Sociohistorical and linguistic account of St Vincent and the Grenadines
This chapter presents a settlement history of St Vincent and the Grenadines, the demographic composition of the islands at transitional periods in their history and the ethnolinguistic origins of the settlers. We show that a great proportion of the African linguistic heritage has been lost and that, throughout the centuries, a number of linguistic elements of Africans brought to the islands have been incorporated into other language varieties as a result of contact, leaving lexical and structural traces of the Africans’ ancestral languages. We also establish that the Carib, Madeiran and Indian descendants have lost or given up the languages of their ancestors. We explore some sociohistorical events that have given rise to this present linguistic state of affairs and highlight some early and modern-day lexical, phonological and grammatical features of Vincentian language.* Keywords: St Vincent and the Grenadines; ethnolinguistic origins; demographic composition; phonology; lexicon; grammar
References
Aceto, Michael
2004/5 The borrowing and innovation of food terms in the Anglophone Caribbean.
Sargasso: Creolistics and Caribbean languages, (2004/5 I): 77–96.
Alleyne, Mervyn
1980 Comparative Afro-American. Ann Arbor MI: Karoma.
Allsopp, Richard
(ed.) 1996 Dictionary of Caribbean English usage. Oxford: OUP.
Anderson, John
, journal
2001 In
Between Slavery and Freedom: Special Magistrate John Anderson’s Journal of St Vincent During the Apprenticeship,
Roderick Alexander McDonald (ed.). Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bailey, Beryl Loftman
1966 Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach. Cambridge: CUP.
Baker, Patrick
1994 Centring the Periphery: Chaos, Order and the Ethnohistory of Dominica. Quebec & Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Baker, Philip
1993 Assessing the African contribution to French-based Creoles. In
Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties, Salikoko Mufwene (ed.), 134-155. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press.
Baker, Philip
1999 Investigating the origin and diffusion of shared features among the Atlantic English Creoles. In
St Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles: The Texts of Samuel Augustus Mathews in Perspective,
Philip Baker &
Adrienne Bruyn (eds), 315-364. London: University of Westminster Press.
Bartens, Angela & Farquharson, Joseph T
2012 African words in the English-lexifier Creoles of San Andrés, Providence, and Nicaragua and other Western Caribbean varieties. In
Black through White: African Words and Calques which Survived Slavery in Creoles and Transplanted European Languages,
Angela Bartens &
Philip Baker (eds), 169-195. London: Battlebridge Publications.
Bastide, Roger
1971 African Civilisations in the New World. New York NY: Harper & Row.
Bickerton, Derek
1981 Roots of Language. Ann Arbor MI: Karoma.
Breton, Raymond
1892[1665] Dictionnaire caraïbe-françois, reprinted, facs. edn. Leipzig: Jules Platzmann.
Breton, Raymond
1900[1666] Dictionnaire françois-caraïbe, reprinted, facs. edn. Leipzig: Jules Platzmann.
Breton, Raymond
1877[1667] Grammaire caraïbe, suivie du catéchisme caraïbe, new edn. Paris: L. Adam & C. Leclerc.
Campbell, John
1763.
Candid and Impartial Considerations on the Nature of the Sugar Trade. London: printed for R. Baldwin.
Captive Passage/
McMillan, Beverly 2002 Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas. Mariners' Museum. Newport News VA: Smithsonian Institute.
Carmichael, A.C
1833 Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured and Negro Population of the West Indies, 2 vols. London: Whittaker, Treacher.
Carretta, Vincent
2005 Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-made Man. Atlanta GA: University of Georgia Press.
Chatelain, Heli & Summers, W.R
1893 Bantu notes and vocabularies no. 1: The language of the Bashi-Lange and Ba-Luba.
Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 25(1): 512–541.
Chaudenson, Robert
1992 Des îles, des hommes, des langues: Essais sur la créolisation linguistique et culturelle. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Chaudenson, Robert
2003 La créolisation: Théorie, applications, implications. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Christaller, Johann Gottlieb
1933 [1881] Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi (Chwee, twi): With a Grammatical Introduction and Appendices on the Geography of the Gold Coast and Other Subjects, 2
nd edn. Basel: Basel Evangelical Missionary Society.
[URL] (5 May 2013).
Colquhoun, A
1815 Treatise on the Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire. London: Joseph Mawman.
Constitution of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
CSP. Great Britain Calendar of State Papers Colonial
America and West Indies. 1661-68.
Major John Scott.
Curtin, Philip
1969 The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Davidson, Basil
1996 [1961] The African Slave Trade. Oxford: James Currey.
De Wolf, Paul P
1995 English-Fula dictionary (Fulfulde, Pulaar, Fulani): A Multidialectal Approach, 3 vols. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
Deerr, Noel
1949/50 The History of Sugar. 2 vols. London: Chapman & Hall.
Duncan, Ebenezer
1960 A Brief History of St Vincent with Studies in Citizenship. Kingstown: St Vincent Reliance Printery.
Dundas, George
1880 Précis of Information Concerning the Colony of Saint Vincent, West Indies. St Vincent: GPO.
Edwards, Bryan
1810 The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies in Three Volumes. Third edition published in 1801, with considerable additions. Illustrated with plates. Vols 2-3. London: John, Sockdale, Piccadilly.
Edwards, Esther
1997 Caribbean Cultural Poems and Parlance in Vincentian Dialect, Vol. 1: Vincentian Life. New York NY: Esther’s Cultural Productions.
Eltis, David, et al.
(eds) 2010a Construction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade database: Sources and methods.
[URL] (16 March 2013).
Eltis, David, et al.
(eds) 2010b Slave voyages database.
[URL] (March - April 2013).
Equiano, Olaudah
1789 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. London: printed for and sold by the author.
Ferguson, Charles A. and DeBose, Charles E
1977 Simplified Registers, Broken Language, and Pidginization. In
Pidgin and Creole Linguistics,
Albert Valdman (ed.), 99-125. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.
Ferreira, Jo-Anne
2006/7 Madeiran Portuguese migration to Guyana, St Vincent, Antigua and Trinidad: A comparative overview.
Portuguese Studies Review 14(2): 63-85.
[URL] (14 April 2013).
Fraser, Adrian
2002 Chatoyer (Chatawae) the First National Hero of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Kingstown: Galaxy Print.
Gimson, Alfred Charles
1970[1962] An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English, 2nd edn. London: Edward Arnold.
Gonzalez, Nancie
1988 Sojourners of the Caribbean: Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Garifuna. Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press.
Gullick, Charles J.M.R
1985.
Myths of a Minority: The Changing Traditions of the Vincentian Caribs. Assen: van Gorcum.
Hancock, Ian
1987 A preliminary classification of the Anglophone Atlantic Creoles, with syntactic data from 33 representative dialects. In
Pidgin and Creole Languages: Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke,
Glenn G. Gilbert (ed.), 264-333. Honolulu HI: University of Hawai’i Press.
Haugen, Einar
1972 The Ecology of Language. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
Holm, John
1988/89 Pidgins and Creoles, Vols 1-2. Cambridge: CUP.
Horn, Laurence
1989 A Natural History of Negation. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hulme, Peter
1986 Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797. London: Methuen.
Hulme, Peter & Whitehead, Neil L
(eds) 1992 Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day. An Anthology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hymes, Dell
(ed.)
Pidginization and Creolization of Languages Cambridge CUP
Jespersen, Otto
1917 Negation in English and Other Languages. Copenhagen: A. F. Host & Son.
Jones, Adam & Johnson. Marion
1980 Slaves from the Windward Coast.
The Journal of African History 21(1): 17-34.
de la Borde, Sieur
1674 Relation des caraïbes, sauvages des isles Antilles de l’Amérique. Paris: Louis Billaine.
Laka, Itziar Murgaza
1990 Negation in Syntax: On the Nature of Functional Categories and Projections. PhD dissertation, MIT.
Lawson, Philip
1993 The East India Company: A History. London: Longman.
Le Breton, Rev. Fr. Adrien S.J
[1662-1736] 1998 Historic account of Saint Vincent, the Indian Youroumayn, the island of the Karaÿbes. Translation made possible by the Mayreau Environmental Development Organisation, introduction: Fr. Robert Divonne.
[URL] (May 2006).
Le Page, Robert & Tabouret-Keller, Andrée
1985 Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: CUP.
Look Lai, Walton
1993 Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar, Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies 1838-1918. Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lovejoy, Paul & Richardson, David
2004 This horrid hole: Royal authority, commerce and credit at Bonny.
The Journal of African History 45(3): 363-392.
M’Baye, Babacar
2009 The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Diasporan Narratives. Jackson MS: University Press of Mississippi.
Mann, Kristin
2010 Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.
Martin, John
2013 The Irish slave trade – The forgotten “white” slaves.
[URL] (15 March 2013).
Martin, Montgomery R
1843 History of the Colonies of the British Empire in the West Indies, South America, North America, Asia, Austral-Asia, Africa and Europe. London: Wm. H. Allen & Co.
McDonald, Roderick A
(ed.) 2001 Between Slavery and Freedom: Special Magistrate John Anderson’s Journal of St Vincent During the Apprenticeship. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press.
Meyerhoff, Miriam & Walker, James A
2013 Bequia Talk: Language in St Vincent and the Grenadines. London: Battlebridge Publications.
Migge, Bettina
1993 Substrate Influence in Creole Language Formation: The Case of Serial Verb Constructions in Sranan. MA thesis, Ohio State University.
Mintz, Sydney W
1971 The socio-historical background to pidginization and creolization. In
Pidginization and Creolization of Languages,
Dell Hymes (ed.), 481-496. Cambridge: CUP.
Moreau, Jean-Pierre
1988.
Guide des trésors archéologiques sous-marins des Petites-Antilles d’après les archives anglaises, espagnoles et françaises des XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Clamart: éd.
J.-P. Moreau.
Mufwene, Salikoko
1992 Africanisms in Gullah: A re-examination of the issues. In
Old English and New: Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honor of Frederic G. Cassidy,
Joan H. Hall,
Dick Doane &
Dick Ringler (eds), 156-182. New York NY: Garland.
Mufwene, Salikoko
2000 Some sociohistorical inferences about the development of African-American English. In
The English History of African American English, Shana Poplack (ed.), 233-263. Oxford: Blackwell.
Niddrie, David L
1960 Eighteenth-century settlement in the British Caribbean.
Transactions and Papers. The Institute of British Geographers 40: 67-80.
Nwokeji, G. Ugo
2006 Review of Equiano the African: Biography of a self-made man.
The Journal of American History 3(3): 840-841.
Ober, Frederick A
1880 Camps in the Caribbees: The Adventures of a Naturalist in the Lesser Antilles. Boston MA: Lee & Shepard.
Ober, Frederick A
1904 Our West Indian Neighbors. New York NY: James Pott & Company.
Pelleprat, Pierre
1665 Relation des missions des pères de la compagnie de Jésus dans les îles et dans la terre ferme de l’Amérique méridionale. Paris: Sébastien & Gabriel Cramoisy.
Prescod, Paula
2004 Une description grammaticale du syntagme nominal dans le créole anglophone de St-Vincent-et-les-Grenadines. Ph.D. dissertation, Université Paris III. Published 2006, Lille: Presses de l’ANRT.
Prescod, Paula
2010 A Grammatical Description of the Noun Phrase in the English-lexicon Creole of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Munich: Lincom.
Prescod, Paula
2013 Vincentian Creole. In
The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Vol. 1: English-based and Dutch-based Languages, Ch.7,
Susanne Michaelis,
Philippe Maurer,
Martin Haspelmath &
Magnus Huber (eds), 70-80. Oxford: OUP.
Prescod, Paula & Fraser, Adrian
2008 A demolinguistic profile of St Vincent and the Grenadines or a successful attempt at linguistic disenfranchisement.
Anthropos 103: 99-112.
Ralston, Lenore D
1985 A historical account of ‘country talk’ on St. Vincent Island: Problems and new directions. In
Diversity and development in English-related Creoles,
Ian Hancock (ed.), 13-32. Ann Arbor MI: Karoma.
Rickford, John
1997 Prior creolization of African-American Vernacular English? Sociohistorical and textual evidence from the 17th and 18th centuries.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 1(3): 315-336.
Roach, Peter
1991[1983] English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course, 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP.
Roberts, George W
1957 The Population of Jamaica: An Analysis of its Structure and Growth. Cambridge: CUP.
Roberts, George W. & Byrne, Joycelin
1966 Summary statistics on indenture and associated migration affecting the West Indies 1834- 1918.
Population Studies XX(1): 125-134.
De Rochefort, Charles
1665[1658] Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l’Amérique. Rotterdam: Amour Leers. The author’s name appears in the second edition of 1665.
Rodney, Walter
1975 The Guinea Coast. In
The Cambridge History of Africa, IV 1600-1790,
J. Richard Gray (ed.), 223-324. Cambridge: CUP.
RSF (Religious Society of Friends)
1824 A View of the Present State of the African Slave Trade. Philadelphia PA: William Brown, Printer 1824. Published by Direction of a meeting representing the Religious Society of Friends.
Sauer, Carl
1966 The Early Spanish Main. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
Schaffer, Matt
2005 Bound to Africa: The Mandinka legacy in the New World.
History in Africa 32: 321-369.
Schneider, Edgar W
2004 Global synopsis: Phonetic and phonological variation in English world-wide. In
A Handbook of Varieties of English: A Multimedia Reference Tool,
Bernd Kortmann,
Edgar W. Schneider (eds) in collaboration with Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie & Clive Upton, 1111-1137. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Schneider, Edgar W
2007 Post-colonial Englishes: The Dynamics of Language Diffusion. Cambridge: CUP.
Shephard, Charles
1997 [1831] An Historical Account of the Island of Saint Vincent, West Indies. London: Frank Cass & Co.
Sheppard, Jill
1977 The “Redlegs” of Barbados: Their Origins and History. New York NY: KTO Press.
Simmonds, Andrew
2008 National report on the development of education in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
International Conference on Education. 25-28 Nov. 2008. Geneva.
[URL] (15 May 2010).
Spinelli, Joseph
1973 Land Use and Population in St Vincent 1763-1960: A Contribution to the Patterns of Economic and Demographic Change in a Small West Indian Island. PhD dissertation, University of Florida.
[URL] (14 March 2013).
SVA
n° 14,
March 18th 1842 St Vincent Archives, correspondence from Lieutenant Governor in St Vincent to Governor of the Windward Islands.
SVA
n° 52,
August 2nd 1842 St Vincent Archives, correspondence from Lieutenant Governor of St Vincent to Governor of the Windward Islands.
SVA
n° 6,
January 16th 1861 St Vincent Archives, correspondence from Lieutenant Governor of St Vincent to Governor of the Windward Islands.
SVA
n° 162,
April 21st 1862 St Vincent Archives, correspondence from Lieutenant Governor of St Vincent to Governor of the Windward Islands.
SVG Statistical Office
2001 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 2001 Population and Housing Census.
[URL] (5 May 2013).
Taylor, Douglas
1958 Names on Saint Vincent.
West-Indische Gids 38: 106-110.
Urua, Eno-Abasi, Ekpenyong, Moses & Gibbon, Dafydd
2004 Uyo Ibibio dictionary (No. 1).
[URL] (20 April 2013).
Young, Sir William
1791/92 A tour through the several islands of Barbadoe, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago and Grenada in the years 1791 and 1792. In
Edwards, Bryan.
The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies in Three Volumes. Third edition published in 1801, with considerable additions. Illustrated with plates. Vols 2-3. London: John, Sockdale, Piccadilly.
Walters, Ivor
1964 The Unfortunate Valentine Morris. Newport: R. H. Johns.
Williams, Eric E
1970 From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969. New York NY: Harper & Row.
Williams, Jeffrey P
2010 Euro-Caribbean English varieties. In
The Lesser-known Varieties of English: An Introduction,
Daniel Schreier,
Peter Trudgill,
Edgar W. Schneider &
Jeffrey Williams (eds), 136-157. Cambridge: CUP.
Winford, Donald
1985 The syntax of fi complements in Caribbean English Creole.
Language 61(3): 588-624.
Zanuttini, Raffaella
1991 Syntactic Properties of Sentential Negation: A Comparative Study of Romance Languages. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Schneider, Edgar W. & Raymond Hickey
2020.
Contact and Caribbean Creoles. In
The Handbook of Language Contact,
► pp. 403 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 april 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.