English in North America and the Caribbean

Christian Mair University of Freiburg (Germany)

English in North America and the Caribbean

Auf dem nordamerikanischen Kontinent und in der anglophonen Karibik haben sich im Laufe der letzten beiden Jahrhunderte mehrere neue Standardvarietäten des Englischen entwickelt. Der US-amerikanische Standard repräsentiert beispielhaft den vollen möglichen Entwicklungszyklus ursprünglich kolonialer Varietäten - von einer marginalen und überregional bedeutungslosen Mundart zu einem der beiden Referenzstandards mit weltweiter Ausstrahlung. Die Normierung des kanadischen Englisch sowie des karibischen Englisch ist historisch jüngeren Datums, und diese beiden emergenten Standardvarietäten unterscheiden sich vom britischen oder amerikanischen Englisch auch dadurch, dass sie sich zum Teil auch heute noch an externen (d. h. britischen oder amerikanischen) Normen orientieren und nur über eine begrenzte internationale Ausstrahlung verfügen. Der vorliegende Beitrag zeichnet die sprachhistorischen Standardisierungsprozesse in den USA, Kanada und der anglophonen Karibik in ihren wesentlichen Zügen nach und beleuchtet exemplarisch die Wechselwirkungen zwischen diesen Entwicklungen und der Herausbildung lokalisierter Traditionen literarischen Schreibens.

1. Introduction: two avenues for the colonial spread of English B y the e n d of the first quarter of the 17 th century several British colonial b e a c h h e a d s h a d b e e n established on the N o r t h A m e r i c a n mainland: J a m e s t o w n , Virginia, in 1607; C u p e r ' s B a y in N e w f o u n d l a n d , intermittently prospering f r o m 1610 to at least the 1620s; and, f r o m 1620, an increasingly successful string of mostly Puritan settlements in w h a t w a s to b e c o m e Massachusetts. A l m o s t simultaneously, the British established a f i r m foothold in the Caribbean archipelago: first in St. Kitts ( f r o m 1624) and shortly a f t e r w a r d s in B a r b a d o s ( f r o m 1627). T h e fact that in hindsight E u r o p e a n colonial settlement of the North A m e r i c a n m a i n l a n d had a m o r e p r o f o u n d l y t r a n s f o r m a t i v e e f f e c t on world history than the colonisation of the Caribbean should not prevent us f r o m recognising that in the short term C a r i b b e a n colonies were to p r o v e economically m o r e

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important to the mother country, mainly because of the rapid transition to the semi-industrial system of plantation agriculture based on African slave labour. What is important in the present connection is, of course, not the economic history of the two colonial spheres of influence but the fundamentally different models they represent for the transplanting of a European language into a new communicative ecology. 1 Thereby, the mainland represents the simple case. Increasing numbers of European settlers emigrated to North America, marginalising indigenous populations and subsequently shifting to the use of English except in Quebec, where the Francophone community has survived and prospered, and in the South and West of the United States, where there has been a strong if informal tradition of Spanish-English bilingualism ever since vast but at the time thinly populated expanses of formerly Mexican territory extending from Texas to California were annexed by the United States in the mid 19th century. The situation is very different in the "English-speaking" Caribbean, where the European settler presence soon ceased to be numerically significant. This resulted in the creolisation of the English language - the emergence of new languages which are best described as hybrid formations with a strong English influence on the vocabulary, an equally strong influence of the West African linguistic substrate on the phonology, and a grammar which integrates elements of English and West African languages with innovations that arose locally and are impressive testimony to the power of the human instinct for language even under the cruel and inhuman conditions of the slave plantation. Where the English withdrew as a colonial power, as they did, for example in Suriname, which was taken over by the Dutch in 1667, the English-based Creoles2 they left behind developed into fully viable and independent natural languages, such as Sranan, Surinam's lingua franca to the present day, and Saramaccan or Ndjuka, smaller languages which owe their survival to their use among closely knit communities of runaway slaves. Where the British continued to rule, the status of English-based Creole languages is more controversial. Professional linguists tend to point out that the obvious lexical similarities between English and the various English-lexicon 1

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The following brief summary cannot do full justice to a complex history. Readers interested in a more detailed account of the language-historical facts are encouraged to consult a number of recent authoritative and comprehensive works of reference such as, for example, the Cambridge History of the English Language, in particular vol. VI (Algeo 2001) for North America, and H o l m ' s (1994) contribution on the Caribbean to volume V of the same work. The term Creole is here used in its technical linguistic sense, to refer to hybrid languages arising f r o m a pidgin base in specific socio-demographic conditions (such as, for example, those typically obtaining in the Caribbean sugar economy). With regard to society and culture, the term has been used to characterise manifestations of the Afro-Caribbean folk culture of the Anglophone Caribbean (cf. e. g. Brathwaite 1971). This is, obviously, very different f r o m its meaning in the context of the United States, where it may refer to indigenous populations of any racial background. With its meaning thus vacillating even in one language, it is little wonder, that it proves even more difficult to pin down in cross-linguistic analysis (cf. e. g. Berg / Mair 1999).


English in North America and the

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Creoles of the region should not be over-rated and that speech forms such as, say, Guyanese or Jamaican Creole, must be regarded as independent languages on the basis of their distinct phonology and grammar. Not only are there striking similarities among the various English-lexicon Creoles in this regard, but also between them as a group and the French-, Dutch- and Portuguese-derived Creoles also spoken in the region (and historically related areas of West Africa). Whether these similarities are manifestations of a universal "creole" language type or due to a shared West African linguistic substrate is an interesting question which cannot be pursued here (but cf. Muysken / Smith 1986). However, the view that English-lexicon Creoles are separate languages from English, has never been espoused by ordinary speakers in the formerly British West Indies, who will insist - in grammar which is unlike anything possibly inherited from European varieties of English - that "is English we a taak." 3 Local speech is hence referred to as patois, dialect or even "bad English" rather than Jamaican, Guyanese etc., and even terms such as (Jamaican /Guyanese, etc.) Creole, which are being promoted through linguistic scholarship have remained marginal in popular usage. Popular perceptions about the status of the local creole languages as "some kind of English" are, of course, aided by the fact that the Creoles are hardly ever heard in their pure forms nowadays but linked to a local variety of English in an intricate continuum of gradual but ordered transitions. "Standard English" and "creole" have thus become abstract reference points, and what is actually heard as the language of the mass of the people in the Anglophone Caribbean today is a wide range of "Creolised English" representing various types of accommodation with the European model brought about by modernisation and urbanisation. It should be emphasised for clarification that local Caribbean whites (as opposed to a transient population of colonial administrators, absentee landowners or foreign businessmen) have been absorbed into the Creole-speaking communities. Whichever way the controversy about the status of English-lexicon Creoles is settled, one thing is obvious. Standard English is a partly foreign language for the majority of the population - associated with formal education, literacy, the colonial administration (formerly) or external economic interests (now). Creolised English is associated with the demographic majority (African or, in selected countries such as Guyana or Trinidad and Tobago, African and East Indian) and the rich Afro-Caribbean folk culture of the region. In such a situation, it was Standard English which - apart from a few experiments - was the default language of literary expression until well into the 20 th century.

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Is English we speaking - i. e. the "mesolectal" (or more standard-like) variant of this "basilectal" (or more creole-like) stock expression has, quite tellingly, been adopted as the title of a collection of essays devoted to matters of Caribbean culture by its author (Morris 1999).


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2. The emergence of endonormative standards of educated English usage W h e n the colonial spread of English in North America and the Caribbean started in the 17 th century, the standardisation of the written language, in particular its orthography, had already progressed very far. This meant that while educated speakers were probably a small minority in most early colonial populations, contemporary British written norms were effectively in place f r o m the very start of the colonial enterprise. T h e standardisation of spoken British English, however, post-dates the separation between the British and North-American branches of English. F r o m the latter part of the Middle English (c. 1100 to c. 1500) period the "Southern" speech of the court and L o n d o n ' s elites carried increasing prestige, but w e need to bear in mind this Southern speech was remote f r o m the contemporary British reference accent "R. P . " (for "Received Pronunciation"). For example, the loss of post-vocalic /r/ and the lowering of the vowel in the c/c/wc-class of words - probably the two most salient present-day markers of a British standard pronunciation in comparison to an American one - did not start spreading f r o m lower-class London usage until the end of the 18 th century. T h e codification of the new standard - acrimoniously but correctly summarised b y R a y m o n d Williams in the following quotation - took place even later, in the 19 th and early 20 t h centuries: These and similar changes [e. g. the move from /ae/ to la:/ or the loss of post-vocalic /r/ in 18th century London pronunciation] were spread by improved communications, but the main agency, undoubtedly, in fixing them as class speech, was the new cult of uniformity in the public schools. It was a mixture of 'correctness', natural development, and affectation, but it became as it were embalmed. It was no longer one kind of English, or even useful common dialect, but 'correct English', 'good English', 'pure English', 'standard English'. In its name, thousands of people have been capable of the vulgar insolence of telling other Englishmen that they do not know how to speak their own language. And as education was extended, mainly under middle-class direction, this attitude spread from being simply a class distinction to a point where it was possible to identify the making of these sounds with being educated, and thousands of teachers and learners, from poor homes, became ashamed of the speech of their fathers. (Williams 1991 [1981], 247) It is significant that the new British prestige accent had only a very marginal impact in the United States. T h e "broad" la:/ took hold in Eastern N e w England and persisted as a mark of prestigious speech in the Boston area until the 20 t h century; the loss of post-vocalic Irl was emulated in N e w England and the coastal South, but for the speech of the mid-Atlantic states, historically the ancestor of all the major remaining dialects of American English, the British developments remained irrelevant. British norms of educated pronunciation were, of course,



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more influential in the colonial West Indies. However, even there their influence tended to be greater in the prestige pronunciation of the educated than in the development of the vernacular. Not surprisingly, the pathways of linguistic (and cultural) decolonisation are as different in North America and the Caribbean as the demographic history of colonisation in the respective regions. In the English-speaking world American English (alongside, possibly, Australian English) is the only former colonial variety of the language which can lay claim to fully "endonormative" status, that is the standards of polite usage are defined by the local educated elites and no longer by the current or former colonial power. Since at least the end of World War I educated Americans have been aware that a different standard from their own reigns in Britain; they have recognised this difference and have even been ready to cede to the British the prestige of historical priority as the community who got the language going, but and this is the crucial point - they would have found it by and large absurd to follow British norms of usage themselves. Note, however, that this linguistic and cultural self-reliance followed political independence only with a considerable time lag. More than a century elapsed between political independence, which came to the United States in 1776/1783, and the full linguistic decolonisation described above. Shifting the focus from the explicit recognition and codification of a local standard to the community's subconscious linguistic practices, the situation we observe is of course a different one. By 1776 distinctly American ways of pronouncing the English language had emerged, and large and growing numbers of locally coined expressions were in use (and were beginning to find their way back to England in increasing numbers). With regard to grammar, particularly in educated and written usage, conventions had been standardised to such an extent by the 17th and 18th centuries that there were few differences worth noting anyway. 4 Individual instances of resistance to British linguistic norms and early expressions of American linguistic nationalism can, of course, be traced back to the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. Lexicographer and man of letters Noah Webster (1758-1843) is well known for his rash and ultimately unsubstantiated prediction in 1789 that political independence from Britain would result in the emergence of an equally independent American language in the foreseeable future: As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose 4

Interestingly, however, what little there is in the way of British and American grammatical contrasts today (such as the use of got vs. gotten, preference for -wards as against -ward in grammatical function words such as toward(s)) is relatively recent, and considerable fluctuation prevails on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 19th century.


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language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline. But if it were not so, she is at too great a distance to be our model, and to instruct us in the principles of our own tongue. [...] America, placed at a distance from those [European] nations, will feel, in a much less degree, the influence of the assimilating causes; at the same time, numerous local causes, such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts and sciences, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language in North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another: Like remote branches of a tree springing from the same stock; or rays of light, shot from the same center, and diverging from each other, in proportion to their distance from the point of separation. (Webster 1951 [1789], 20-23) Not surprisingly, Webster's subsequent work is characterised by a greater degree of realism, which is of course the very quality that has made it so influential. The title of his major contribution to the description of English, An American Dictionary of the English Language (first published in 1828), definitely strikes a more appropriate balance between two equally patent truths, namely that (1) the citizens of the politically independent United States continued to speak English in their majority and (2) their English reflected the new natural and social environment and therefore deserved to be described in its own terms. On the practical side, Webster's American Spelling Book, first published in 1783 and distributed extremely widely well into 20 th century, propagated this eminently reasonable view effectively. Of course, Webster's point of view was not shared by all of his fellow citizens, and throughout the 19th century it remains easy to find voices expressing linguistic deference to Britain especially among the educated classes - a point which, incidentally, Noah Webster himself was keenly aware of: However they [Americans] may boast of independence, and the freedom of their government, yet their opinions are not sufficiently independent; an astonishing respect for the arts and literature of their parent country, and a blind imitation of its manners, are still prevalent among the Americans. Thus an habitual respect for another country, deserved indeed and once laudable, turns their attention from their own interests, and prevents their respecting themselves. (Webster 1951 [1789], 398) Such deference disappears almost completely after the early 20 th century. A situation is reached in which, barring a few minor orthographic and grammatical conventions and rather more lexical and idiomatic peculiarities, the US shares with Britain and other English-speaking countries a common written standard, whereas it cultivates its own norms of educated pronunciation. These norms were plural ones at first, with at least three major regional accents (New England, South, Inland / Midwest) being regarded as equally acceptable, whereas the latter



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half of the twentieth century saw an increasing trend to focus on one single national (historically Midwestern) norm: Since the mid 20 th Century, however, there has been a trend among educated speakers, especially those of the younger generation, towards limitation of the use of marked regional features while speaking in formal settings. It is common for college students, for example, to speak without much influence of regional pronunciation in the classroom, but to use regionally marked pronunciations among friends in the hallway. [...] This model is quite similar to what one hears in the national broadcast media, since broadcasters have long participated in the more general trend of younger educated speakers. (Kretzschmar / Konopka in Upton / Kretzschmar / Konopka 2001, xiii-xiv)

Now for the first time in history it is possible to speak of a single national US standard of pronunciation - at least in public and formal usage. 5 The long story of the gradual but in the end complete linguistic emancipation of the American standard from the British model is worth telling not only for its own sake but also because it serves as a model for the description of developments which are currently unfolding in many parts of the former British Empire, including, of course, the Anglophone Caribbean (formerly known as the British West Indies). Historically, the English-lexicon Creoles (and the creolised varieties of English which sprang from them later) were omnipresent but denied any open sociolinguistic prestige or recognition. These were reserved for standard English. Since independence, which came to the larger territories such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Guyana in the 1960s, a more complex and differentiated picture has emerged. Creoles and creolised Englishes are still vital and thriving. Occasional efforts by language planners notwithstanding (e. g. Devonish 1986), there is little interest among the general population to see them standardised or promoted in the education system, and standard English continues to be seen as the road to economic prosperity, social status and - an important consideration in a region still labouring from the consequences of enforced overpopulation during slavery - migration to the United States or Canada. Behind this apparent continuity, however, subtle changes have occurred. For one thing, it is no longer very clear what is meant by the term "standard English" in the region today. While in colonial days "proper" English was unequivocally

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Note that more standardisation in educated speech does not result in less diversity at the vernacular level: "This paradox - the strong continued existence of regional dialects when most Americans think that dialect variation is fading - is the topic for another essay [...], but it is possible to say here that American English has developed a national dialect for the usually welleducated participants in a national marketplace for goods, services, and jobs. The well-educated share a national speech pattern within their own social stratum, unlike earlier periods in the history of American English when they shared regional dialects with working-class and lowermiddle-class speakers." (Kretzschmar 2004, 55)


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equated with the British standard, today the influence of Britain, while still felt, is declining. Conversely, American norms of usage have become enormously influential in recent decades. In addition to these two powerful foreign norms, local conventions of educated usage are forming which reveal some direct and many more indirect influences of the Creole substrate. With regard to Creoles and creolised Englishes, the traditional stigma attached to them has not been fully removed, but speakers have come to endorse their vernaculars as genuine expressions of their folk-cultural heritage to an increasing extent. In the words of Rickford and Traugott, attitudes towards Creoles and creolised English are "paradoxical", regarding them at the same time as "symbol of powerlessness and degeneracy" and as "symbol of solidarity and truth" (Rickford / Traugott 1985, 252).

3. Literary writers and the process of linguistic emancipation 3.1 The United States In the first few decades after independence American literary writers were generally not separatists - neither culturally nor linguistically. For example, the honour of being the pioneer of the "American" short story was bestowed on Washington Irving (1783-1859) by a literary critic only in the early 20 th century (Pattee 1966 [1923]). The author of "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" himself was blissfully unaware of this distinction and most likely saw himself as an author writing for a literary audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, American subjects were given a prominent place by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), but the way they were being treated presented no challenge to the cultural and linguistic sensitivities of an educated British reading public. It was not until the latter half of the 19th century that a "vernacular" tradition (Lemke 2003 and forthcoming) began to gather momentum. A new generation of "local-color" writers emphasised the use of local and non-standard linguistic features as an appropriate stylistic strategy in the presentation of subject matter set in the newly opened up regions of the United States. Thereby, access of vernacular linguistic forms to a standard English literary text was regulated tightly - in stages of increasing difficulty. Nonstandard or distinctly local expressions found their way onto the written page most easily in passages of direct speech produced by fictional characters. The next step was extended first-person narrative by vernacular speakers. The final stage - obviously not reached in these early experiments - is represented by texts displaying unselfconscious use of vernacular American vocabulary, idiom and grammar in third-person narration.



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The towering figure among a group of 19 th -century local-color writers, realists and regionalists who worked towards such linguistic and stylistic emancipation and the shaping of a distinctly American literary English is undoubtedly Mark Twain (1835-1910). His 1884 vernacular narrative The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was to be extremely influential both with regard to its general cultural message and its linguistic experimentation. In a well-known authorial preface to the book, Mark Twain emphasises the linguistic realism of the work and the richness of the linguistic resources at his disposal: In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guesswork; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. (Twain 1988 [1884], n. p. [lvii]) A reading of the work will show that this remark can be substantiated in the text and is only partly tongue-in-cheek. Note, though, that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a first-person narrative, which - as has been suggested above - marks an intermediate stage in the full emancipation of a truly American literary idiom. The latter half of the 19th and the early 20 th century were periods not generally marked by such affirmative attitudes towards an American literary language. A good example of linguistic self-hatred among major American writers of the time is represented by Henry lames (1843-1916), who made the following observations about the linguistic culture of his native land: [...] the last of American idiosyncracies, the last by which we can be conceived as "represented" in the international concert of culture, would be the pretension to a tonestandard, to our wooing comparison with that of other nations. The French, the Germans, the Italians, the English perhaps in particular, and many other people, Occidental and Oriental, I surmise, not excluding the Turks and the Chinese, have for the symbol of education, of civility, a tone-standard; we alone flourish in undisturbed and - as in the sense of so many other of our connections - in something like sublime unconsciousness of any such possibility. (lames 1905, 12) Our national use of vocal sound, in men and women alike, is slovenly - an absolutely inexpert daub of unapplied tone. (lames 1905, 25) There are, you see, sounds of a mysterious and intrinsic meanness, and there are sounds of a mysterious intrinsic frankness and sweetness; and I think the recurrent note that I have indicated - fatherrr and motherrr and otherrr, waterrr and matterrr and


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scatterrr, harrrd and barrrd, parrrt, starrrt, and (dreadful to say) arrrt (the repetition it is that drives home the ugliness), are signal specimens of what becomes of a custom of utterance out of which the principle of taste has dropped. (James 1905, 29) Let me linger only long enough to add a mention of the deplorable effect of the almost total loss, among innumerable speakers, of any approach to purity in the sound of the e. It is converted under this particularly ugly blight, into a u which is itself unaccompanied with any dignity of intention, which makes for mere ignoble thickness and turbidity. For choice, perhaps, "vurry," "Amurrica," "Philadulphia," "tullegram," "twuddy" (what becomes of "twenty" here is an ineptitude truly beyond any alliteration), and the like, descend deepest into the abyss. (James 1905, 31) The writers who eventually brought about the full emancipation from British norms of literary usage were the "modernists" coming to the fore in the 1920s and 1930s - writers such as Ernest Hemingway, acknowledging a profound debt to Mark Twain, William Faulkner or John Dos Passos. In the preface to his trilogy U. S.A. (1938), John Dos Passos (1896-1970) formulates a programmatic statement explaining his vision of what it means to be American. The vernacular, "the language of the people," emerges as the only tie that binds the whole nation together. The passage is worth quoting at length: Only the ears busy to catch the speech are not alone; the ears are caught tight, linked tight by the tendrils of phrased words, the turn of a joke, the singsong fade of a story, the gruff fall of a sentence; linking tendrils of speech twine through the city blocks, spread over pavements, grow out along broad parked avenues, speed with the trucks leaving on their long night runs over roaring highways, whisper down sandy byroads past wornout farms, joining up cities and fillingstations, roundhouses, steamboats, planes groping along airways; words call out on mountain pastures, drift slow down rivers widening to the sea and the hushed beaches. (Dos Passos 1938, vi) U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres [sic], a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dogeared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world's greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts, U. S. A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people. (Dos Passos 1938, vii) The novels making up the trilogy - The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen-Nineteen (1932) and The Big Money (1936) - display a broad range of techniques, from collage and montage to focalised narrative, which allows the author to experiment



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with the full range of strategies for the representation of vernacular linguistic features in literary texts. A second wave of vernacularisation followed after World War II, when after the first experiments of the 1920s and 1930s, several ethnic writing traditions consolidated: African-American literature, Jewish-American literature, increasingly also Mexican-American and Asian-American writing have profited from the linguistic heritage of the respective communities and developed their own, sometimes highly successful variants of the American vernacular literary style. As Toni Morrison's achievement is the subject of a separate discussion in the present volume, ways of adapting and appropriating the African-American linguistic heritage in literature will be illustrated here by means of a brief passage from John Edgar Wideman's Homewood trilogy, which at one and the same time is an artistically successful contemporary extension of a long literary tradition and signals a distinctly and unmistakably American stylistic flavour for a contemporary international readership. The text stages the narrative voice of an elderly female vernacular speaker, who recounts her version of the history of Pittsburgh's Homewood section: They some the first settle here in Homewood. On Hamilton Avenue where Albion comes in. Trolley cars used to be on Hamilton but Charlie and Sybela Owens come here long before that. Most the city still be what you call North Side now. Old Allegheny then. Wasn't but a few families this side the river and hardly none at all out this way when Grandmother Owens come. Brought two children from slavery and had eighteen more that lived after they got here. Most born up on Bruston Hill after the other white men let Charlie know they didn't want one of their kind living with no black woman so Charlie he up and moved. Way up on Bruston Hill where nobody round trying to mind his business. Stead of killing them busybodies he took Grandmother Owens up there and that's the start of Homewood. Children and grandchildren coming down off that hill and settling. Then other Negroes and every other kind of people moving here because life was good and everybody welcome. They say the land Charlie owned on Hamilton was fixed. After he left, nothing grow or prosper there. They say Grandmother Owens cursed it and Charlie warned all them white folks not to touch his land. He said he would go to keep peace but nobody better not set a foot on the land he left behind. That spiteful piece of property been the downfall of so many I done forgot half the troubles come to people try to live there [...] And Mother Bess said Preach. Said Tell the truth. (Wideman 1992, 165f.)

3.2

Canada

The course of evolution which Canadian English was going to take was decisively shaped by an exodus of "Loyalist" settlers from the newly independent United States in the late 18th century, and in spite of Canada's remaining part of the British Empire and, subsequently, the Commonwealth of Nations, Canadian


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English is a solidly North American dialect, sharing with the US standard such features as the presence of post-vocalic Irl, the "broad" a and the "flapping" of intervocalic IM. It takes fairly delicate phonetic analysis to detect Canadian features of pronunciation (such as "Canadian Raising" 6 ). There has been and still remains some British influence in spelling, but British conventions have left few marks on Canadian vocabulary, grammar and idiom. Canada's history of gradual and smooth political emancipation from Britain ensured that voices advocating cultural and linguistic self-reliance remained less strident than the more extreme spectrum of comparable U. S. ones. In addition, Canadian nationalism obviously found itself up against two "others" - the transatlantic European one on the one hand and the powerful neighbour to the South on the other, which latterly has been perceived to be the bigger threat. What this has meant for Canadian literature in English has been explored in Margaret Atwood's classic critical study Survival (1972). Numerous passages from Atwood's own works can be cited to show that the topic has not only appealed to her at the level of literary interpretation and historiography but also permeates her creative writing. Compare, for example, the following passage from her novel Surfacing, which encapsulates within the space of a few paragraphs several faultlines of the complex ethnolinguistic battles of the region: The woman looks at me, inquisitive but not smiling, and the two men still in Elvis Presley haircuts, duck's ass at the back and greased pompadours curving out over their foreheads, stop talking and look at me; they keep their elbows on the counter. I hesitate: maybe the tradition has changed, maybe they no longer speak English. "Avez-vous du viande hache?" I ask her, blushing because of my accent. She grins and then the two men grin also, not at me but at each other. I see I've made a mistake, I should have pretended to be an American. "Amburger, oh yes we have lots. How much?" she asks, adding the final Η carelessly to show she can if she feels like it. This is border country. "A pound, no two pounds," I say, blushing even more because I've been so easily discovered, they're making fun of me and I have no way of letting them know I share the joke. Also I agree with them, if you live in a place you should speak the language. But this isn't where I lived. She hacks with a cleaver at a cube of frozen meat, weighs it. "Doo leevers," she says, mimicking my school accent. (Atwood 1973 [1972], 27f.)

The liberal Anglo-Canadian narrator is caught in a double bind. In full sympathy with French Canadians' quest for linguistic and cultural rights, she wants to accommodate, by speaking her - atrocious - French. The French shop assistant

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Which manifests itself in a more central first element of the diphthongs /ai/ and /ao/ when they occur before voiceless consonants, so that the diphthongs pronounced in rice and bout would sound different from the ones in rise and loud. This feature is not a perfect discriminator of Canadian English as it is variably used within Canada, and used by some elsewhere.



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proves the more expert linguist, commanding all the options, from not choosing to speak English via translating the narrator's grammatically incorrect viande hache into French-accented 'amburger to speaking plain Canadian English. The obvious way out - to pretend that she is from the United States (and hence not supposed to speak a foreign language) - is an choice foreclosed to a Canadian looking for her roots. 3.3 T h e Caribbean If the story of Canadian linguistic and cultural emancipation from Britain presents a less agonistic and strident version than that of the United States, the Caribbean takes us to the other extreme. The history of the Caribbean has been a painful one for most of the time, characterised by fragmentation, discontinuity, disruption and destruction of traditions which has very often led to bizarre and unexpected types of forced cultural contact. Sometimes, this suffering released creative energies, which manifested themselves in various types of syncretism, the hybridisation and fusion of cultures. This double nature of the Caribbean experience is well described by the American anthropologist James Clifford: [Caribbean history] is a history of degradation, mimicry, violence, and blocked possibilities. It is also rebellious, syncretic, and creative. (Clifford 1988, 15)

"Rebellious, syncretic, and creative" would seem to be apt adjectives to describe the creole languages of the region, which are, of course, an essential part of its Afro-Caribbean folk-cultural heritage. However, history equally explains why these very Creoles were held in a degree of contempt by outsiders and to some extent even by their own speakers that goes far beyond the condescension the educated elites of Britain meted out to colonial settler varieties.7 It is thus not an exaggeration to say that the language issue has been at the very heart of English-language writing from the Caribbean from the very start. As for elite writing - that is literary works produced for educated readers locally and internationally and published through the usual channels - the Afro-Caribbean linguistic heritage was admitted into the texts in a long and gradual process, starting with careful and highly stylised experiments in the first half of the 20th century and broadening into a more daring and variegated current in the memorable creative flowering that marked the final years of the colonial period in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Nobel prizes awarded to Derek Walcott in 1992 7

Note that this condescension is evident primarily in later stages of development, for example when the colonial population shows signs of restiveness and, as in the case of the United States, finally secedes from the mother country. Earlier comments often tend to praise settler communities and their children for preserving their linguistic heritage in the wilderness.


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and to V. S. Naipaul in 2001 bear witness to the fact that from small beginnings West Indian writing in English has now developed a truly global reach. Fragmentation is a cultural hallmark of the postcolonial Caribbean. The major island nations - Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Jamaica share the common heritage of neo-African New World slavery-based plantation societies to a greater or lesser extent, but apart from that each has a unique linguistic, social, cultural, political and demographic history. In the colonial period it was only the European cultural heritage of the region which was valued. Caribbean societies tended to be described negatively, in terms of their alleged cultural deficits, because the Afro-Caribbean and Creole culture remained marginalised. In the British West Indies, a pioneer in the recovery of the AfroCaribbean and Creole heritage was Barbadian historian, writer and philosopher Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Brathwaite 1971). To him we owe one of the profoundest philosophical meditations on what an appropriate literary idiom for the Caribbean might look like: History of the Voice: the Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984). "Nation language" was defined vaguely but very appropriately, to cover both Creole and Creolised English put to literary use and standard English adapted to Caribbean context. Today, the status and function of Creoles and Creolised English in literary writing have become standard topics of academic investigation, with a recent burst of interesting work at the intersection of linguistics and literary and cultural studies (cf. e.g. Lalla 2005; Mühleisen 2002, 2005). Alongside this written tradition of elite writing, there is another, more popular and orally based current of creativity. Even before World War II, at a time when Creoles and creolised English had not yet become functional in the postcolonial struggle for self-definition and identity and were held out of the public domain, Jamaicans of all social backgrounds enjoyed listening to Louise Bennett's satirical poetry. Behind the genial facade of the folk poet there was a sophisticated commentator of contemporary social trends. Thirty years later, in the mid 1970s, one current of this local vernacular tradition erupted on the international pop-cultural scene in the wake of reggae musician Bob Marley's phenomenal success as a performer and an ideologue of the African diaspora.8 A strong Caribbean diaspora in Britain, the US and Canada has since added focal points from which a widening current of linguistic and cultural influence has emanated. Today, artists and writers from the region generally fall into three groups, depending on the strategies that they have developed to cope with its complex cultural heritage. 8

Previously, international audiences had been exposed to watered-down versions of Caribbean calypso, for example by performers such as Harry Belafonte, but in comparison to the impact of reggae these were timid beginnings.



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3.3.1 The globalisation of the vernacular The pioneer in this line is probably Bob Marley, icon of reggae and the first truly global superstar from the Third World. In the wake of reggae, Jamaican dancehall, dub poetry and other Caribbean styles got a global hearing. If one recalls that many of the pioneers of US rap and hip-hop, such as, for example, Grandmaster Flash, were of Caribbean ancestry, one might also include these African-American styles from the US in this list. The globalisation of aspects of Afro-Caribbean folk culture, of marginalised religions such as Rastafarianism, and - last but not least - of Caribbean Creole languages has been strikingly successful - to the extent that dreadlocks have become one standard hairstyle option for German adolescents and Jamaican Creole elements have entered white British youngsters' adolescent slang (cf. Rampton 1995). This success has come at a price, however. Much of the cultural content has been diluted along the way, and the vernacular poetry produced by reggae artists has not been considered prizeworthy by the Nobel committee. If reggae and its successor traditions provide the necessary background for an understanding of this tradition of vernacular Caribbean performance poetry, a survey of the development of Caribbean literary idioms must place the major emphasis on work which has appeared in print. Prominent dub poets who have sometimes taken this route to reach their audiences include Mikey Smith, Mutabaruka and - based in the Black British community - Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah. 9 Michael ('Mikey') Smith (1954-1983) is the author of "Me cyaan believe it," an early classic of the genre. W e have recordings of powerful performances 10 and there is a printed version which shows that at least part of the effect survives the transfer into the written medium: ME CYAAN BELIEVE IT Me seh me cyaan believe it me seh me cyaan believe it Room dem a rent me apply widin but as me go een cockroach rat an scorpion also come een Waan good nose haffi run 9

10

Readers interested in further information on the history of the Afro-Caribbean performance tradition and its place in global youth culture are referred to works such as Bader 1988, Cooper 1995, Dorsey 2000 or Habekost 1993. For example on the 1982 LP Mi Cyaan Believe It - London: Island Records IL PS 9717.


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but me naw go siddung pon high wall like Humpty Dumpty me a face me reality One little bwoy come blow im horn an me look pon im wid scorn an me realize how me five bwoy-picni was a victim of de trick dem call partisan politricks an me ban me belly an me bawl an me ban me belly an me bawl Lawd me cyaan believe it me seh me cyaan believe it

[...] Lawd me see some blackbud livin inna one buildin but no rent no pay so dem cyaan stay Lawd de oppress an de dispossess cyaan get no res What nex? Teck a trip from Kingston to Jamaica Teck twelve from a dozen an me see me mumma in heaven Madhouse! Madhouse! Me seh me cyaan believe it me seh me cyaan believe it Yuh believe it? How yuh fi believe it when yuh laugh an yuh blind yuh eye to it? But me know yuh believe it Lawwwwwwwwd me know yuh believe it (Smith 1986, 13-15)



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3.3.2 The rejection of the vernacular: V. S. Naipaul The recent history of the Caribbean has been characterised by emigration, the mass emigration of manual labourers and the emigration of highly educated individuals who felt that the region did not afford them the opportunity to realise their full potential. One of these literary emigres is Vidiadhar Surajprasad [V. S.]. Naipaul. In his work, Naipaul emphasises the negative aspects of the Caribbean's colonial heritage. He has not only emigrated physically, like many other Caribbean writers, but also intellectually and emotionally. In particular, he refuses to be part of a third-world or post-colonial movement of cultural liberation and emancipation. In his view, slavery casts a long shadow, draining the human spirit even today and stifling creativity: So many things in these West Indian territories, I now began to see, speak of slavery. There is slavery in the vegetation. In the sugarcane brought by Columbus on that second voyage when, to Queen Isabella's fury, he proposed the enslavement of the Amerindians. In the breadfruit, cheap slave food, three hundred trees of which were taken to St. Vincent by Captain Bligh in 1793 and sold for a thousand pounds four years after a similar venture had been frustrated by the Bounty mutiny. And just as in the barren British Guiana savannah lands a clump of cashew trees marks the site of an Amerindian village, so in lamaica a clump of star-apple trees marks the site of a slave provision ground. (Trinidad, with only forty years of slavery, has proportionately far fewer star-apple trees than lamaica.) There is slavery in the food, in the saltfish still beloved by the islanders. Slavery in the absence of family life, in the laughter in the cinema films of German concentration camps, the fondness for terms of racial abuse, in the physical brutality of strong to weak. Nowhere in the world are children beaten as savagely as in the West Indies. (Naipaul 1962, 230f.)

It is against observations such as these that we have to judge Naipaul's oftenquoted verdict: History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies. (Naipaul 1962, 29)

Rejecting one's past in this way comes at a price. Naipaul is a very controversial figure in his native Trinidad. On the other hand, it has not prevented him being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. 3.3.3 The fusion of the vernacular and the elite traditions in literature: Derek Walcott Derek Walcott, the poet and dramatist from St. Lucia, is part of a wave of literary creativity that emanated from the Caribbean in the latter half of the 20th century. Other Anglophone writers of international standing include Edward Brathwaite from


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Barbados, Trinidad-born Samuel Selvon (1923-1994), and of course - in spite of his antagonistic stance towards his native region - V. S. Naipaul. The wave is by no means confined to the Anglophone Caribbean. It is also an issue in the works of Maryse Conde, Aime Cesaire or Patrick Chamoiseau (see Seiler and Poll in this volume), writers from the French Antilles, and one should not forget that one of the roots of Latin American "magical realism" is in the pockets of Creole culture on the Latin American mainland, for example in Colombia's Atlantic seaboard, the region around Aracataca, the birthplace of another Nobel Laureate, Gabriel Garcia Märquez. Derek Walcott's project is to celebrate the Afro-Caribbean folk-heritage of the Caribbean by showing how it might be integrated into world-literature and thus reconciling the native and colonial traditions. Where Naipaul sees cultural disaster, he celebrates survival: Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accepting and secreting fragments of an old epic vocabulary from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral and ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture [...]. The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They survived the Middle Passage and the Fatel Rozack, the ship that carried the first indentured Indians from Madras to the canefields [...], that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic lew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle. And here they are all, in a single Caribbean city, Port of Spain, the sum of history, Froude's 'non-people.' A downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven. Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven. (Walcott 1992, 28) This is the visible poetry of the Antilles, then. Survival. (Walcott 1992, 30)

In his poetry, Walcott shows himself to be a master in the handling of the "double voice." Most of his works can be read against the "global" background of the British and European literary canon, and such readings make sense. But his works also resonate with allusions to the "local" Afro-Caribbean folk-heritage. A full appreciation of his work requires the reader to be alert and sensitive to both dimensions. Thus the Creole cultural influence on the work goes far beyond the modest overt traces of the Creole dialect in Walcott's literary idiom. In fact, he defines himself as the literary voice of a people that have been creolised - in language, religion, music and their arts. I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education,



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I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I ' m nobody, or I ' m a nation. (from: "The Schooner 'Flight'" in: Walcott 1986, 346)

Note that this text is at the same time distinctly local in tone and remains easily intelligible to English-speaking readers everywhere in the world. The absence of the third-person singular inflection on the verb love, a grammatical creolism, does not constitute a very obvious and obtrusive code-switch, and the use of the taboo epithet nigger by the lyrical persona is an example of a universal communicative strategy conscious re-appropriation of terms of abuse by a marginalised group to foster ingroup solidarity. On the other hand, it deserves to be pointed out that the reader unaware with the meaning and use of the expression red nigger in the Caribbean does lose some important insight. The phrase is labelled as "anti-formal and derogatory" and defined as follows in Allsopp's Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage: A person of African descent with a yellowish skin and very tough hair, often one whose parents are both the immediate offspring of black and white parents. And what make her precious so? That fading yellow red-nigger skin? Cause she ain't no spring chicken again [...] The term is used as a strong insult usufally] by dark-skinned Black people. (Allsopp 1996, 470)

In his work, Derek Walcott has steered clear of two dangers confronting the postcolonial literary writer. First, he has not allowed the awesome literary heritage of Europe to intimidate him to the point that he would be reduced to unoriginal imitation. But neither has he thrown it overboard and turned into a literary activist sacrificing universal appeal to local concerns. He is a poet from the Caribbean, but not a folklorist. He writes in English rather than in the Creole dialect, but both in its form and its rhetoric the English he uses is unmistakable. In his work he has, in the words of the chairman of the Nobel Selection Committee, given a literary voice to the Caribbean which can be heard - and understood - everywhere.

4. Conclusion The history of English in North America and the Caribbean is part of a process in which a European language has been globalised and become pluricentric. The fact that there are now several co-existing standards of English and that several more are emerging should not be interpreted as an easy "democracy of voices" that has superseded the oppressive linguistic regime of the colonial period. The fact that there are now many standards does not mean that they are all equally prestigious or have an equal reach. The present paper provides ample illustration of this truth


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in describing three very different ex-colonial varieties of English: one, American English, which has become the globally dominant standard, and two others, namely Canadian English and Caribbean English, which are still emerging, have a more restricted geographical reach and are still being shaped by often conflicting pressures exerted by British, American and local forces. If there is one over-arching generalisation emerging from the study of the role of literary writers in these processes, it is that successful literary writing in such situations thrives not when writers indulge in sterile attempts to emulate a European literary canon, but when they become sensitive to the sociolinguistic richness of their community and use this resource in order to fashion a new and truly American literary language.

5. References Algeo, John (ed.) (2001): The Cambridge history of the English language. Vol. 6: English in North America. Cambridge: CUP. Allsopp, Richard (1996): Dictionary of Caribbean English usage. Oxford: OUP. Atwood, Margaret (1972): Survival: a thematic guide to Canadian literature. Toronto: Anansi. Atwood, Margaret (1973 [1972]): Surfacing. Don Mills. Ontario: PaperJacks. Bader, Stasa (1988): Worte wie Feuer: Dance Hall-Dichtung in Jamaika und England. Neustadt: Schwinn. Berg, Walter B r u n o / M a i r , Christian (1999): "Kreol!" Sprachliche und kulturelle Grenzgänge in Argentinien und in der Karibik. In: Fludernik, Monika / Gehrke, Hans-Joachim (eds.): Grenzgänger zwischen Kulturen. Identitäten und Alteritäten 1. Würzburg: Ergon, 447^160. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau (1971): The development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820. Oxford: Clarendon. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau (1984): History of the voice: development of nation language in Anglophone Caribbean poetry. London: New Beacon Books. Clifford, James (1988): The Predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cooper, Carolyn (1995): Noises in the blood: orality, gender and the 'vulgar' body of Jamaican popular culture. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. Devonish, Hubert (1986): Language and liberation: Creole language politics in the Caribbean. London: Karia. Dorsey, Brian (2000): Spirituality, sensuality, literality: blues, jazz, and rap as music and poetry. Wien: Braumüller. Dos Passos, John (1938): U. S. Α. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Habekost, Christian (1993): Verbal riddim: the politics and aesthetics of African-Caribbean dub poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Holm, John A. (1994): English in the Caribbean. In: Burchfield, Robert (ed.): The Cambridge history of the English language. Vol. V: English in Britain and overseas. Cambridge: CUP, 328-381. James, Henry (1905): The Question of Our Speech / The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures. Boston, MA, and New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. Krapp, George Philip (1969 [1919]): The pronunciation of standard English in America. New York: AMS Reprints. Kretzschmar, William A. (2004): Regional dialects. In: Finegan, Edward A. / Rickford, John R. (eds.): Language in the USA: Themes for the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 39-57.



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Lalla, Barbara (2005): Creole and respec' in the development of Jamaican literary discourse. In: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Studies 20, 53-84. Lemke, Sieglinde (2003): Theories of American culture in the name of the vernacular. In: REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 19, 155-174. Lemke, Sieglinde (forthcoming): The Enigma of the Vernacular: The Vernacular Tradition in American Literature Exemplified by Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and So Far From God. Morris, Mervyn (1999): Is English we speaking and other essays. Kingston: Ian Randle. Mühleisen, Susanne (2002): Creole discourse: exploring prestige formation and change across Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Mühleisen, Susanne (2005): Introduction: Creole languages in Creole literatures - status and standardization. In: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Studies 20, 1-14. Muysken, Pieter / Smith, Norval (eds.) (1986): Substrata versus universals in Creole genesis. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Naipaul, V[idiadhar] S[urajprasad] (1962): The Middle Passage. London: Deutsch. Pattee, Fred Lewis (1966 [1923]): The development of the American short story: an historical survey. New York: Biblo & Tannen. Rampton, Ben (1995): Crossing: language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman. Rickford, John R. / Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1985): Symbol of powerlessness and degeneracy, or symbol of solidarity and truth? Paradoxical attitudes towards pidgins and Creoles. In: Greenbaum, Sidney (ed.): The English language today. Oxford: Pergamon, 252-261. Smith, Michael (1986): It a come: poems by Michael Smith, ed. Mervyn Morris. London: Race Today. Twain, Mark (1988 [1884]): The works of Mark Twain. Vol. 8: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Upton, Clive / Kretzschmar, William A. / Konopka, Rafal (2001): The Oxford dictionary of pronunciation for current English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walcott, Derek (1986): Collected poems 1948-1984. London: Faber & Faber. Walcott, Derek (1993): The Antilles: fragments of epic memory [The Nobel Lecture]. In: New Republic 28 Dec. 1992, 2832. Book publication 1993: New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Webster, Noah (1951 [1789]: Dissertations on the English language. Gainesville, FL: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints. Wideman, John Edgar (1992): The Homewood books. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh UP. Williams, Raymond (1981): The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus.

