Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean (review)

This book consists of an introduction and twelve original analyses of Eastern Caribbean languages, varieties that remain largely unexplored in Anglophone dialectology and pidgin and creole studies. This work and related plans to describe undocumented languages were conceived at a 1998 symposium on the goals of creolistics in the twenty-first century.

The volume’s first study, by Becky Childs, Jeffrey Reaser, and Walt Wolfram, focuses on phonological change in black and white speech in two isolated Bahamian communities. The authors draw attention to mutual influence and evidence for the maintenance of dialectal distinctiveness. The next paper, by Helean McPhee, also analyzes Bahamian. The author finds that some of its TMA auxiliaries can be classified differently at the level of syntax and semantics.

The third contribution is the first analysis of English in the Turks and Caicos Islands. With it, Cecilia Cutler provides an overview of the language and posits that it is somewhat similar to AAVE and Bermudian. Next, Robin Sabino, Mary Diamond, and Leah Cockcroft offer a fascinating examination of pluralization strategies in the British and American Virgin Islands. They consider performed speech from four corpora spanning forty years and find no evidence that this grammatical subsystem has shifted towards Standard English.

The fifth selection is one of the first studies published on language in Anguilla. In it, Jeffrey P. Williams describes the sociohistorical origins and grammar of a white enclave community. The next contribution, by Michael Aceto, responds to the need to differentiate between genesis and other types of language emergence. Highlighting the case of Barbudan Creole English, he formulates an alternative to the creole continuum model, a classificatory system that recognizes three broad classes: immigrant creole varieties, dialect creole varieties, and deep creole varieties.

Beverley Bryan and Rosalind Burnette’s research analyzes teachers’ attitudes toward four languages in Dominica: English, Kwéyòl, Kokoy, and Dominican Creole English. They report generally positive attitudes toward these vernaculars. Next, Paul B. Garrett explores the origins of vernacular English in St. Lucia, an island in which most people speak a French-lexified creole. Giving special attention to sociohistorical factors, he argues that not all English-derived vernaculars should be considered creoles.

The next two papers deal with the language and performance on the Grenadine island of Carriacou. Joan M. Fayer offers a vivid description of a folk performance known as Shakespeare Mas, and Ronald Kephart provides a grammatical sketch of Carriacou Creole English.

The paper by Gerard van Kerk focuses on the language of an elderly woman from Barbados. Her speech reveals ‘deeper’ creole features than usually associated with Barbados, characteristics the author suggests are found only among a small percentage of the population. In the final essay, David Sutcliffe describes suprasegmental systems in Barbadian, Trinidadian, and Guyanese. He argues convincingly that even English-derived creole varieties that resemble standard forms can be analyzed as having tonal patterns.

This impressive collection of scholarship stands out as an exciting and motivating resource, offering creolists and other linguists a wealth of previously unavailable information and many provocative suggestions for future research.