Review essay of Atlas of the Languages of Suriname. Eithne B. Carlin and Jacques Arends, eds. Leiden, The Netherlands: KITLV Press. ISBN 906718196X.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Suriname’s linguistic diversity, however, encompasses not only Old and New World languages but seven original creole languages. The Atlas’s 9 contributors comprehensively document this small nation’s polyglot status. 19 languages survive in the present, though Carlin is not sanguine about the prospects for survival of 4 of the 8 remaining Amerindian languages: “…Akuriyo, Tunayana, Sikiiyana and Mawayana will die out in the coming two or three decades, since they are no longer being transmitted to children. Rather, their children learn Trio, the dominant languages in the villages, Kwamalasamutu and Tepu, where these languages are spoken” (Carlin: 43). It is a measure of the world dominance of the English language, however, that although it is not listed as one of Suriname’s 19 languages, English is the medium for all 11 essays/chapters in the Atlas,. This is not hard to understand since, as the chapters by Arends, Smith and Bruyn document, the bulk of the vocabulary of ‘Sranan tongo’, Suriname’s lingua franca, and of four of the six Maroon languages, derives from the English language. In addition, English is everywhere: “On television, programmes such as sports shows and the daily news are presented in Dutch, but foreign (especially North American) programmes are broadcast in the original language, that is, without any subtitling or synchronization. The effect of this situation has become evident over the last few years, since English is gaining popularity, and competence in English within the general Surinamese public has increased dramatically” (Carlin and Arends: 285). Evidence of Suriname’s linguistic diversity abounds in the pages of the Atlas. Another Atlas contributor, Tjon Sie Fat, declares that, “Paramaribo, with up to a dozen languages, is a sociolinguist’s paradise. Sranan and Dutch dominate, with Dutch being used in formal and Sranan in informal situations. Stylistically simplified Sranan is also the main inter-ethnic language” (p. 237).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".