Chapter 12
Memoirs from Central America
A linguistic analysis of personal recollections of West Indian laborers in the construction of the Panama Canal
This chapter introduces and linguistically evaluates a hitherto unexplored source of earlier Caribbean vernacular English. It
comprises more than one hundred letters written in 1963 by former Panama Canal workers as part of a competition commemorating the 50th
anniversary of the opening of the Canal. I first provide an overview of some of the non-standard features evident in the letters and then zoom
in on a single variable, i.e., past inflection. Applying the principles of comparative sociolinguistics (cf. Tagliamonte 2013), I demonstrate that the abstract patterning of variation observed for this variable greatly
resembles that found in previous studies of Caribbean English-lexifier creoles and related varieties, such as African American Vernacular
English. All in all, the pilot study presented here provides impressive evidence of the value of the “Panama letters” as a window on
vernacular usage in the late nineteenth-century Anglophone Caribbean.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.West Indians in the Canal Zone: A short sociohistorical sketch
- 3.The Panama letters: Theoretical and methodological considerations
- 4.The Panama letters: A linguistic analysis
- 5.Conclusion and outlook
-
Notes
-
References
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