Orthography and ideology: issues in Sranan spelling

This paper concerns the orthography of Sranan, an English-lexicon creole sp oken by a majority of the population in Surinam (South America), which also has many speakers in the Netherlands Sranan has a long written tradition a nd has had two official orthographies, but it is still often written inform ally using conventions;largely derived from Dutch. Social and ideological i ssues always accompany the development of an orthography but are often view ed as lying outside the realm of linguistics. In this paper I survey the or thographic practices, past and present, used in writing Sranan, to argue th at orthographies are shaped less by the phonological facts of the language concerned than by social and cultural factors in the context where the orth ography is used. The most important of these are the nature of bilingualism among the literate part of the population while the orthography is develop ing; literacy practices within the community as a whole; and ideological be liefs concerning languages and their Speakers, both inside and outside the speech community. I argue for the view that orthography is a social practic e embedded in the social and cultural practices of the writers and speakers of the language.