CRB 502 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Commonwealth Caribbean, Double Entendre, Nation Language
14 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
With more and more people arriving in the caribbean, post-columbus, language common to each colony that everyone could speak and understand evolved. Under colonialism, the colonizer"s language (spanish, english, french, dutch) was imposed on everyone, but colonized peoples language (indigenous, african, indian chinese, mixed) allowed creolized languages evolve that were distinct to each colony. Because of this, in the caribbean, language has historically been linked to race and class: the more one spoke like the colonizer, the higher up the social pyramid one would be. Creole languages were oral, not written meant they were still lower class. Patois or dialect) and the people who spoke it were seen as low class, uneducated, and ignorant. Only until the post-independence era (after 1962 in the anglophone caribbean) that certain caribbean people began to embrace these creole languages as nation languages, legitimate in their own right.
