The Commonwealth of The Bahamas, as the country is officially called, appears to be a very good test case for the Americanisation hypothesis, as the variety of English spoken there has always been subject to varying influences. On the one hand, there is the inherited colonial norm, British English (BrE). Having been first settled by a group of British religious dissenters from Bermuda in 1648, the Bahamas remained a British colony for more than 300 years, and the British legacy is still clearly visible in the coun- try’s institutional structure. Not surprisingly, educated BrE, and more specifically RP,
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392 Stephanie Hackert & Dagmar Deuber
still exerts considerable influence in all official administrative and political language use, in the educational system, and in the more conservative media.
On the other hand, the Bahamas received its main population influx in the wake of the American Revolutionary War, when thousands of loyalists and loyalist slaves fled the newly independent United States and resettled in parts of the New World that remained British. The loyalist immigration not only tripled the entire colony’s population and increased the proportion of blacks to three quarters of the whole ( Craton & Saunders 1992: 179), but it also introduced the predecessor of contempo- rary Bahamian Creole to the islands – most likely an early form of Gullah, the creole that is still spoken on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia (cf.
Hackert & Huber 2007).
Bahamians have always travelled to the North American mainland, and today there is the added influence of millions of American tourists who visit the islands each year and that of the American mass media, television in particular. Schoolbooks are now often American, and since the number of Bahamians attending college or univer- sity in North America is growing steadily, the number of students taking the SAT col- lege admission test in addition to the British-modelled Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) is increasing. The influence of AmE in the Bahamas is therefore by no means negligible and appears to have risen since independence in 1973. One sign of this process may be the growing number of Bahamian radio and television newsreaders and hosts, particularly on private channels, whose accent is modelled on General American rather than on RP norms, rhoticity obviously being one of the most salient features of this accent.
Trinidad was first colonised by the Spanish in 1498, but settlement was limited until large-scale immigration from French possessions in the Caribbean in the late 18th century. The island was taken by the British in 1797, and immigration was from then on mainly from the UK and from other British colonies in the Caribbean (Winer 1993: 9). English and English Creole have been commonly spoken since the early 19th century, with French Creole also widely spoken until the end of the cen- tury (1993: 9). Tobago, which had also been taken by the Spanish in 1498 and had seen the rule of different, competing colonial powers, was joined with Trinidad as a single colony in 1889 (1993: 10). Trinidad and Tobago attained its independence from Britain in 1962.
As in the Bahamas, the traditional orientation of English in Trinidad and Tobago has been towards the British norm, implanted during the colonial period, but there has been increasing influence from AmE in the more recent past. Winer (1993: 48–49) mentions several factors in this development, namely the large US presence in the country during World War II, increased travel and migration since the 1960s, and the growing importation of television programs and commercials. The impact of AmE in the media domain has been only increasing since the early 1990s, when cable
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comAmerican influence on written Caribbean English 393 television was introduced, providing access to a wide variety of American channels, and the liberalisation of radio broadcasting spurred the presence on air of a greater variety of accents, including American-influenced ones (Deuber & Leung 2013: 297).
3. Data and method
If English in the Caribbean has been undergoing a process of Americanisation, we would expect to find a shift in norm orientation from British to American between pre- or early post-independence and contemporary language use. In order to test this hypothesis, we constructed four corpora of newspaper texts which we assumed would reflect linguistic changes which might have taken place in postcolonial times. We opted for leading national newspapers in each country: the Nassau Guardian, together with its colonial forerunner, the Nassau Guardian and Bahamas Observer (NGBO), and the Trinidad Guardian, which was recently renamed Trinidad and Tobago Guard- ian (TT Guardian).
The contemporary sample spans ten years (2002–12) for the Bahamas; the texts from the present-day TT Guardian were collected from 2011/12 editions.1 For the his- torical samples, we chose 1968 editions from both papers. While the Bahamas were still a British colony at the time, Trinidad and Tobago had been independent for six years. We included only news articles and restricted the collection to news that had appeared in the national or local sections of the papers in order not to run the risk of encountering pieces distributed by international news agencies (cf. Mair 1992: 79;
Sand 1999: 20). Table 1 presents an overview of the data.
Table 1. Overview of corpora used for this study
Newspaper Years covered No. of words
Nassau Guardian and Bahamas Observer 1968 25,810
Nassau Guardian 2002–12 73,452
Trinidad Guardian 1968 37,140
Trinidad and Tobago Guardian 2011/12 40,172
The four corpora are quite small by present-day standards. This is a consequence of the considerable problems we encountered in digitising historical newspaper samples
1. The contemporary Bahamas corpus already existed; for reasons of time, we decided to use it for this chapter, even though we are, of course, aware of the fact that ten years can make a substantial difference in the case of rapid linguistic change.
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394 Stephanie Hackert & Dagmar Deuber
from the Caribbean. Such samples are readily available on microfilm from the Library of Congress or the British Library, for example. Unfortunately, the print quality of the originals is often poor, which is why the material in many cases had to be typewrit- ten rather than processed by means of OCR programs. The small size of our corpora means that we were unable to analyse rare features such as the mandative subjunctive or the irregular past participle gotten (cf. Hundt 2009: 20, 30) and that the frequencies we obtained for the features eventually selected were fairly low in some cases. How- ever, in the spirit of Hundt & Leech (2012), we argue that even small samples such as ours can be usefully employed in tracing grammatical changes if they are chosen and analysed carefully.2 At the same time, we consider our results preliminary and hope to eventually substantiate and expand them with a larger database.
The software we employed to process the data is WordSmith Tools 5.0. In the fol- lowing, we present frequencies normalised to 40,000 words. In order to contextualise our findings, we compare them with findings from the literature. In the main, this will be Leech et al. (2009), as this work, as noted above, is still the standard of reference in the description of grammatical changes in late 20th century BrE and AmE. Where rel- evant, the results of other, small-scale studies will be considered as well. Finally, where results are available, we also refer to the newspaper sections of two recent corpora of BrE and AmE compiled at Lancaster University, BE06 and AE06 (Baker 2009).3