Deaf Stirrings in Surinam

This chapter discusses the Surinam Deaf community as a linguistic minority with a language of their own: an as yet unnamed sign language. It provides some background information about Surinam, about the Deaf community and the Kennedy School. The chapter elaborates more on the efforts by Dutch advisors in collaboration with the Deaf community and the Kennedy School to improve the quality of interaction and communication between the teachers and the pupils, and ultimately between deaf and hearing people in Surinam. The deaf class-assistant uses both Netherlands (NGT)/sign-supported Dutch (SSD) and the local sign variety. SSD is not a language in itself, but rather spoken Dutch with signs taken from the NGT lexicon and inserted in a seemingly random way into Dutch sentence structure. Language policy played a big role in this discussion, along with the availability of bilingual Dutch/NGT materials in the Netherlands and the lack of knowledge about the local sign variety.