General characteristics of Caribbean English

Introduction

The West Indies is a linguistic patchwork. In the West Indies proper – the Greater and Lesser Antilles and the Bahamas – and in the associated mainland coastal areas of Central and South America, we find speakers not only of Spanish, English, French, and Dutch, but also of Creoles based on these: thus Papiamentu in Aruba and Curaçao, Sranan (Taki-Taki) in Surinam, Haitian Creole in Haiti, and Negro Dutch in St Thomas. On the mainland there are a variety of autochthonous Amerindian languages; no such languages now remain in the islands, although it is known that Arawak was once spoken in Trinidad, Carib (Karina) in Tobago and Grenada, and Island-Carib (which in spite of its name is an Arawakan language) in most of the Lesser Antilles The various European and European-derived languages of the area reflect the varying fortunes of the European powers which once battled for mastery of the Caribbean, along with the patterns of colonization which they succeeded in establishing. The Caribbean area also includes some ‘imported’ languages which are not European, such as Javanese in Surinam and Hindi in Trinidad and Guyana.

The most populous of the West Indian English-speaking territories is Jamaica in the Greater Antilles, with a population in excess of 2 million. Next comes Trinidad and Tobago, off the coast of Venezuela at the other end of the archipelago crescent, with rather over a million. Guyana, on the mainland of South America, has a population approaching three-quarters of a million.