Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole LanguagesVol. 37:2 (2022) ► pp.357–394
Phonetic variation in Standard English spoken by Trinidadian professionals
This paper analyzes the speech of 27 Trinidadian professionals (lawyers, lecturers, and politicians), who are typical speakers of Standard Trinidadian English in formal contexts, where traditionally Standard English is targeted. We investigate phonetic variation in Trinidadian English speech with regard to the varying integration of Creole features. The paper presents the results of an acoustic study of 10 vowels and an auditory analysis of three consonantal variables, using data from the Trinidad and Tobago component of the International Corpus of English.
The analysis shows that exonormative influences do not play a role. Individual Trinidadian Creole features are integrated into standard speech (voiced TH-stopping, partial overlap of bath-start-trap, partial overlap of strut-lot) and some realizations are identical in both codes (face and goat), while others are avoided (voiceless TH-stopping, the realization of down with as a monophthong with a velar nasal, the cloth-thought merger, and the realization of mouth as [ɔʊ]). These results from Trinidad confirm the validity of Irvine’s (2004, 2008) model of load-bearing and non load-bearing variables for the distinction between English and Creole. The conclusion highlights methodological differences to Irvine’s study and discusses an extended conceptualization of Standard English that incorporates variation along the dimension of exo- versus endonormativity.
Keywords: Trinidad, Standard English, Trinidadian English Creole, phonetic variation, International Corpus of English
Article outline
- 1.Standard Englishes in the Anglophone Caribbean
- 2.Variation in Trinidadian English/Creole
- 3.Data and method
- 4.Results
- 5.Load-bearingness in Trinidadian English/Creole
- Notes
-
References
References
Adank, Patti, Roel Smits, & Roeland van Hout
2004 A
comparison of vowel normalization procedures for language variation research. Journal of the
Acoustical Society of
America, 116(5). 3099–3107. 
Allsopp, Richard
2003 Dictionary
of Caribbean English usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boersma, Paul & David Weenink
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn
2007 Accent,
(ING) and the social logic of listener perceptions. American
Speech 82(3). 32–64.
Carpenter, Karen & Hubert Devonish
2012 Boys
will be boys: Gender and bilingual education in a creole language
situation. In Jeannette Allsopp & John R. Rickford (eds.), Language,
Culture and Caribbean
Identity, 161–175. University of the West Indies Press.
Carrington, Lawrence D.
1999 The status of creole in the
Caribbean. Caribbean
Quarterly 45(2/3). 41–51.
Cassidy, Frederic G. & Robert B. LePage
1980 Dictionary
of Jamaican English (2nd
ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DeCamp, David
1971 Towards
a generative analysis of a post-creole speech continuum. In Dell Hymes (ed.), Pidginization
and creolization of
languages, 349–370. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deuber, Dagmar
2009 Standard
English in the secondary school in Trinidad: Problems – properties –
prospects. In Thomas Hoffmann & Lucia Siebers (eds.), World
Englishes – problems, properties and prospects (Varieties of English Around the World
G40), 82–104. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
2010 Standard
English and situational variation: Sociolinguistic considerations in the compilation of ICE-Trinidad and
Tobago. ICAME
Journal 341. 24–40.
2013 Towards
endonormative standards of English in the Caribbean: A study of students’ beliefs and school
curricula. Language, Culture and
Curriculum 26(2). 109–127.
2014 English
in the Caribbean: Variation, Style and Standards in Jamaica and Trinidad (Studies in English
Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deuber, Dagmar & Glenda A. Leung
2013 Investigating
attitudes towards an emerging standard of English: Evaluations of newscasters’ accents in
Trinidad. Multilingua 32(3). 289–319.
Devonish, Hubert
2007 Language
& liberation: Creole language politics in the Caribbean (2nd
ed.). Kingston: Arawak.
Di Paolo, Marianna, Malcah Yaeger-Dror & Alicia Beckford Wassink
2011 Analyzing
vowels. In Marianna Di Paolo & Malcah Yaeger-Dror (eds.), Sociophonetics:
A student’s
guide, 87–106. London: Routledge.
Ferreira, Jo-Anne & Kathy-Ann Drayton
fc. Trinidadian
English. Author manuscript submitted for publication.
Greenbaum, Sidney
1996 Introducing
ICE. In Sidney Greenbaum (ed.), Comparing
English worldwide: The International Corpus of
English, 3–12. Oxford: Clarendon.
Hundt, Marianna & Ulrike Gut
(eds.) 2012 Mapping
unity and diversity world-wide: Corpus-based studies of New
Englishes. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Irvine, Alison
2004 A
good command of the English language: Phonological variation in the Jamaican acrolect. Journal
of Pidgin and Creole
Languages 19(1). 41–76.
2008 Contrast
and convergence in Standard Jamaican English: The phonological architecture of the standard in an ideologically bidialectal
community. World
Englishes 27(1). 9–25.
James, Winford & Valerie Youssef
2008 The
creoles of Trinidad and Tobago: Morphology and syntax. In Edgar W. Schneider (ed.), A
handbook of varieties of English. Volume 2: The Americas and the
Caribbean, 662–692. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Johnson, Daniel E.
2009 Getting off the GoldVarb standard:
Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics
Compass 31(1). 359–383.
Kouwenberg, Silvia, Winnie Anderson-Brown, Terri-Ann Barrett, Shyrel-Ann Dean, Tamirand De Lisser, Havenol Douglas, Marsha Forbes, Autense France, Byron Jones, Novelette McClean, & Jodianne Scott
2011 Linguistics
in the Caribbean: Empowerment through Creole language awareness. Journal of Pidgin and Creole
languages 26(2). 387–403.
Kelley, Matthew & Benjamin Tucker
2020 A
comparison of four vowel overlap measures. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America 147(1). 137–145.
Lacoste, Véronique
2017 The
Caribbean. In Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, & Devyani Sharma (eds.), The
Oxford handbook of World
Englishes, 389–408. Oxford University Press.
Leung, Glenda A.
2013 A synchronic sociophonetic study
of monophthongs in Trinidadian
English. Freiburg: University of Freiburg PhD dissertation. [URL] (10 March,
2020.)
Lobanov, B. M.
1971 Classification
of Russian vowels spoken by different speakers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America, 49(2). 606–608.
Mair, Christian
2002 Creolisms
in an emerging standard: Written English in Jamaica. English
World-Wide 23(1). 31–58.
2009 Corpus
linguistics meets sociolinguistics: Studying educated spoken usage in Jamaica on the basis of the International Corpus of
English. In Thomas Hoffmann & Lucia Siebers (eds.), World
Englishes – Problems, properties and
prospects, 39–60. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
2011 Corpora
and the new Englishes: Using the ‘Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican’ to explore research perspectives for the
future. In Fanny Meunier, Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, & Magalie Paquot (eds.), A
taste for corpora: In honour of Sylviane
Granger, 209–236. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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). 81–122.
Meer, Philipp & Dagmar Deuber
2020 Standard
English in Trinidad: Multinormativity, translocality, and implications for the Dynamic Model and the EIF
Model. In Sarah Buschfeld & Alexander Kautzsch (eds.), Modelling
World Englishes: A joint approach towards postcolonial and non-postcolonial
varieties, 274–297. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Meyerhoff, Miriam & James Walker
2006 The
persistence of grammatical constraints: “urban sojourners” from Bequia. University of
Pennsylvania Working Papers in
Linguistics 12(2). 131–143.
Mühleisen, Susanne
2001 Is
“Bad English” dying out? A diachronic comparative study of attitudes towards Creole versus Standard English in
Trinidad. Philologie im
Netz 151. 43–78. [URL] (10 March,
2020.)
Nelson, Gerald
1996 The
design of the corpus. In Sidney Greenbaum (ed.), Comparing
English worldwide: The International Corpus of
English, 27–35. Oxford: Clarendon.
Nycz, Jennifer & Lauren Hall-Lew
2013 Best
practices in measuring vowel merger. Proceedings of Meetings on
Acoustics 201.
Patrick, Patrick. L.
1999 Urban Jamaican creole: Variation in the
mesolect (Varieties of English around the World
17). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rickford, John. R. & Elizabeth C. Traugott
1985 Symbol
of powerlessness and degeneracy, or symbol of solidarity and truth?: Paradoxical attitudes toward Pidgins and
Creoles. In Sidney Greenbaum (ed.), The
English language
today, 252–261. Oxford: Pergamon.
Rosenfelder, Ingrid
2009 Sociophonetic
variation in educated Jamaican English: An analysis of the spoken component of the
ICE-Jamaica. Freiburg: University of Freiburg PhD dissertation. [URL] (10 March,
2020.)
Shields-Brodber, Kathryn
1997 Requiem
for English in an “English-speaking” community. In E. W. Schneider (ed.), Englishes
around the
World, 57–67. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Solomon, Denis
1993 The
speech of Trinidad: A reference grammar. St Augustine: University of the West Indies School of Continuing Studies.
Thomas, Erik R. & Tyler Kendall
Wassink, Alicia Beckford
2001 Theme and variation in
Jamaican vowels. Language Variation and
Change 13(2). 135–159.
2006 A geometric
representation of spectral and temporal vowel features: Quantification of overlap in three
varieties. Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America 19(4). 2334–2350.
Wells, John. C.
1982 Accents of
English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Westphal, Michael
2017 Language
variation on Jamaican radio (Varieties of English around the World
60). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Wickham, Hadley
2016 ggplot2:
Elegant graphics for data analysis. New York: Springer.
Wilson, Guyanne
2014 The
sociolinguistics of singing: Dialect and style in classical choral singing in
Trinidad. Münster: Monsenstein und Vannerdat.
Wilson, Guyanne, Michael Westphal, Johanna Hartmann, & Dagmar Deuber
2017 The
use of question tags in different text types of Trinidadian English. World
Englishes 36(4). 726–743.
Winer, Lise
2009 Dictionary
of the English/Creole of Trinidad &
Tobago. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Winford, Donald
1978 Phonological
hypercorrection in the process of decreolization: The case of Trinidadian English. Journal of
Linguistics 14(2). 277–291.
1985 The
concept of “diglossia” in Caribbean creole situations. Language in
Society 14(3). 345–356.
1997 Re-examining
Caribbean English creole continua. World
Englishes 16(2). 233–279.
Youssef, Valerie
2004 “Is
English we speaking”: Tribagonian in the twenty-first century: Some notes and comments on the English usage of Trinidad and
Tobago. English
Today 20(4). 42–49.
2011 The
varilingual repertoire of Tobagonian speakers. In Lars Hinrichs & Joseph T. Farquharson (eds.), Variation
in the Caribbean: From creole continua to individual agency (Creole Language Library
37), 191–205. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Youssef, Valerie & Winford James
2008 The
creoles of Trinidad and Tobago: Phonology. In Edgar W. Schneider (ed.), A
handbook of varieties of English. Volume 2: The Americas and the
Caribbean, 320–338. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.