The Netherlands have become one of the most varied multi-racial societies of Europe after the last war.
Any West European country which had or still has colonies, now has the important task of facing multi-racial changes and coming to grips with them. There are, of course, language problems, e.g. the fact that our teachers have not been trained in socio-linguistics. Therefore they have no knowledge of the language situation of the migrated child.
They rarely succeed in teaching these children to master the language
so as to be able to communicate in the language as adequately as they do in a mother tongue situation. If a teacher wants to help Surinam children become completely bilingual he will have to realise that the elementary mechanisms of his own language differ from those of Surinam, Hindi, Chinese, Moroccan or any other language in the world.
Hence, language education of Surinam children is much more than just teaching things like vocabulary and sentence structure. It is, there-fore, to be expected that children from Surinam will not be motivated to learn Dutch as well as they know their own mother tongue, as long as the pluriformity of society is not taken into account in their education, in study books, magazines, television and the press.
Most children in Surinam live in an environment where more than one language is spoken, sometimes including Dutch. This situation continues in the Netherlands, although there are differences in the received pronunciation of Dutch: the Dutch which a Surinam child uses differs markedly from the Dutch spoken by teachers, school children, in fact, the vast majority of the new society. It is clear that the children of Surinam migrants get into difficulties compared with native Dutch children in our system of education. These difficulties already begin when the children fail to understand what the teacher is trying to tell them. The school education of the Surinam child is such, that he does not readily ask the teacher for an explanation when there is something he does not understand. Many things, therefor , remain unnoticed, because the teacher does not realise that the child is unfamiliar with even simple concepts. Besides, the children make mistakes because they have learned to think and talk in their own language.
The stimulation of the acquisition of Dutch requires:
1. countering interference which occurs because two or more languages (Sranan Tongo, Hindi, Dutch) are used together;
2. forcing back institutionalised deviations of Dutch received pronunciation.
In the framework of establishing one's identity all this must never lead to an underestimation of the native language.
From research work by Alers and Voskuil it appears, that especially the influence of Sranan Tongo on the Dutch of Surinam children is very great.
Three categories of "typical mistakes" may be pointed out:
1.the connection between spoken language and written language,
2. difficulties of a syntactical nature,
3. difficulties of a morphological nature.
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