Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 31, Issue 2, 2016

In the literature on Caribbean creoles two descriptive models have dominated to explain the structures of linguistic codes, the relationships between them, and their distribution: diglossia and the creole continuum. Most Anglophone linguists have argued that it is most accurate to describe the linguistic contexts of Martinique and Guadeloupe as stable diglossic situations in which two recognizable linguistic varieties with specific functional assignments are spoken. They contrast the French Antilles with the Caribbean islands where an English-lexifer creole is spoken, described as examples of creole continua. This paper reconsiders the applicability of the diglossia model for describing the linguistic varieties in Guadeloupe and the patterns of their use. I explain why most Antillean scholars describe the French Antilles as examples of diglossia, yet also acknowledge a creole continuum with intermediate varieties of both French and Kréyòl. As a further point, I consider whether or not Guadeloupe’s linguistic situation is best described as a stable one. In doing so, I counter the argument of Meyjes (1995) that language shift is occurring in favor of French monolingualism. My goal in this paper is to foster dialogue between Francophone and Anglophone creolists and to clarify some of our basic assumptions about Caribbean creoles.

The present paper constructs a socio-historically oriented account of Antiguan Creole (hereafter AC) formation based on the chronology, demographics, economy, and origin and distribution of the population groups of colonial Antigua. During the first decades after the establishment of the colony in the mid seventeenth century until the end of that century, Antigua based its economy on small holdings not dependent on slave labor, where contact among different linguistic groups was so close and direct as to create a second language variety (hereafter L2). By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the demographic make-up changed radically as sugar became the dominant crop, enslaved peoples were massively imported, and a plantation economy dominated the island’s affairs. It is during this period that segregation increased, creating a gap between groups of European and African origin, which resulted in a process of restructuring that created a more divergent form of the earlier L2. Thus I argue that AC formation involved both the pre-plantation and the plantation phases, so the creolization process was not completed until the importation of slaves stopped and the balance between the locally-born and the foreign-born population shifted in favor of the former. Furthermore, I survey the language groups that may have been available during both phases and argue that AC formation was modeled on its lexifier during the first decades of its existence but its formation continued afterwards adopting more substrate traits. Therefore, moderate superstrate and substrate positions account for AC formation.

This paper provides a preliminary report on attitudes toward varieties of Belizean Kriol in coastal Belize. We used a verbal-guise test with 141 participants, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data in Belize City and Punta Gorda, and we found that the variety of Kriol spoken in Belize City is rated more highly in general along several dimensions than the variety spoken in Punta Gorda. We also found that BC Kriol was rated more highly by male participants from both test sites. This paper is the first installment of an ongoing project, which investigates the linguistic prestige system(s) in place with respect to Kriol by region and among individual ethnic groups in Belize.