Preliminaries to the study of the dialects of white West Indian English

Abstract

Scattered throughout the anglophone West Indies there exists a minority poor population, descended from the early English colonial expansion. As Hancock (1984: 2) has pointed out, the speakers of various metropolitan English dialects represent one of the ingredients in the contact situation that gave rise to the contemporary English-related creoles. However, this population has received only scant attention from creolists despite the fact that their dialects are the contemporary survivals of those metropolitan varieties which were present in the early sociolinguistic environment. The purpose of this paper is to present some of the demographic, geographic, and sociolinguistic parameters which affected the development of the dialects of white West Indian English.1 For the most part, the focus will be on the historical accounts of the white population. By examining the historical evidence, tentative relationships between the dialects which take into account settlement history, internal migration, and areal contact will be presented.