Bahamian Standard English

A first approach

Elisabeth Bruckmaier | University of Regensburg

Stephanie Hackert | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

This article presents both quantitative and qualitative information on the orthography, lexis, and morphosyntax of Bahamian Standard English. Employing a press corpus of over 100 000 words, it aims not only at a descriptive account but also at initial answers to two research questions. First, is Standard English as spoken in the Bahamas still following the traditional British norm or has it shifted toward an American orientation; and second, what role does the local creole play in shaping the variety? An overview of the current sociolinguistic situation obtaining in the Bahamas complements the analysis.

Keywords: the Bahamas, corpus linguistics, Standard English, the Caribbean, press language, International Corpus of English, British vs. American norms, Bahamian Creole

Published online: 05 July 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.32.2.03bru

Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

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2013. In A Dictionary of Varieties of English, ► pp. 363 ff.

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2017. In Language Variation on Jamaican Radio [Varieties of English Around the World, G60],

Hackert, Stephanie

2015. Pseudotitles in Bahamian English. Journal of English Linguistics 43:2 ► pp. 143 ff.

Hackert, Stephanie

2016. In World Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G57], ► pp. 85 ff.

Hackert, Stephanie & Dagmar Deuber

2015. In Grammatical Change in English World-Wide [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 67], ► pp. 389 ff.

Meer, Philipp, Michael Westphal, Eva Canan Hänsel & Dagmar Deuber

2019. Trinidadian secondary school students’ attitudes toward accents of Standard English. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 34:1 ► pp. 83 ff.

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