Sranan Tongo Alphabet & Phrases

Sranan Tongo, also written Sranantongo and often just called Sranan, is the English-based creole that grew up on the plantations of Suriname and became a widely used lingua franca in Suriname. Its name means "Suriname tongue": Sranan is the Sranan form of the country's name and tongo comes from English tongue. The official spelling uses 21 basic Latin letters and also È and Ò; C, J, Q, V and X are not part of it, though they occur in names and loanwords.

For a long time people wrote Sranan the way Dutch is spelled, because Dutch was the language of school: oe for the oo sound and j for the y sound, so you was joe and I love you was Mi lobi joe. The official spelling adopted in 1986 standardized the system; the standard forms include: u as in yu (you), fu (for, of); y as in yu and yere (hear); ny as in nyan (eat). Older spellings still turn up in song titles, family sayings and social media, and both are understood.

The standard spelling uses 21 basic Latin letters and also È and Ò. It omits C, J, Q, V and X except in names and loanwords; J also survives in older Dutch-style spellings such as joe.

Sranan Tongo phrases and greetings to copy

The greeting everyone knows is Fa waka?, literally "how does it walk?", meaning how is it going; Fa yu tan? asks how you are, and Odi is a plain hello. Thanks are Tangi or, more warmly, Grantangi (thank you very much). Mi lobi yu is I love you, Switi Sranan (sweet Suriname) is said with pride about the country, and Wakti pikinso asks someone to wait a little.

A handful of small words carry most sentences: mi (I, me, my), yu (you), a (he, she, it, and also "the"), wi (we), den (they, and the plural marker: den pikin, the children), no (not), e (marks an ongoing action: mi e go, I'm going), kaba (already, finished). Ready-made versions of these phrases with emoji are in the combos below.

Where Sranan Tongo words come from

Most everyday words come from English, reshaped by the sound rules of the West African languages spoken by the enslaved people who created the language: waka (walk), taki (talk), lobi (love), switi (sweet), bigi (big), kondre (country). English left Suriname early, when the colony passed to the Dutch in 1667, so Sranan went its own way and took in many Dutch words, such as wakti (wait, from wachten). Portuguese gave words like sabi (know) and pikin (small, child), and African languages gave others, among them the name of the spider trickster Anansi, hero of the Anansitori folk tales.

Sranan in turn gave words to the Netherlands: the street slang of Dutch cities, Straattaal, uses Sranan words such as fawaka and switi (tasty, lovely), so young people in Dutch cities, including many with no Surinamese roots, pick up Sranan greetings.

How to type Sranan Tongo: quotes, $ and ƒ

Because the standard spelling uses no accents, Sranan Tongo is typed on any layout. The extras you may want are curly quotation marks for dialogue and titles: on Windows “ is Alt+0147, ” Alt+0148, ‘ Alt+0145 and ’ Alt+0146; on a Mac Option+[ gives “, Option+Shift+[ ”, Option+] ‘ and Option+Shift+] ’; on a phone hold the " or ' key. In HTML they are “, ”, ‘ and ’.

Suriname's money is the Surinamese dollar (SRD), written with the ordinary dollar sign $, usually as SRD 100 or Sr$ 100 so it is not mistaken for US dollars; in Sranan money is moni. Before 2004 the country used the Surinamese guilder, written with the florin sign ƒ (Alt+0131 on Windows, Option+F on a Mac, ƒ in HTML), which you still meet in older prices and documents.

Where Sranan Tongo is spoken

Sranan Tongo is the common language of Suriname 🇸🇷, where CLDR estimates about 440,000 speakers, most of the country, whether their family language is Dutch, Sarnami Hindustani, Javanese, a Maroon language or Chinese. Dutch is the only official language, but Sranan is what people use in the market, on the bus, at parties and in politics on the campaign trail. It also lives in the large Surinamese community of the Netherlands 🇳🇱, where it is heard on 1 July at Keti Koti ("the chains are cut") ⛓️‍💥, the day that marks the abolition of slavery in 1863.

Sranan has a written tradition too. Moravian missionaries printed Bible translations in it in the 19th century, and the poet Trefossa (Henri de Ziel) showed in the 1950s that it could carry serious poetry; his verse Opo kondreman un opo is the Sranan stanza of Suriname's national anthem. Its closest relatives are Ndyuka and Saramaccan, the languages of Suriname's Maroons, and the other English-based creoles of the Atlantic: see our Jamaican Patois Alphabet & Phrases, Belize Kriol Alphabet & Phrases, Krio Alphabet and Nigerian Pidgin Alphabet. For Dutch letters such as é and ë see Dutch Alphabet & Special Characters, and for the flag, food and holiday emoji see Suriname Emoji & Symbols.