Dr Renata De Bies, a friend of the Richard & Jeannette Allsopp Centre for Caribbean Lexicography, Dean of the subfaculty of Humanities at the Antom de Kom University in Suriname and co-editor of the Carisur Culinair Dictionair Surinaams-Nederlands/Caraibisch Engels, passed away on May 13, 2024. Below is a tribute from Honorary Research Fellow in Lexicography Dr Jeannette Allsopp.
 

It is my infinitely sad and painful task to pay tribute to the late Dr. Renata de Bies, (1947 – 2024) who passed away on May 13, 2024.

My husband, Professor Richard Allsopp and I first met Renata during the 1980s while she was on a visit to Barbados and wanted to get to know us as we were in the process of compiling the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (DCEU).  As a fellow linguist and lexicographer, she was very interested in our work and made sure to contact us, which she did through her friend Andrew Bynoe, the proprietor of Carlton and A1 supermarkets, whose guest she was.

We invited her to our home and that was the beginning of a friendship which lasted for well over 30 years.  Renata was an avid supporter of our work and after the publication of the DCEU in 1996 and my publication of the Caribbean Multilingual Dictionary (CMD) in 2003, she sought to establish a professional relationship with me because of my multilingual work. 

Renata de Bies was also Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Suriname. She had a long and distinguished career as a lecturer in both the Faculty of Humanities, as well as in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and was an outstanding linguist, lexicologist and lexicographer in her country, as well as a translator and interpreter (English – Dutch and vice versa).

In addition to her university career, Renata de Bies also worked in the Ministry of Education in Suriname, and was a long-standing member of the Advisory Committee of the Language Council, Language Act of Suriname, as part of that Ministry.  She was also an advisor to the Dutch Language Union and acted as chairperson of the Spelling Committee for the Dutch Language Union for many years.

Renata was very interested in the cuisine of the Caribbean and as I had done work in my multilingual dictionary on Caribbean foods, she wanted us to collaborate on the production of a work she had in mind on the cuisine of Suriname, and so we got together to do so during the early 2000s. The end-product of our collaboration was the Carisur Culinaire Dictionaire (CCD) in Surinamese Dutch and Caribbean English, published by the Anton de Kom University in Suriname in 2013.

In that same year, she came to Guyana to attend the launch of my book edited with Professor John Rickford, Language, Culture and Caribbean Identity published by the University of the West Indies Press in 2012.  Later on in 2013, she graciously invited me to Suriname for the launch of the CCD, which was held in November 2013 and hosted by the Anton de Kom University of Suriname.  During the celebration of that launch, we appeared together on a programme hosted by Paramaribo TV to talk about the book and about the great importance of Caribbean languages in general, including crossing language barriers to include the other two major official languages of the Caribbean, Spanish and French, but also the official language of Suriname, Surinamese Dutch.

Further to the launch of the CCD in Suriname, Renata and I collaborated on a paper for the Society for Caribbean Linguistics Conference 2014, entitled “Analysis of Surinamese Dutch – Caribbean English Bilingual Dictionary: Issues encountered in Compilation” which we delivered jointly at the conference, held in Aruba.
Because of our close collaboration on the CCD, and her expertise in linguistics, lexicology and lexicography, I invited her to become a member of the Lexicography Board of the Richard and Jeannette Centre for Caribbean Lexicography in 2014.  She eagerly accepted the invitation and gave valuable advice and insights into lexicological and lexicographic questions.  Renata also acted as the external examiner for my then PhD candidate in Caribbean Lexicography, now Dr. Romel Springer, in 2016.

Dr. De Bies’s research is based on language variation and language contact, as well as on the Surinamese Dutch lexicon.  She has also worked on several small sociolinguistic research projects in Surinamese Dutch, a dictionary project out of which she produced her Wordbook of Surinamese and Netherlands Dutch (WSN) in 2009, as well as other lexicological research, including research on the political usage of Surinamese Dutch. 
Her other publications include the Woordenboek Surinaamse Bijdrage aan het Nederlands – Dictionary of Surinamese Contribution to the Netherlands (WSBN) in 2008 and a paper entitled “Language Loss and African Cultural Heritage in the Caribbean” presented at the Conference “Africa in the 21st century” in 2023.  In June 2017, she delivered the second Richard Allsopp Memorial Lecture entitled “The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage: A Guiding Light in the Development of Caribbean Lexicography in the 21^st Century”.

We in the world of Caribbean linguistics, lexicology and lexicography applaud the work and mourn the loss of our departed colleague. May she rest in peace eternal.