Bey or bouy: Orthographic patterns in Bahamian Creole English on the web

This paper is the first study of the orthographic patterns of speakers of Bahamian Creole English (BCE) when attempting to write their language in online environments. For the study, a corpus of 2.5 million words was retrieved from the online forum site <www.bahamasissues.com>. Corpus-linguistic software packages were used to determine keywords, concordances, and token frequencies. The study finds that there exists evidence of a non-codified common core of spellings in BCE, a pattern that has not up to now been described in an academic publication. The piece has implications for future lexicographic and orthographic studies of BCE.