This study investigates the generation and maintenance
of multiple personal names in an Anglophone Creole-speaking
community of Panama. Nearly every Afro-Panamanian resident
of the island of Bastimentos has two given names, one
Spanish-derived and the other Creole-derived. The Creole or
“ethnic name” is virtually the exclusive name used
locally for reference and address. It is argued that these ethnic
names are preferred for reference and address because they
reflexively define who members of this speech community are
in terms of culture and ancestry. A typology of nicknames and
pseudonyms as well as a brief cross-cultural presentation of
multiple or alternative personal names is provided. Ethnic name
usage in Bastimentos is discussed within an acts of identity
framework.
This paper discusses internally-motivated change as a largely ignored factor in understanding diachrony in creole languages: that is, externally-motivated models — and the most popular of these is certainly decreolization and the related concept of the creole continuum — have been nearly exclusively relied upon by creolists to explain phenomena associated with language variation and change in creole-speaking communities, particularly among the Atlantic English-derived creoles. This paper presents one alternative to viewing variation data derived from creole speakers as solely a function of decreolization. It raises issues associated with (and explores alternatives to) that singular view of diachrony.
This paper presents a diachronic analysis of Saramaccan syllable structure. It examines data from Schumann's 1778 manuscript, and demonstrates that early Saramaccan syllable structure included complex onsets. A case is also made that in the last two centuries, these complex onsets in Saramaccan have been simplified from CCV to CVCV. This example of language change has important implications for creole studies because most views of change (for two exceptions, see Muhlhäusler, 1986; Mufwene, 1993), especially those that rely on models of decreolization, often suggest that CV templates precede a change to complex onsets. A change from CCV to CVCV, though representing a common and less marked shift in terms of general syllable typology, appears to be considerably less documented among the Atlantic creole languages.
This article describes a secret language called "Gypsy" spoken in an English-derived Creole speech community on the Caribbean island of Bastimentos in Panama. Data from this cryptolect are used as a means to examine language variation on the island. This article highlights the fact that a range of English-derived Creole varieties exists in Bastimentos, lacking the effects of a lexically related metropolitan variety in the same geographical area. (Creole, cryptolect, Panama, secret language, speech play, variation)* ^Y / B e l i z e Nicaragua Costa Rica
MICHAEL
Florida v \ O _ Bahamas
<^> Haiti JamaicaHonduras » o .
This article examines the origins of the past tense marker woz, which is in variation with di(d), in the English-derived creole spoken on the Panamanian island of Bastimentos in the Caribbean Sea. This study of language variation suggests that the concepts of decreolization as well as the Creole continuum itself have limited applications in regions where the national language is unrelated lexically to a creole spoken within its national borders. It also suggests that decreolization as an explanatory model has been overapplied in general, and that some variation phenomena designated as the result of language contact may instead be disguised examples of internally-motivated change or at least the result of multiple causation (i.e. a combination of internally-and externally-motivated factors).
This paper examines data gathered via fieldwork from St Eustatius, an island in the Dutch Caribbean. This English variety displays a handful of correspondences with other Englishes spoken in geographically proximate areas, but what is most noteworthy about this restructured English is that so much of its grammar is significantly different from many of those same nearby varieties. Historical, linguistic, and ethnographic data are interwoven to make the case that Statian English sounds different from most other Englishes of the Caribbean basin because the colonizing and settlement patterns of the island differed from plantation societies focusing on the production of cash crops. St Eustatius was a commercial center instead, offering an entrepôt for goods (and, at times, slaves) for sale to customers from the eastern rim of the Americas. In this import-export context, English as a lingua franca of trade emerged with its own distinctive cluster of features.
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