Article published in:
Grammatical Change in English World-Wide
Edited by Peter Collins
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 67] 2015
► pp. 389–410

American influence on written Caribbean English

A diachronic analysis of newspaper reportage in the Bahamas and in Trinidad and Tobago

| University of Munich
| University of Munster
This paper presents a diachronic analysis of press news reports in the Bahamas and in Trinidad and Tobago with a view to shedding light on the question of Americanisation. We analyse four corpora, one from the 1960s and one contemporary from each country. The following features are studied: (1) contractions of negatives and verb forms, (2) the be-passive, (3) relative that vs. which, and (4) pseudotitles. Our results show that Americanisation is a factor to be reckoned with in Caribbean English, as are colloquialisation and densification; at the same time, Caribbean journalistic writing definitely retains a distinct flavour of formality which distinguishes it from newspaper language not just in the US but also in Britain. Keywords: Caribbean; Americanisation; newspapers; Bahamas; Trinidad and Tobago
Published online: 24 February 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.67.16hac
References
Awonusi, Victor
1994 The Americanization of Nigerian English. World Englishes 13: 75–82. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul
2009 The BE06 corpus of British English and recent language change. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14: 312–337. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bayard, Donn
1989 Me say that? No way! The social correlates of American lexical diffusion in NZE. Te Reo 32: 17–60.Google Scholar
Bell, Allan
1988 The British base and the American connection in New Zealand media English. American Speech 63: 326–344. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas
2003 Compressed noun-phrase structures in newspaper discourse: The competing demands of popularization vs. economy. In New Media Language, Jean Aitchison & Diana M. Lewis (eds), 169–181. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Bohmann, Axel & Schultz, Patrick
2011 Sacred that and wicked which: Prescriptivism and change in the use of English relativizers. Texas Linguistics Forum http://​studentorgs​.utexas​.edu​/salsa​/proceedings​/2011​/09TLF54​-BohmannSchultz​.pdf (6 March 2014).Google Scholar
Bruckmaier, Elisabeth & Hackert, Stephanie
2011 Bahamian standard English: A first approach. English World-Wide 32: 174–205. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Craton, Michael & Saunders, Gail
1992 Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People, Vol. 1: From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Crystal, David
2003 English as a Global Language, 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Deuber, Dagmar & Leung, Glenda-Alicia
2013 Investigating attitudes towards an emerging standard of English: Evaluations of newscasters’ accents in Trinidad. Multilingua 32: 289–319. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Deuber, Dagmar & Hackert, Stephanie
2013 American influence across Caribbean standard Englishes. Paper presented at the 19th International Congress of Linguists, Geneva.
Fairclough, Norman
1992 Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Hackert, Stephanie
Forthcoming. Pseudotitles in Bahamian English: A case of Americanization? Journal of English Linguistics. The paper is scheduled to appear in 2015.
Hackert, Stephanie & Huber, Magnus
2007 Gullah in the diaspora: Historical and linguistic evidence from the Bahamas. Diachronica 24: 279‑325. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hänsel, Eva Canan & Deuber, Dagmar
2013 Globalization, postcolonial Englishes, and the English language press in Kenya, Singapore, and Trinidad and Tobago. World Englishes 32: 338–357. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey
2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne
2009 Colonial lag, colonial innovation or simply language change? In One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between British and American English, Günter Rohdenburg & Julia Schlüter (eds), 13–37. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Leech, Geoffrey
2012 “Small is beautiful”. On the value of standard reference corpora for observing recent grammatical change. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds), 175–188. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Igboanusi, Herbert
2003 Americanisms in Nigerian English. World Englishes 22: 599–604. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Irvine, Alison
2004 A good command of the English language: Phonological variation in the Jamaican acrolect. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 19: 41–76. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas
2009 Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leek, Robert H. & Bayard, Donn
1995 Yankisms in Kiwiland, from zed to zee: American lexical and pronunciation incursions in Dunedin (1984-1985) and Auckland (1990). Te Reo 38: 105–125.Google Scholar
Mair, Christian
1992 Problems in the compilation of a corpus of standard Caribbean English: A pilot study. In New Directions in English Language Corpora: Methodology, Results, Software Developments, Gerhard Leitner (ed.), 75–96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2002 Creolisms in an emerging standard: Written English in Jamaica. English World-Wide 23: 31–58. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2006 Twentieth-Century English. History, Variation and Standardization. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009 Corpus linguistics meets sociolinguistics: Studying educated spoken usage in Jamaica on the basis of the International Corpus of English. In World Englishes: Problems, Properties and Prospects [Varieties of English around the World G40], Lucia Siebers & Thomas Hoffmann (eds), 39–60. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McArthur, Tom
2002 The Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Meyer, Charles
1992 Apposition in Contemporary English. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2002 Pseudo-titles in the press genre of various components of the International Corpus of English. In Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 9], Randi Reppen, Susan M. Fitzmaurice & Douglas Biber (eds), 147–166. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam
1993 Lexical shift in working class New Zealand English: Variation in the use of lexical pairs. English World-Wide 14: 231–248. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Modiano, Marko
1996 The Americanization of Euro-English. World Englishes 15: 207–215. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Olofsson, Arne
1981 Relative Junctions in Written American English. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.Google Scholar
Peters, Pam
2001 Varietal effects: The influence of American English on Australian and British English. In Who’s Centric Now? The Present State of Post-Colonial Englishes, Bruce Moore (ed.), 297–309. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey K
2009 50 years of stupid grammar advice. The Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (32): B15. http://​chronicle​.com​/article​/50​-Years​-of​-Stupid​-Grammar​/25497) (6 March 2014).Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rydén, Mats
1975 Noun-name collocations in British English newspaper language. Studia Neophilologica 67: 14–39. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sand, Andrea
1999 Linguistic Variation in Jamaica. A Corpus‑based Study of Radio and Newspaper Usage. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W
2006 English in North America. In The Handbook of World Englishes, Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru & Cecil L. Nelson (eds), 58–73. Oxford: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sedlatschek, Andreas
2009 Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change [Varieties of English around the World G38]. Amsterdam: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Nicholas & Leech, Geoffrey
2013 Verb structures in twentieth-century British English. In The Verb Phrase in English. Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora, Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech & Sean Wallis (eds), 68–98. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Svartvik, Jan & Leech, Geoffrey
2006 English: One Tongue, Many Voices. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Brian
1989 “American, British and other foreign influences on AusE. In Australian English: The Language of a New Society, Peter Collins & David Blair (eds), 225–254. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.Google Scholar
Trüb, Regina
2008 American English Impact on South African English: An Empirical Analysis of its Manifestations and Attitudes towards it. PhD dissertation, University of Regensburg.
Vine, Bernadette
1999 Americanisms in the New Zealand English lexicon. World Englishes 18: 13–22. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Winer, Lise
1993 Trinidad and Tobago [Varieties of English around the World T6]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Winford, Donald
2003 An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 7 other publications

No author info given
2021.  In Nominal and Pronominal Address in Jamaica and Trinidad [Topics in Address Research, 3], Crossref logo
Gilquin, Gaëtanelle
2018.  In Modeling World Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G61], ► pp. 187 ff. Crossref logo
Hackert, Stephanie
2016.  In World Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G57], ► pp. 85 ff. Crossref logo
Hackert, Stephanie & Diana Wengler
2022. Recent Grammatical Change in Postcolonial Englishes: A Real-time Study of Genitive Variation in Caribbean and Indian News Writing. Journal of English Linguistics 50:1 ► pp. 3 ff. Crossref logo
Loureiro-Porto, Lucía
2020. (Un)democratic Epicene Pronouns in Asian Englishes: A Register Approach. Journal of English Linguistics 48:3 ► pp. 282 ff. Crossref logo
Oenbring, Raymond & Matthias Klumm
2022. The trappings of order. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 43:1 ► pp. 66 ff. Crossref logo
Wilson, Guyanne
2020. Variability and acceptability in Trinidadian English. World Englishes 39:3 ► pp. 462 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 may 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.