The epicentre model and American influence on Bahamian Englishes

Abstract

Americanization has been described as one of the major sociocultural processes of language change currently affecting varieties of English worldwide; it is generally linked to the post-World War II rise of the United States to global superpower status in political, military, economic, and cultural terms. Owing to their immediate geographical proximity, the Bahamas always had closer demographic, cultural, and institutional links with the North American mainland than other British colonies. The present paper applies the notion of epicentral influence, in the sense of a regionally dominant model influencing developments in neighboring areas, to Bahamian-American linguistic relations and attempts to disentangle global from epicentral American influence. It considers not just standard Bahamian English but also Bahamian Creole, all levels of language, diachronic and synchronic data, and corpus findings as well as attitudinal studies and discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of the Bahamian data for the epicentre idea.