English in the West Indies, or the West Indies in English?

Abstract

The English of the West Indies, like the other languages of the area, shows many resemblances to the language patterns of Negroes in other parts of the New World. There have been many controversies over this matter, with many linguists, especially dialect geographers, inclined to deny West African influence upon anything inside continental North America except for Gullah(Georgia and South Carolina sea islands) and the French Creole of Louisiana. Others, like Lorenzo Turner, who conclusively disproved the widely held belief that Gullah was an amalgam of archaic features from the British Isles,have substantiated the thesis of the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits that the culture, including the language, of Negroes from Suriname to Michigan retains many traces of African patterns. And, since the recent death of the Haitian philologist Jules Faine, no one has seriously denied resemblances among the Caribbean dialects.