The study investigates language attitudes in The Bahamas, addressing the current status of the local creole in
society as well as attitudinal indicators of endonormative reorientation and stabilization. At the heart of the study is a verbal
guise test which investigates covert language attitudes among educated Bahamians, mostly current and former university students;
this was supplemented by a selection of acceptance rating scales and other direct question formats. The research instrument was
specifically designed to look into the complex relationships between Bahamian Creole and local as well as non-local accents of
standard English and to test associated solidarity and status effects in informal settings. The results show that the situation in
The Bahamas mirrors what is found for other creole-speaking Caribbean countries in that the local vernacular continues to be ‘the
language of solidarity, national identity, emotion and humour, and Standard the language of education, religion, and officialdom’
(Youssef 2004: 44). Notably, the study also finds that standard Bahamian English
outranks the other metropolitan standards with regard to status traits, suggesting an increase in endonormativity.
The Bahamas Ministry of Education and
Culture. 1972. Focus on the future: White paper on
education. [URL]. (15February, 2021.)
The Bahamas Ministry of
Tourism. 2018. Our language: Bahamian English. [URL]. (4May, 2018.)
Bates, Douglas, Martin Mächler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting
linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical
Software 67(1). 1–48.
Bayard, Donn, Ann Weatherall, Cynthia Gallois & Jeffery Pittam. 2001. Pax
Americana? Accent attitudinal evaluations in New Zealand, Australia and America. Journal of
Sociolinguistics 5(1). 22–49.
Beckford Wassink, Alicia. 1999. Historic
low prestige and seeds of change: Attitudes toward Jamaican Creole. Language in
Society 28(1). 57–92.
Belgrave, Korah. 2008. Attitudes
of Barbadians to British, American and Barbadian accents. La Torre: Revista de la Universidad
de Puerto
Rico 13(49–50). 429–444.
Bernaisch, Tobias. 2012. Attitudes
towards Englishes in Sri Lanka. World
Englishes 31(3). 279–291.
Bernaisch, Tobias & Christopher Koch. 2016. Attitudes
towards Englishes in India. World
Englishes 35(1). 118–132.
Department of Statistics. 2012. 2010
Census of population and housing. [URL]. (10July, 2018.)
Deuber, Dagmar. 2013. Towards
endonormative standards of English in the Caribbean: A study of students’ beliefs and school
curricula. Language, Culture and
Curriculum 26(2). 109–127.
Deuber, Dagmar & Glenda A. Leung. 2013. Investigating
attitudes towards an emerging standard of English: Evaluations of newscasters’ accents in
Trinidad. Multilingua 32(3). 289–219.
Fox, John. 2003. Effect
displays in R for generalised linear models. Journal of Statistical
Software 8(15).
Garrett, Peter. 2010. Attitudes
to language (Key Topics in
Sociolinguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenbaum, Sidney. 1996. Comparing
English worldwide: The International Corpus of
English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hackert, Stephanie. 2016. Standards
of English in the Caribbean: History, attitudes, functions,
features. In Elena Seoane & Cristina Suarez-Gomez (eds.), World
Englishes: New theoretical and methodological considerations (Varieties of English Around the World
G57), 85–111. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Holm, John A. & Alison W. Shilling. 1982. Dictionary
of Bahamian English. Cold Spring, NY: Lexik House.
IDEA International Dialects of English
Archive. 2017. Texas 20. [URL]. (24July, 2018.)
Jamaican Language Unit. 2005. The
language attitude survey of Jamaica: Data analysis. [URL]. (12May, 2017.)
Kuznetsova, Alexandra, Per B. Brockhoff & Rune H. B. Christensen. 2017. lmerTest
package: Tests in linear mixed effects models. Journal of Statistical
Software 82(13). 1–26.
Labov, William. 1963. The
social motivation of a sound
change. WORD 19(3). 273–309.
Labov, William. 1966. The
social stratification of English in New York City (Urban Language
Series). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Llamas, Carmen & Dominic J. L. Watt. 2014. Scottish,
English, British?: Innovations in attitude measurement. Language and Linguistics
Compass 8(11). 610–617.
Mair, Christian. 2006. Twentieth-century
English (Studies in English
Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McArthur, Tom. 2002. The
Oxford guide to World English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mühleisen, Susanne. 2001. Is
‘bad English’ dying out? A comparative diachronic study on attitudes towards Creole versus standard English in
Trinidad. Philologie im Netz 151, [URL]. (9May, 2017.)
Nelson, Gerald. 2002. International
Corpus of English: Markup manual for spoken texts. [URL]. (15February, 2021.)
Oenbring, Raymond & William Fielding. 2014. Young
adults’ attitudes to standard and nonstandard English in an English-creole speaking country: The case of The
Bahamas. Language, Discourse &
Society 3(1). 28–51.
R Core Team. 2018. R: A language and
environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
Rickford, John R.1985. Standard and non-standard
language attitudes in a creole continuum. In Nessa Wolfson & Joan Manes (eds.), Language
of
inequality, 145–160. Berlin: Mouton.
Roberts, Nicole. 2018. Bahamian
dictionary of dem old essential words and phrases. [URL]. (13August, 2018.)
Rosario-Martinez, Helios de. 2015. phia: Post-hoc interaction
analysis. R package version 0.2-1. [URL]. (14August, 2018.)
Schneider, Edgar W.2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around
the world (Cambridge Approaches to Language
Contact). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Urwick, James. 2002. The
Bahamian educational system: A case study in Americanization. Comparative Education
Review 46(2). 157–181.
Westphal, Michael. 2015. Attitudes
toward accents of standard English in Jamaican radio newscasting. Journal of English
Linguistics 43(4). 311–333.
Wickham, Hadley. 2007. Reshaping
data with the reshape package. Journal of Statistical
Software 21(12).
Wickham, Hadley. 2009. ggplot2:
Elegant graphics for data analysis. New York, NY: Springer.
Winford, Donald. 1976. Teacher
attitudes toward language varieties in a creole community. International Journal of the
Sociology of
Language 8(8). 45–75.
Youssef, Valerie. 2004. ‘Is
English we speaking’: Trinbagonian in the twenty-first century. English
Today 20(4). 42–49.
Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Laube, Alexander
2023. Variation in the imperfective in Bahamian English. World Englishes 42:1 ► pp. 27 ff.
Li, Tianxin, Xigang Ke, Jin Li & Chaohai Shen
2023. Public attitudes towards dialects: Evidence from 31 Chinese provinces. PLOS ONE 18:10 ► pp. e0292852 ff.
Meer, Philipp & Mirjam Schmalz
2023. Introduction: Englishes of the Caribbean. World Englishes 42:1 ► pp. 2 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.