Chapter published in:
Keeping in Touch: Emigrant letters across the English-speaking world
Edited by Raymond Hickey
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 10] 2019

Memoirs from Central America

A linguistic analysis of personal recollections of West Indian laborers in the construction of the Panama Canal

This chapter introduces and linguistically evaluates a hitherto unexplored source of earlier Caribbean vernacular English. It comprises more than one hundred letters written in 1963 by former Panama Canal workers as part of a competition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Canal. I first provide an overview of some of the non-standard features evident in the letters and then zoom in on a single variable, i.e., past inflection. Applying the principles of comparative sociolinguistics (cf. Tagliamonte 2013), I demonstrate that the abstract patterning of variation observed for this variable greatly resembles that found in previous studies of Caribbean English-lexifier creoles and related varieties, such as African American Vernacular English. All in all, the pilot study presented here provides impressive evidence of the value of the “Panama letters” as a window on vernacular usage in the late nineteenth-century Anglophone Caribbean.
Keywords: Panama Canal, personal letters, earlier Caribbean vernacular English, creole, past inflection, Varbrul
Published online: 28 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10.12hac
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