Despite the publication of Aceto & Williams (2003), the languages spoken in the Eastern Caribbean remain underdescribed. In this paper, we outline a project examining language use in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines), based on fieldwork between 2003 and 2005, comprising over 100 hours of sociolinguistic interviews conducted and recorded by community-member researchers. We present quantitative analysis of three aspects of the grammatical system that exhibit variation: absence of the verb BE, verbal negation, and tense-aspect marking. We focus on three communities characterized by different sociodemographic histories. This paper fills a gap in our knowledge of the Eastern Caribbean and provides a descriptive sociolinguistic analysis as a starting point for future work. The findings contribute more generally to our understanding of (post-)colonial and contact varieties of English.
2015. Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Contact. Language and Linguistics Compass 9:6 ► pp. 243 ff.
Walker, James A. & Miriam Meyerhoff
2015. Bequia English. In Further Studies in the Lesser-Known Varieties of English, ► pp. 128 ff.
Walker, James A. & Miriam Meyerhoff
2020. Pivots of the Caribbean? Low-back vowels in eastern Caribbean English. Linguistics 58:1 ► pp. 109 ff.
Walker, James A. & Miriam Meyerhoff
2023. Complementation and the creole continuum in the Eastern Caribbean. World Englishes 42:1 ► pp. 9 ff.
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