The local, the global, and the authentic: Language change and the construction of authenticity in Bequia

Abstract

This paper examines processes of authentication in Paget Farm, one of the communities in creole-speaking Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines). The study is based on sociolinguistic interviews with two generations of Bequia speakers, adolescents and their grandparents, recorded in the course of semiethnographic fieldwork. Several variants of past temporal reference were analysed: bare verbs (I go yesterday) vs. inflected verbs (I went yesterday), and preverbal been (I been go yesterday) -a stigmatised, "old-fashioned", basilectal form (Patrick 1999). This paper not only shows that authenticity, rather than being a constant quality of a speech community, is linguistically and socially constructed, but also considers speakers' motivations behind this process. Crucial to authentication are the social meanings of linguistic variables, local ideologies, as well as the larger socio-economic context. Moreover, I demonstrate that creole speaking communities, where the relationship between the global and the local is particularly strong, provide an especially fruitful area for research on authenticity.

Complementation and the creole continuum in the Eastern Caribbean

“…Although residents of each village do not form a monolithic (socio)linguistic block, the importance of village in local identity arose repeatedly during our fieldwork, later corroborated by Daleszynska's (2013) fieldwork among younger Bequians. Mount Pleasant speech is often described by residents of all villages as more ‘correct’ or more ‘English’.…”

“…Taken together, these results suggest that distinct endonormative patterns have emerged in Bequia, which serve as a common means of expressing a highly local way of speaking English. Following Daleszynska (2013), we might see both Hamilton and Paget Farm as iconically representing vernacular norms on Bequia. However, as she observes, speakers may stake this claim to vernacularity and a distinctive, non‐standard way of speaking through the use of divergent features.…”

“…Mount Pleasant speech is often described by residents of all villages as more ‘correct’ or more ‘English’. As Daleszynska (2013) discusses, there are competing notions of ‘authentic’ or ‘true island’ identity differentiating Hamilton and (in particular) Paget Farm on the Southside: put crudely, Hamilton can claim an authentic indigeneity based on its plantation history, while Southside villages can claim authentic indigeneity through their maritime traditions. Much of our work on language variation in Bequia has explored the extent to which local language ideologies and perceptions of difference play out in speech production.…”

In pursuit of social meaning

“…The case that authenticity and the vernacular are confused in sociolinguistics is not so clearly motivated; foundational texts like Labov (, 2006 [1966]) seldom (never, in the case of Sociolinguistic Patterns ) use the terms authentic(ity) , despite being concerned deeply with motivating the vernacular as the object of study. Nor is there a clearly articulated case for the consequential impact of that confusion (for example, Daleszynska, , demonstrates how claims to authenticity may be consequential for the analysis of variation across communities and generations on Bequia, St Vincent and the Grenadines). Elsewhere in MLV , the concepts being problematized (diglossia, the standard, social categories) are clearly established as problems on empirical or theoretical grounds, and this in turn frames practical, methodological, or conceptual remedies for the problems.…”