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‘Is English we speaking’: Trinbagonian in the twenty-first century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2004

Valerie Youssef
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in the Department of Liberal Arts, in the Faculty of Humanities and Education of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago.

Abstract

Some notes and comments on the English usage of Trinidad and Tobago. The paper argues that for Trinidadians to think in terms of speaking and owning ‘only’ their distinctive Creole, setting aside their long-established indigenous variety of Standard English as if not really their own, is a complex distortion of social and linguistic reality. The reality has emerged from social, cultural, and psychological factors present in the Anglophone Caribbean at large, includes both conventional English and the Creole with which it inter-operates on a daily basis, and is an issue that stands in need of a positive revision that acknowledges the islands' dual inheritance.

Type
Original Article
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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