Grammatical variation in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines)

Abstract

Despite the publication of Aceto & Williams (2003), the languages spoken in the Eastern Caribbean remain underdescribed. In this paper, we outline a project examining language use in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines), based on fieldwork between 2003 and 2005, comprising over 100 hours of sociolinguistic interviews conducted and recorded by community-member researchers. We present quantitative analysis of three aspects of the grammatical system that exhibit variation: absence of the verb BE, verbal negation, and tense-aspect marking. We focus on three communities characterized by different sociodemographic histories. This paper fills a gap in our knowledge of the Eastern Caribbean and provides a descriptive sociolinguistic analysis as a starting point for future work. The findings contribute more generally to our understanding of (post-)colonial and contact varieties of English.