Pirate English of the Caribbean and Atlantic trade routes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Linguistic hypotheses based on socio-historical data

Abstract

Pirate English has been academically overlooked and historically marginalized since its inception in the seventeenth century. Yet it was a formative variety in port settlements of the Caribbean, Europe, West Africa and the Americas and likely to have influenced creoles and dialects of littoral regions. However, there is little reliable data on which to base a diachronic analysis due to the nature of the outlaw speech community that was mostly illiterate. Given the difficulty of compiling empirical data for analysis, this paper applies a model that uses sociolinguistic and socio-historical data in order to determine hypothetical linguistic features in contact-induced dialect formation. Resulting hypotheses about the nature of Pirate English include maximal variability in the early stages a high-representation of male forms significant borrowing from non-prestigious English varieties and input from multiple adstrates of equal prestige. Findings also indicate the apparent emergence of Pirate English in the early eighteenth century through contact between young, male maritime workers and settlers in port societies that was seemingly followed by a period of intense leveling and unnatural transmission in extended communication networks.