English Language Studies in the Caribbean

Abstract

N VARIOUS PARTS of the Caribbean area, as everyone knows, four European languages are official: in descending order of numbers of speakers, Spanish, English, French, and Dutch. It is also well known that the standard forms of these languages are not spoken by more than a small fraction of the populations, and that since the period of colonization Creolized forms of these languages have come into existence, each of which differs from the European speech in at least three ways: first, through the nonacquisition' of certain grammatical complexities of the standard languages (such as inflection); second, through the effect of lexical, grammatical, and phonetic features of African and other non-European languages carried over into each; and third, through regular local phonetic changes or through archaism. Speaking broadly, there exists a linguistic scale or spectrum having at one end the standard European language, and at the other the conservative form of each Creole language. Along the scale between, one may find many types of variation, and each may to' some extent be correlated with social statusitself, of course, closely correlated with education, economic status, and race. These relationships have been intriguing sociologists and anthropologists for some time, for here in our close neighborhood (and in a most attractive setting) is a perfect laboratory for the study of problems arising out of the complex human mixture. The same may be said of the linguistic situation: no matter what the type of problem, it can be found close by in the Caribbean. Our present purpose is to sketch the state of the English language in this area, beginning with some idea of the places where English is spoken, the types that exist, and the numbers of speakers. The Caribbean, a broad, landenclosed sea, is over a thousand miles wide, bordered on the west and south by the mainland almost wholly Spanish-speaking; on the north by the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico), and on the east by the Leeward Islands (including the Virgin Islands, British and American), the Windward Islands, Barbados and Trinidad. In 1958 the English-speaking islands formed the Federation of the West Indies.