Creoles of the
CARIBBEAN
by : Shana Jones Read her blog at www . roamingaviatrix . com
In my travels across the Caribbean , I ’ ve often wondered why the accents across certain islands are so different despite their shared language . Why the sing-song of Trinidadian prose and playful ebbing and flowing of Virgin Islanders while the swift gallop of Jamaican patois ? Surely a similar situation exists among the French , Spanish , and Dutch islands , but where do these different accents come from ? Why is it that each island has a dialect apart from the official language and distinct from the other islands sharing the same official language ? Curiosity set me off on an investigation that uncovered some pretty interesting stuff .
First of all , we can debunk the common belief that Creole in the Caribbean is spoken only by Haitians , St . Lucians , and Dominicans . “ Creole ” may be the name given to the dialect these people speak , but the term actually refers to any language born of a need for communication between people speaking different languages . When slaves were brought over to the Caribbean , there would have been communication barriers among them ( people from different tribes ended up on the same plantation ) and between them and their European masters . A simple set of vocabulary had to be adopted for day-to-day living , the result of which was a new hybrid that borrowed from the multitude of African tongues present and those of their European oppressors . This “ pidgeon ” would become the mother tongue of subsequent generations , evolving and developing over time into a full-fledged language with complex grammar rules and vocabulary .
Discovering this was my “ aha !” moment . This explained the rainbow of accents from the paisaje de campo of Cuba to the “ heights and terraces ” of Antigua and from the klein steden of Curacao to les montagnes of Guadeloupe . Each dialect , or “ creole ”, would have emerged from the unique blend of the many African languages present on the plantations combined with that of the European oppressors . In some cases , such as in St . Vincent and the Grenadines , creoles were peppered with influences from the multiple European languages , further enriching the dialect . Children born in this environment would grow up knowing only these dialects as their mode of communication . Of course , there
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