Edited by Raymond Hickey
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 10] 2019
► pp. 261–285
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.