I will tell you something if you will not get annoyed”) - p. 158
laykan mē kul sabh kai gō bā? (“how many children are there in all?”) - p. 162
jab tū acchā hōbē ta tōhar bhāṛī paiṭhāi dēb (“when you are [lit. will be] well I’ll send you fare”) - p. 165
Guyanese Bhojpuri (from Gambhir 1981):
baṭ ham sunilā oke paisā nā he kīne ke (“but I hear that he does not have money to buy”) - p. 119
inkar, jano, pati ke antkāl ho gail raha (“her husband, you know, had died”) - p. 120
ta tū bhayyā ke kaise, inke kaise tū pā gailā? (“then, how did you meet this person?”) - p. 139
ū bole ki jab maṭhiyā hamār ban jāi ta ham cal jāb, ham nā āb baṭ ham nā jāni ki ū mar jāi (“she said ‘when my temple is finished then I will go away and not come back,’ but I did not know that she was going to die”) - p. 147
tab ham kahi ki e beṭā āp kaun des ke hao ta tū batiho ki ham, mātā ji, ham phalānā des ke he (“then I say that oh son, which country are you from, and then you will say that mother, I am from such and such country”) - p. 164
Sarnami (from Huiskamp 1978):
Note: I am presenting these sentences in the original Dutch orthography used by Huiskamp, rather than the IAST convention we have been using thus far. For example, this means oe for u, and dj for j (since in Dutch, j by itself represents a “y” sound).
aur toe bhie India ke baaṭe? (“are you also from India?”) - p. 20, app. p. 1
hamlog thak gailie he…aur bahoet piaas lagal hai, ma (“we are tired…and very thirsty, Mum”) - p. 73, app. p. 2
hamaar aurat aur ham ghoemiela nadie ke kienaare (“my wife and I are walking along a river”) - p. 136, app. p. 3
ka djaahe kare ie vaas se, Lila? (“what are you going to do with that vase, Lila?”) - p. 151, app. p. 3
ham eke goelaabie rang debe (“I will give it a pink color”) - p. 210
Audio excerpt: an interview from Suriname
While Guyanese and Trinidad Bhojpuri had all but died out by the 1980s, Sarnami survived for at least a decade longer, and several recordings of it are easily found online. The YouTube channel Sarnami TV has uploaded hundreds of videos of programming related to the Surinamese Indian community, with footage from 1989 to the present day, including lots of interviews5. The first minute or so of the video below features an interview with some Surinamese schoolchildren in 1989 or 1990. I will do my best to both transcribe and translate the beginning of the interview. To be honest, I didn’t understand every word of the exchange, and sometimes had to guess the meaning based on context. So take my translation with a grain of salt!
Interviewer: hamlog hai nikeri ke o gaon me bāṭi rastā ke nām ham na jānīlā, ma be pata cal jāyegā, ekago laḍkan pās hot rahile to e sabse ek āt-bāt ham puchau. kaise rahile beṭa?
(We are in a town in Nickerie, I don’t know the name of the road, I’ve forgotten. Some children are here nearby, so I will ask them some questions. How are you, child?)
Boy: [?] rahili, Babu
(I’m good, Babu)
Interviewer: kahān se āve tu log?
(Where are you all coming from?)
Boy: hamlog ailā mandir se
(We are coming from the temple)
Interviewer: ta mandir me kathā raha ki bhāgvat?
(Was there storytelling or worship in the temple?)
Boy: kathā na raha, bhāgvat na raha, hum log hindī les6 se aila
(It wasn’t storytelling or worship, we are coming from a Hindi lesson)
Interviewer: o, to tu log hindī les faula kar rahe. tab tu jāne moi7 se hindī batiāi?
(Oh, so you all are studying Hindi. Then do you know how to speak Hindi well?)
Boy: ham moi se hindī nai jānīlā batiāi, ham jānīlā batiāi
(I don’t know how to speak Hindi well, but I can speak)
Interviewer: tani mani jānenā? ta kitna din se tu faula karingi les se?
(You know a little, isn’t it? Then for how many days have you been going to lessons?)
Boy: hindi les faula karira dui haftā, sir
(I have been going to Hindi lesson for two weeks, sir)
Interviewer: acchā, ta tu skūl jāhe?
(OK, so you go to school?)
Boy: hāñ
(Yes)
Interviewer: kaun skūl jāhe tu?
(Which school do you go to?)
Boy: ham jānā sitalsing skūl
(I go to Sitalsing School)
Interviewer: kaunci…[???]
Boy: [???]
Interviewer: kaun klās me baiṭhe hai?
(Which class do you sit in?)
Boy: ham baiṭhīlā erste8 klās
(I sit in the first class)
Interviewer: kabhi to [?] bhaile bāṭe hai?
(Did you sometimes become [?])
Boy: hāñ ham bhaili hai
(Yes, I was)
Listening to this interview, we finally get to hear some of the features we’ve been discussing come to life, for example the “to be” verb derived from Sanskrit vrt (hamlog hai nikeri ke o gaon me bāṭi) and the -la present (ham na jānīlā). We also hear the intermingling of Indic and Dutch phonological systems in the accent of these speakers, with almost seamless incorporation of Dutch loanwords into their Sarnami. Overall, it’s just cool to see a recording of young speakers of Sarnami as recently as 1990, presumably multiple generations removed from their Indian-born ancestors. If we assume that the boy was ~10 years old in the video, he would only be ~45 years old today!
Thus concludes our initial foray into Caribbean Hindustani. In the process of familiarizing ourselves with its grammar, we ended up learning some general features of Bhojpuri and also learned about some connections within languages of the Indo-Aryan family. We will soon build on our foundation here to translate some Indo-Caribbean songs.
Stay tuned!
References:
Barz, R.K. 1988. “Language maintenance and literary use: the case of Mauritian Bhojpuri, Sarnami and Fiji Hindi.” In Language Transplanted: The Development of Overseas Hindi. R. K. Barz and J. Siegel (eds.), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz: 197-220.
Damsteegt, T. 1988. “Sarnami: a living language.” In Language Transplanted: The Development of Overseas Hindi. R. K. Barz and J. Siegel (eds.), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz: 95-120.
Gambhir, S.K. 1981. The East Indian speech community in Guyana: a sociolinguistic study with special reference to koine formation. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Huiskamp, A.B. 1978. Soeroe se soeroe kar: an audio-visual course in Sarnami Hindustani for beginners Part 1. Paramaribo: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Masica, C. 1991. The Indo-Aryan languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mohan, P. 1978. Trinidad Bhojpuri: a morphological study. Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan.
Siegel, J. 1988. “Introduction.” In Language Transplanted: The Development of Overseas Hindi. R. K. Barz and J. Siegel (eds.), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz: 1-22.
About 8% of people in Trinidad and Tobago are specifically of mixed Indian/African ethnicity, and are known as the Dougla people (apparently from Hindi do-gala, or “two-necked”). The pop star Nicki Minaj is from this community.
Remember that the island of Java was part of the Dutch East Indies.
It’s interesting to note that Niuew Nickerie (the capital of Nickerie district of Suriname) is less than 30 miles away from the Crabwood Creek community of Guyana where most of the participants of Gambhir’s study came from. There is apparently an interesting variety of Caribbean Hindustani in this border region - perhaps a mix of Guyanese Bhojpuri and Sarnami - but I have decided not to investigate this in detail for this post.
The working language of the channel is Dutch. Thankfully, I am able to read and understand basic Dutch, thanks to my four years of high school German plus Dutch Duolingo. From SarnamiTV’s “About” section: De makers van SarnamiTV maken programma's sinds 1989 en zijn de eerste programma makers voor de Hindoestanen in Nederland (“The creators of SarnamiTV have made programming since 1989 and are the first program creators for the Hindustanis in the Netherlands”).
les is the Dutch word for “lesson,” which is the word I’m assuming the boy is using here.
mooi means “nice” in Dutch. If I’m correct, the boy is using mooi-se as an adverb to mean “well.”
eerste means “first” in Dutch.