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focused instead on the increase in loans from French, a perhaps inevitable consequence of the restoration of a king who had spent many years of exile in France. In an interesting postscript, many of the terms which were derided as inkhornisms during this period have in fact survived into modern usage (see Baugh and Cable, 2002: 217–51).
5.5 Contact and Change: English in Barbados
Until the late 1500s, English ‘had no very important role as a foreign or second language anywhere, and was spoken as a native language in a very small area of the globe indeed’ (Trudgill, 2002: 29). The technical and navigational advances of the seventeenth century, however, would initiate the language’s journey to its modern, global status. With the 1600 chartering of the East India Company, the introduction of English to India began. In the western hemisphere, colonization and settlement took English to Ireland (officially conquered in 1601) and further afield to what is now America, neighbouring isles such as Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and as far up the North American coast as Newfoundland. Plantation settlements also took English into the Caribbean: Anguilla, Antigua, Barbuda, Barbados, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, the American Virgin Islands and mainland Guyana and Belize were all claimed and settled in the 1600s. So too were areas of Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia.
As noted earlier in this chapter, histories of English have tended to concentrate on the standardization of the language in the modern period, consequently paying scant attention to the beginnings of its global life. This section attempts a measure of redress in considering English in the context of one of the earliest landing points for English in the New World, Barbados. We begin with a brief outline of the island’s relevant social history.
Barbados, claimed in 1627, was one of the first islands to be settled by England as a permanent, crop-producing colony. Its first settlers, ‘3 score of Christaynes and forty slaves of Negeres and indeynes’ (from a letter of 1627; in Holm, 1989: 446), established the island’s first commercial crops of tobacco and cotton. More English settlers soon followed: some moderately wealthy yeomen who had bought or leased land for tobacco plantations, but most indentured workers5 drawn from the poorer communities of various English counties including East Anglia, Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire (Watts, 1987: 149–50). The reliance on indentureship continued throughout the 1630s – a period in which the number of plantations (and therefore of English landowners) increased steadily. While African and indigenous Carib and Arawak slaves were retained, they generally remained a minority during Barbados’ tobacco-producing years (ibid.: 150–1). Thus, an official population count in 1645 estimated that the island was home to about 24,000 inhabitants, ‘among whom were 11,200 landowners, 18,300 white men capable of bearing firearms, and 5,680 slaves, the latter being predominantly African but also including a handful of Arawak and Carib men and women’ (Scott, c. 1667; quoted in Watts, 1987: 151).
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In the late 1640s to the mid-1650s, the population underwent further increase, mainly as a result of the English Civil War and also because of a change in economic policy. Between 1649 and 1655, approximately 12,000 prisoners-of-war from Cromwell’s campaigns in Ireland and Scotland were taken to the island and forced into indentureship. In this, they were joined by others who had been pressganged (in the language of the time, barbadosed), as well as by petty criminals, prostitutes and those whose sentences of death or life imprisonment had been commuted to transportation. Needless to say, these unwilling indentees created, in the eyes of contemporary observers, an unreliable and unimpressive workforce. Whistler (1654), for example, griped that while the colony was ‘one of the richest spotes of ground in the wordell’ it was also ‘the dunghill wharon England doth cast forth its rubidge’ (in Watts, 1987: 200).
Between the 1640s and the mid-1650s, the island saw a widespread changeover to sugar-cane cultivation and sugar production – a change that was made more profitable by the importation of slave labour (a cheaper and more efficient alternative to indentureship). Watts (ibid.: 218) points out that population data for slaves prior to about 1650 is lacking, incomplete or unreliable. It is known, however, that the increase after this period was dramatic
– for example, about 6,000 slaves worked on estates in 1650, but this figure had risen to about 20,000 in 1653. Contemporary data suggests that from about 1655, the slave population began to outnumber the White and by the mid1660s, ‘black slaves had become numerically dominant over whites by an approximate factor of three to two, women and children being included in both cases’ (ibid.: 218). This was also helped by the fact that after 1660 and the restoration of the monarchy, the indentureship scheme underwent a further decline in numbers as the supply of prisoners-of-war dried up and the more stable political and economic conditions in England seduced once potentially willing participants.
The establishment of big sugar plantations forced many small landowners into selling their holdings. Along with ex-indentured workers who could no longer afford to buy land at the end of their contracts, and labourers who could not find work in a slave economy, they began a process of White migration out of Barbados in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Many chose to emigrate to the new English colonies in Suriname, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands. Indeed, Holm (1989: 447) argues that this phase of population movement was significant enough to have ‘played a central role in the dispersal of British regional speech in the New World’.
Eighteenth-century Barbados continued to be a population dispersal point in the Caribbean, mainly for slaves brought in from Africa. Sugar production continued its lucrative run in the nineteenth century (slavery was abolished in 1834), and the island’s continuing prosperity (conducive to high birth rates and consequently, population increase) led to another significant wave of emigration to Caribbean anglophone territories in the 1830s. The island remained a British colony until 1966, and a census carried out some 40 years later showed a reversal of its earliest population statistics: in 2000, the population comprised 80 per cent Black, 4 per cent White and 16 per cent Other.
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It is clear that the colonization of Barbados took place in the context of contact – a phenomenon which, as we have seen in Chapters 3 and 4, can have different linguistic consequences according to its nature. In the case of modern Barbados, English was made the official language of the island but the majority of locals, if not all, also speak Bajan or, as it is sometimes known, Barbadian (Creole) English. The linguistic status of Bajan has been a matter of debate, primarily for two reasons. First, modern Bajan does not conform to an expected ‘creole template’ (see, for example, Whinnom’s list in Chapter 4, Section 4.5) and instead has been analysed as closer in structure to varieties of English. Second, some of the patterns of settlement in the island – specifically long periods of indentureship and small populations living in close proximity – do not accord with a traditional model of creolization in which contact between two socio-politically and numerically unequal groups is necessary, hostile and (sometimes violently) characterized by socio-political oppression and social distance from the outset (as in the context of slave plantations). In this setting, it has been assumed that the language of the socio-politically powerful (superstratal) group becomes the target of the less powerful (substratal) group who, because of the hostile environment, cannot acquire it fluently. Eventually, the interplay between superstratal and substratal languages results in a creole.6
The question then of whether Bajan can be considered a creole, or at the very least, a language with creole ancestry (which has become more similar over the years to English through ongoing exposure to the latter), remains unsettled. Hancock (1980), for instance, argues that the sociohistorical dimension of the contact situation does not support the emergence of a creole, and posits that Bajan is essentially a ‘local metropolitan, rather than creolized variety of English’ (1980: 22). Others such as Cassidy (1980), Rickford and Handler (1994), and Fields (1995) have argued instead that modern Bajan is descended from a creole ancestor which has undergone decreolization (that is, in essence, become ‘less’ creole) at some point in its history. This pro-creole perspective has largely been based on the attestation of certain structural properties in historical texts. Thus, Rickford and Handler (1994) and Fields (1995), for example, have examined textual data from the late seventeenth–nineteenth centuries containing examples of spoken Bajan, and posit a ‘full-fledged creole ancestry’ for the language (Fields, 1995: 105). Similarly, Cassidy (1980: 14) states that ‘present day Barbadian English preserves what can hardly be explained otherwise as a creole residue’, and Winford (1993: Chapter 8) concludes that ‘there is more creole in its [the speech of Barbados] present and its past than scholars have usually been willing to recognize’.
Arguments for a creole ancestry are not unproblematic. As in all historical perspectives on language use, the necessary reliance on textual material for accurate linguistic description makes analyses somewhat tenuous. As Fields (1995: 93) states in relation to her data:
A note of caution . . . needs to be given concerning the nature of written records of early slave language. In the first place, they are all second hand, written by white Europeans, who were transcribing what they believe they had heard. Secondly, these transcribers may have had varying degrees of competence in performing this task, some of them being long term residents, others being merely transient visitors. Because of the variable dependability of these texts, one has to be cautious when drawing conclusions about features evidenced by only one author.
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A second issue lies in the assumption of distinctive creole structural properties in earlier stages of Bajan (and in a comparative perspective, in modern Bajan as well). As we have already seen (Chapter 4, Section 4.5), creoles do not appear to form a unique typological class but instead share many features and processes with other non-creole languages. A good illustration of this can be seen in the list of ‘significant creole features’ used in Fields’s (1995) analysis. Many of these, such as ‘absence of plural marking on nouns, absence of case marking on pronouns . . .
unmarked past tense’ and multiple negation (ibid.: 98), are not specific to creoles but can also be found in languages such as English and indeed, are crosslinguistically common. As Mufwene (1986: 131; in Chaudenson, 2001: 144–5) states, ‘the features which hitherto have been associated with creoles cannot distinguish these languages from non-creole languages. There are many of the latter which have not only the same features but also almost the same combinations thereof.’
A further issue concerns the reconciliation of a Bajan creole ancestor with Barbados’ settlement patterns. As stated earlier, Barbados does not wholly conform to what we might call the established template for creole emergence: Fields (1995: 89) states that ‘the sociohistorical situation in Barbados . . . was not as straightforward and as clear-cut as in most other English-speaking Caribbean islands’. This is because the first 30 or so years of settlement, and of contact between groups, were not conducive to creolization: English speakers were in the majority, and populations were small enough to allow for its acquisition by nonnative speakers with relative ease. Thus, arguments for a Bajan creole ancestor typically place its emergence sometime after 1655, when the number of Africans began to consistently outnumber Europeans (see above) and social, and linguistic, distance between the two groups significantly increased. This is not in itself a problematic stance; indeed, it is extremely plausible. What is perhaps a bit more awkward, however, is the fact that the posited early phase of English acquisition and use is treated as separate and distinct from the later phase of creolization. In other words, the early phase of non-creole use is deemed somewhat unimportant to the later creole development of Bajan, and the two may be made to seem discrete periods of language history. This is not unjustifiable: pre-1655 data for linguistic and social interaction are sparse and as intimated earlier, a substantial phase of superstratal and substratal interaction has not typically been assumed to precede the emergence of a creole. However, as we have consistently noted throughout these chapters in relation to English, language use cannot so easily be compartmentalized – there is evident continuity between the Anglo-Saxon period and OE, on the one hand, and the ME period and ME, on the other, for instance. To postulate continuity between the early and later phases of Barbados’ linguistic history therefore would not seem unreasonable.
One such approach is that of Mufwene (2001), whose theory of creolization posits a line of development from early non-creole to later creole use. Mufwene (ibid.: 9–10) argues that creoles developed in settlement colonies, or colonies where contact was, in the first instance, intimate and regular between European colonists (many of whom were indentured servants) and other ethnic groups
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(such as those comprised of slaves). In the homestead phase of these settlements, non-Europeans were in the minority and although subject to socio-political discrimination, were relatively well integrated. Mufwene (2001: 9–10) maintains that this less powerful group ‘had full access to European languages . . . which they acquired through regular interactions with their native or fluent speakers’. Importantly, the European languages being acquired in these contexts were not standard forms but colonial koinés of the non-standard regional and social lects of the majority of Europeans sent out to the colonies; Europeans who comprised ‘large proportions of indentured servants and other low-class employees of colonial companies’ (ibid.: 28).
Once settlements moved into bigger plantation economies, the dynamics of the contact situation changed. The extensive importation of labour (such as African slaves) onto such holdings, and European migration out of them, would not only shift population ratios of European to non-European (with the latter becoming the majority) but also make contact between these two groups (and therefore, fluent acquisition of the European language) increasingly difficult. Mufwene (ibid.: 9–10) therefore hypothesizes that creolization occurred through the attempts of new, non-European labour arrivals in the plantation period to acquire the colonial vernaculars being spoken around them. However, given the difficulty in interacting with native and fluent speakers, these attempts ended up being ‘imperfect replications’ (Lass, 1997: 112); a process ‘intensified . . . by the decreasing disproportion of native and fluent speakers (creole and seasoned slaves) relative to nonproficient speakers’ (Mufwene, 2001: 9–10).
This approach certainly seems to fit the social and linguistic situation outlined for Barbados (see social history above). Importantly, it also plausibly links the two phases of non-creole use and creolization. In addition, Mufwene’s approach also offers an explanation (alternative to decreolization) for the structural parallels that have been observed between Bajan and English. Mufwene (ibid.: 28–9) argues that ‘structural features of creoles have been predetermined to a large extent (though not exclusively) by characteristics of the vernaculars spoken by the populations that founded the colonies in which they developed’. In essence, those vernaculars would have been heavily based on the European colonial koinés, carrying features already native to a substantial number of their (European) speakers and therefore linguistically ‘dominant’. Through inter-generational transmission, such features would have become ‘deeply entrenched as predicted by Wimsatt’s (1999, 2000) principle of generative entrenchment’, meaning simply that older features have a better chance of survival than newer ones because ‘they have acquired more and more carriers, hence more transmitters, with each additional generation of speakers’ (Mufwene, 2001: 28–9). Many would therefore eventually pass into creoles once they began to emerge.
In this perspective, structural similarities between Bajan and English varieties can be accounted for diachronically. A particular study of interest here is that of Niles (1980), who has highlighted similarities in patterns and features between Bajan and non-standard EModE varieties, particularly those of the south-western regions of England, from which the majority of English settlers came. Niles also argues that early Bajan (1627–1655) was ultimately a variety of English,
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properties of which eventually became part of a Bajan creole (which she hypothesizes emerged in the eighteenth century at the height of the plantation era) and which have survived into modern speech. For example, Niles posits that modern Bajan gender compounds such as head-piece ‘head’, nose-hole ‘nostril’, before-time ‘before, formerly’ (as in I was a great fighter beforetime, and I is still a great fighter now), dusk-time ‘dusk’ and lower-side ‘below’ (ibid.: 101, 103) have a southwestern dialectal English (SWDE) source. In terms of pronouns, modern Bajan makes use of pronouns designated as subject in standard English usage in object position (as in he like she ‘he likes her’), and vice versa (as in me eh going dere ‘I am not going there’). According to Wright (1905: 270–1), one of Niles’ main sources for SWDE, similar usages existed in the latter: I opes us chell do the same (‘I hope we shall do the same’ (Somerset)) and Er dresses erzel’ uncommon fine (‘she dresses extremely well’ (Devon) (Wright, 1905: 270–1)). Niles (1980: 115) found instances such as she did glare at we (‘she glared at us’ (Essex)), he do starve I at nights w’ the cold (‘he starves me [of heat] on cold nights’ (Wiltshire)) and I will bring she in, so that you may see she on Vriday (‘I’ll bring her in, so that you may see her on Friday’ (Devon)). Some modern Bajan speakers also make use of um as a third person pronoun. Fields (1995) states that it is specifically used with singular, neuter reference (that is, the equivalent of it) although textual citations from the nineteenth century indicate that it could at one time have plural reference (as in Then you have stolen them said I? No misses, me no tief um, me take um, was the reply ‘. . . no mistress, I did not steal them, I took them’ (Bayley, 1833; quoted in Fields, 1995: 96). Niles (1980: 116) found evidence of parallel usages in SWDE: urn in an git tha kay a tha zeller, an let Jack car um up tu barn (‘run in and get the keys to the cellar, and let Jack carry them up to the barn’ (Devon)), Bant um purty little craychers? (‘Aren’t they pretty little creatures?’ (Devon)).
In terms of verbs, modern Bajan speakers make use of uninflected forms in the expression of past temporal reference. Elworthy (1877; cited in Niles, 1980) noted this in SWDE usage, as in uur kaech dhu dwuuyz (‘I caught the boys’ (Somerset)) and aaay waive tain yeard u-voaur braksus (‘I wove ten yards before breakfast’ (Somerset)). Finally, Niles notes that the use of multiple negative markers occurs in both modern Bajan and SWDE. Examples from the latter include I never did’n zee no jis bwoys, nor vor mischy, not in all my born days (‘I have never seen such boys, nor such mischief, in all my days’ (Somerset)), you can’t never make no sense of women folks of a Saturday (‘you can’t ever make sense of women on a Saturday’ (Sussex)) and er idden no better than nobody else (‘she isn’t better than anyone else’ (Devon)) (Elworthy, 1886: 38; in Niles, 1980: 130).
Theories of creolization such as that of Mufwene, then, offer a plausible framework for reading the changing dynamics of contact situations such as that which obtained in colonies such as Barbados, and for our purposes, for understanding at least one dimension of change that English began to undergo in the EModE period. What is particularly interesting in the context of the latter is the fact that at the same time that norms and ideologies of ‘correctness’ in language use were explicitly beginning to take shape and to be perceived as important in the evolution of an intellectually progressive and increasingly powerful nation (see Section 5.2), the non-standard everyday use of socially ordinary English speakers was taking root in the colonies; and