Languages of the Caribbean

The

• San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina
  (Colombia)
• French (official language of Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Saint Barthélemy, French Guiana and Saint-Martin)
• U.S. Virgin Islands)^[1]
• Dutch (official language of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten, and Suriname)
• Haitian Creole (official language of Haiti)
• Papiamento (a Portuguese and Spanish-based Creole language) (official language of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao)

There are also a number of creoles and local patois. Dozens of the creole languages of the Caribbean are widely used informally among the general population. There are also a few additional smaller indigenous languages. Many of the indigenous languages have become extinct or are dying out.

At odds with the ever-growing desire for a single Caribbean community,^[2] the linguistic diversity of a few Caribbean islands has made language policy an issue in the post-colonial era. In recent years, Caribbean islands have become aware of a linguistic inheritance of sorts. However, language policies being developed nowadays are mostly aimed at multilingualism.

Languages

Most languages spoken in the Caribbean are either European languages (namely Spanish, English, French, and Dutch) or European language-based creoles.

Spanish speakers are the most numerous in the Caribbean by far, with over 25 million native speakers in the Greater Antilles . English is the first or second language in most of the smaller Caribbean islands and is also the unofficial lingua franca of tourism, the dominant industry in the Caribbean region. In the Caribbean, the official language is usually determined by whichever colonial power (England, Spain, France, or the Netherlands) held sway over the island first or longest.

English

The first permanent English colonies were founded at Saint Kitts (1624) and Barbados (1627). The English language is the third most established throughout the Caribbean; however, due to the relatively small populations of the English-speaking territories, only 14%^[3] of West Indians are English speakers. English is the official language of about 18 Caribbean territories inhabited by about 6 million people, though most inhabitants of these islands may more properly be described as speaking English creoles rather than local varieties of standard English.

Spanish

Spanish was introduced to the Caribbean with the voyages of discovery by

About one-quarter of West Indians speak French or a

Dutch is an official language of the Caribbean islands that remain under Dutch sovereignty. However, Dutch is not the dominant language on these islands. On the islands of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire, a creole based on Portuguese, Spanish and West African languages known as Papiamento is predominant, while in Sint Maarten, Saba and Sint Eustatius, English, as well as a local English creole, are spoken. A Dutch creole known as Negerhollands was spoken in the former Danish West Indian islands of Saint Thomas and Saint John, but is now extinct. Its last native speaker died in 1987.^[6]

Other languages

Caribbean Hindustani

Several languages spoken in the Caribbean belong to language groups concentrated or originating in the mainland countries bordering on the Caribbean: Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru.

Many indigenous languages (actually spoken with the mainland Caribbean rather than the islands) have been added to the list of endangered or extinct languages—for example,

A substantial proportion of the world's creole languages are to be found in the Caribbean and Africa, due partly to their multilingualism and their colonial past. The lexifiers of most of the Caribbean creoles and patois are languages of Indo-European colonizers of the era. Creole languages continue to evolve in the direction of European colonial languages to which they are related, so that decreolization occurs and a post-creole continuum arises. For example, the Jamaican sociolinguistic situation has often been described in terms of this continuum.^[12] Papiamento, spoken on the so-called 'ABC' islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao), shows traces of both indigenous languages and Spanish,^[13] Portuguese, and Dutch lexicons.).

In Jamaica, though generally an English-speaking island, a patois drawing on a multitude of influences including Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arawak, Irish and African languages is widely spoken. In Barbados, a dialect often known as "bajan" have influences from West African languages that can be heard on a regular daily basis.

In Haiti, a French-speaking island that also mixed between the French and West African languages to be based on Haitian Creole after the slaves won independence from France on 1 January 1804 that was once mixed between the white French settlers and African slaves that was imported from Africa to the New World. Haiti became the first Latin American country to gain independence and became the first black republic, the first Caribbean nation and the second independent nation in the Americas after the United States under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

Contact between the French and English-lexified creoles is fairly common in the Lesser Antilles (apart from Saint Lucia), and can also be observed on Dominica, Saint Vincent, Carriacou, Petite Martinique and Grenada.^[14]

In

In Saint Lucia, it was colonised by France as part of the French Caribbean, followed by the British that became part of the British Caribbean, the official language of Saint Lucia was English while Saint Lucian Creole French was also spoken, but was and still is related to Haitian Creole once the French had captured the slaves from Africa and sold in the Americas. Saint Lucian Creole emerged as a form of communication between the African slaves and the French colonizers. It was each ruled seven times and at war which was 14 times between England and France after the Seven Years' War as well as the Battle of St. Lucia during the American Revolutionary War in 1778. While the French Revolution broke out in Paris in 1789, a revolutionary tribunal was sent to Saint Lucia, headed by Captain La Crosse. Following the declaration of the French Republic on 22 September 1792 and the Execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793, Britain declared war on France in the Caribbean until the French National Convention abolished slavery on 4 February 1794. The Haitian Revolution led by the former slaves including Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe while the other Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture was captured by the French in 1802 and died in France on 7 April 1803. The Battle of Vertières led by the former slaves including Dessalines defeated the French and declared the colony of Saint-Domingue independence on 1 January 1804 and renamed the country Ayiti meaning (Land of Mountains). Haiti became the world's first and oldest free black nation in the modern world, and the second oldest independent country in the Americas after the United States. Saint Lucia gained independence from the United Kingdom on 22 February 1979, as the United States recognized Saint Lucia as a federated state of the British Commonwealth.

Others

Asian languages such as Chinese and other Indian languages such as Tamil are spoken by Asian expatriates and their descendants exclusively. In earlier historical times, other Indo-European languages, such as Danish or German,^[15] could be found in northeastern parts of the Caribbean.

Change and policy

Throughout the long multilingual history of the Caribbean continent, Caribbean languages have been subject to phenomena like language contact, language expansion, language shift, and language death.^[16] Two examples are the Spanish expansion, in which Spanish-speaking peoples expanded over most of central Caribbean, thereby displacing Arawak speaking peoples in much of the Caribbean, and the Creole expansion, in which Creole-speaking peoples expanded over several of islands. Another example is the English expansion in the 17th century, which led to the extension of English to much of the north and the east Caribbean.

After gaining independence, many Caribbean countries, in the search for national unity, selected one language (generally the former colonial language) to be used in government and education. In recent years, Caribbean countries have become increasingly convinced of the importance of linguistic diversity. Language policies that are being developed nowadays are mostly aimed at multilingualism.[17]

Demographics

Of the 38 million West Indians (as of 2001),^[18] about 62% speak Spanish (a west Caribbean lingua franca). About 25% speak French, about 15% speak English, and 5% speak Dutch. Spanish and English are important second languages: 24 million and 9 million speak them as second languages.

The following is a list of major Caribbean languages (by total number of speakers)^{[needs updating]}:

Linguistic features

Some linguistic features are particularly common among languages spoken in the Caribbean, whereas others seem less common. Such shared traits probably are not due to a common origin of all Caribbean languages. Instead, some may be due to language contact (resulting in borrowing) and specific idioms and phrases may be due to a similar cultural background.

Syntax

Widespread syntactical structures include the common use of adjectival verbs for e.g.:" He dirty the floor. The use of juxtaposition to show possession as in English Creole, "John book" instead of Standard English, "John's book", the omission of the copula in structures such as "he sick" and "the boy reading". In Standard English, these examples would be rendered, 'he seems/appears/is sick' and "the boy is reading".

Semantic

Quite often, only one term is used for both animal and meat; the word nama or nyama for animal/meat is particularly widespread in otherwise widely divergent Caribbean languages.

See also

• Anglophone Caribbean
• Antillean Creole
• Caribbean English
• Caribbean Spanish
• Caribbean Hindustani
• Creole language
• Use of the Dutch language in the Caribbean
• English-based creole languages
• French-based creole languages
• List of sovereign states and dependent territories in the Caribbean
• Pre-Arawakan languages of the Greater Antilles

Notes