Engaging Language, Ideologies, And Linguistics In The Caribbean And Beyond

When linguists study languages that result from situations of contact—for example, Creoles, second language varieties, and mixed languages—they encounter a well-knit set of ideologies of oppression. In focusing on the Caribbean, these ideologies usually deny the presence of coherence, complexity, and creativity in these linguistic systems. The role that these language varieties play in enabling communication can be minimized as well, as specialists and non-specialists alike at times describe them as inadequate, defective, and impoverished. Moreover, some have even proposed that multi-ethnic and multi-lingual communities are "schizophrenic" and indicated that their members are alingual and without a well-defined cultural identity. However, approaches that challenge these more-than-a-century-old ideas (e.g., Lance 1969; Poplack 1980; Arends 1995; DeGraff 2005, Zentella 2016) show that these preconceptions are rooted in a colonialist ideology that interferes with understandings of the complexities inherent to linguistic systems, language contact, attitudes towards language use, and cultural networks. Like these works, this volume challenges these oppressive ideologies.

The Language and Discourse Research Group

This project has its roots in the Language and Discourse Research Group, which we established in 2014 in the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus.¹ The group was established to give several linguists from different colleges and departments on our campus regular opportunities to meet and discuss their research interests and their work in progress, as well as recent scholarly publications. Shortly after the group was founded, membership was extended to include linguists outside of Puerto Rico. We have had fruitful discussions via digital platforms with the group's international participants regarding their work and ours. The articles compiled in this special issue are the product of the scholarly research conducted by several of the group's local and international members, as well as some invited collaborators with similar research interests.

Our group's focus on variation, difference, and the juxtaposition of cultural forms is reflected in this volume's cover image, Patricia Sanabria Ibarra's mural "Cellular Big Bang," a work that celebrates the eclectic combination of colors and diverse artistic techniques. The original piece—which uses organic paint, foam, and glass to interpret the emergence of the universe—is intended to motivate passers-by to pause and contemplate their origins and identities. The mural's imposing size (48 by 28 feet), concentric circles, and expanding linear figures are reminiscent of the notion of the greater Caribbean that frames this project, as well as the patterns and tensions that repeat across this volume's contents.

The Articles

This volume envisions the Caribbean as an expansive region that consists of multiple diasporas and differentially shifting boundaries, as suggested by its inclusion of data from speech communities in Europe and islands of the Indian Ocean, as well as San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia and Chipilo, México. San Basilio de Palenque, located in the northern part of the country, includes people of Afro-Colombian descent who speak the Creole language called Palenquero. A substantial number of the residents in the latter setting, Chipilo, speak Veneto, the language of ancestors who migrated from Italy to central Mexico in the nineteenth century. We suggest that making connections between these areas and scholarly work on the insular Caribbean enriches our platform for understanding language by providing relevant tools and useful points of comparison. In addition, extending our notion of the Caribbean's boundaries illuminates significant sociohistorical similarities (e.g., histories of mass migration, enslavement, and colonialism, as well as asymmetrical power relationships associated with economic systems and imperial expansion). These associations can bring into relief patterns that linguists see as universal and assist in rearticulating some of the assumptions about phenomena that are thought to be specific to the region.

The six articles included in this special issue of Caribbean Studies vary in terms of their disciplinary perspectives (e.g., sociolinguistics, variationist linguistics, bilingualism, and creolistics) and the specific language contact situations and phenomena under examination, which include bilingualism, code-switching, language contact, multiethnolects...