230007 English in the Caribbean (S) (SoSe 2014)

English in the Caribbean

Nowadays, linguists and educators resort to the term Englishes to account for varieties of English spoken in diverse regions across the globe. Diversity is manifest from continent to continent as well as within a single territory. The English-official Caribbean is of particular interest for a number of reasons. For one thing, the linguistic diversity of the Caribbean poses enormous challenges in language education since each English-official Caribbean territory has an English-lexified and/or French-lexified Creole co-existing with the official language. Moreover, the stories of English in the Caribbean are closely entwined with those of creolization and have heightened our awareness and understanding of language variation and change during and after contact.

The course will examine the historical, linguistic and social forces that have influenced linguistic outcomes in the English-official Caribbean. We will also identify and analyse linguistic practices in the Caribbean through available corpora such as the International Corpus of English), recordings and published sources. Students who take this seminar are strongly encouraged to also take “Under our Skin: African Heritage in the Caribbean” being offered by Diana Fulger since the two courses complement each other. The syllabus will be available from the first day of February 2014 and students may write the instructor at joseph.farquharson@uni-bielfeld.de to receive a copy.