Orthographic Standardization for Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract

The growing acceptability of Creole languages in more domains and functions has led to the examination of ways of standardizing their orthographic conventions. This paper proposes a standardized orthography for the English Creole vernacular of Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies. The reasons for this are two: meeting the needs of a local population writing more and more in Creole, and preparing a standard reference dictionary of the language. A brief overview of Caribbean vernacular Creole languages is followed by a summary of the historical develop ment of language in Trinidad and Tobago, including writing conventions. Three orthographic models -phonemic, historic-etymological, and modified English -are described and evaluated; a "continuum" model is advocated. Overview of Vernacular Creoles in the Caribbean Creole LanguagesThe Caribbean (including the Guyanas, Belize, and Honduras) includes speakers of a number of Creole languages. Such languages are typically defined by the process in which they were formed, rather than solely by their linguistic characteristics.[Creoles] developed as communication systems between Europeans and West Africans during the period of European colonial expansion, the trade in enslaved Africans, and the plantation phase of Caribbean economy. Initially, the early versions of these languages were purely compromise cross-linguistic communication systems. The duration of the circumstances This paper is a revised version of a presentation given at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee Linguistics Symposium on Language and Literacy, April 1988. The author is responsible for final content, but is very grateful to Lawrence D. Carrington, Frederic G. Cassidy, Hubert Devonish, Ricky Jacobs, and Don Winford for their helpful comments and corrections.

Literacy in Pidgin and Creole Languages

“…'They're coming to talk with that old guy.' A modified etymological orthography distinguishes some of the salient linguistic features of the P/C, especially in pronunciation (Winer, 1990). So the same example from Hawai'i Creole with modified etymological orthography would be: Dey stay coming fo talk wit dat ol buggah.…”

“…Current Issues in Language Planning the Caribbean, English-lexified creoles are used in stories, especially in dialogue, and also in songs, poems and plays (Winer, 1990). Jamaican Creole is also widely used in cartoons and comics, and since the 1990s it has been used in stories as the voice of first-and third-person narration.…”

On the origin of linguistic norms: Orthography, ideology and the first constitutional challenge to the 1996 reform of German

“…Similar uses of orthography as a means of styling both Self and Other in debates over ethnic, regional, and0or national identities have been explored in the context of Scots English (McClure 1985), Indonesian and Malaysian (Vikør 1988), English Creole in Trinidad and Tobago (Winer 1990), Louisiana French (Brown 1993), Haitian Creole (Schieffelin & Doucet 1994), Manx (Sebba 1998b), Norfolk dialect (Trudgill 1999), and Corsican (Jaffe 1999). And whereas Clark & Ivanic (1997:195-211) critically explore the use of spelling and punctuation as a means of disciplining language users at school and beyond whereas Kress 2000 focuses on the emergent writing practices of young children as these attempt to marry the desire to use orthography as an expression of personal creativity, on the one hand, with the pressure to conform to mainstream practices, on the other (see also Kataoka 1997).…”

Bilingual literacy in creole contexts

“…Throughout the Commonwealth Caribbean, literature in English is most prevalent, but English-lexified creoles are frequently in poems and plays, and also in short stories and novels. This is especially in dialogue, but also as the voice of first and third person narration (Mü hleisen 2002;Warner-Lewis 2001;Winer 1990). In recent years, Hawai'i Creole has also become widely used in the literature with the appearance of many popular poems and short stories and several novels using dialogue in the language (Romaine 1994(Romaine , 1996(Romaine , 2005.…”

“…A modified etymological orthography distinguishes the salient linguistic features of the creole, avoids apostrophes and uses phonemic representation for words not from the lexifier (Winer 1990). An intermediate phonemic orthography basically has a symbol (or digraph) for one phoneme, but in some cases it uses the spelling conventions of the lexifier Á for example, Bou for /u/ in French-lexified creoles (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994).…”