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Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas: In honor of John V. Singler
Edited by Cecelia Cutler, Zvjezdana Vrzić and Philipp Angermeyer
[Creole Language Library 53] 2017
► pp. 177–200

Historical separations

Race, class and language in Barbados

It is not uncommon to hear Barbadians speak of their existence in terms of the aphorism, “All O’ We Is One,” implying a shared culture and identity. However, this national discourse of oneness is oftentimes contradicted by the sociohistorical discourses and realities of racial separation. In this paper, I discuss divided racial and class boundaries from sociohistorical, demographic and contemporary perspectives on Barbados. I investigate how these perspectives factor into linguistic outcomes regarding the English-related creole, Bajan, in a post-colonial, racially mixed, working-class community. A quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of several morphosyntactic features, including present and past tense copula variability and tense/aspect marking, indicate that black and white populations, despite a perceived ideology of difference, speak the local vernacular in a typically creole manner. The notion of speaker identity and agency, advanced by Singler (2006, 2008) in theorizing creole genesis (cf. Baker 1995), underlies the arguments put forth in this paper.

Keywords: Barbados, race, class, sociolinguistics, variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Perspective on race and class in Barbados
  • 3.The community
  • 4.Sociolinguistic variation
    • 4.1Copula variability: Present tense
    • 4.2Copula variability: Past tense
    • 4.3Past tense marking (excluding the copula)
  • 5.The intersection of race and class in Barbados
  • 6.Language ideology
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cll.53.08bla
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