Kwinti is an English-based creole of Suriname closely related to Ndyuka.[2] The language has less than 300 speakers,[3] and split from Plantation Creole which is nowadays known as Sranan Tongo in the middle 18th century.[4]Code-switching with Sranan Tongo and Dutch was common among the younger generation in 1973,[5] and about 70% of the tribe have moved to the urban areas.[6] UNESCO considers the language endangered.[7]
In the 1970s, Jan English-Lueck collected a vocabulary of 500 words. Unlike the Ndyuka languages, the letter r is spoken in a similar way to Sranan Tongo and Dutch, although speakers without r have been discovered later. About three quarters of the words were cognate to Sranan Tongo, very few (circa 3%) were cognate to Matawai, and about 17% were not found in the other creoles and mainly originated from Dutch.[8] The differences can be explained by education, because according to a 2011 study the population of Witagron had a good command of both Dutch and Sranan Tongo.[9]
