In comparison to many of the English-based creoles of the Caribbean region, limited research has been conducted on what Bahamians commonly refer to as “Bahamian Dialect.” This lack of research on “Bahamian Dialect” is perhaps due to the fact that for many years, Bahamians have assumed that this language is simply a variety of English. However, academic research shows that this is not the case. In fact, there is much socio-historical and linguistic evidence to support the proposal that “Bahamian Dialect” is a creole. Before examining the creole status of “Bahamian Dialect” it is necessary to define the term “creole.”
What is a Creole? According to Holm, “A creole has a jargon or pidgin in its ancestry; it is spoken by …a speech community, often one whose ancestors were displaced geographically so that their ties with their original language and socio-cultural identity were partly broken. Such social conditions were often the result of slavery” (Pidgins and Creoles, 6). In short, a Creole is a language that resulted from a contact situation, was acquired by children as a first language and is now spoken by a speech community. Like many of its neighbouring territories, slavery is part of The Bahamas’ history, but is there existing linguistic evidence in support of the creole status of Bahamian Dialect?
Is what we call Bahamian Dialect really a Creole? There are two major criteria used to determine the creole status of a language.
According to Schneider (89) and many other linguists, features relating to tense, mood and aspect are decisive in determining whether a language is a Creole. In other words, features that communicate time, a speaker’s attitude and the manner of an event are important in determining the creole status of a language. In Creoles, these features are used as separate markers that precede the predicate of a sentence, unlike English where inflection is often used.
Most Caribbean Creoles have what is known as a continuum language situation, where language varieties range from Creole to the standard language. So, some of the population speak a Creole variety, others speak a mesolectal variety which simply put, involves systematic use of some Creole and non-creole features, and then others speak a standard variety. We should keep in mind that every speaker shows some variation in speech. In societies such as The Bahamas, people may easily code switch from one variety to another, without realizing that they are actually using two different language systems. Presented below, is crucial linguistic evidence in support of the creole status of “Bahamian Dialect.”
The creole properties presented below have been distilled from seminal linguistic works and are widely agreed upon as characteristic of Atlantic Creoles, and more specifically, Caribbean Creoles. The following table presents syntactic features typical of Caribbean Creoles and the corresponding Bahamian data (the Bahamian data is taken from McPhee, and the transcription system employed is that of Holm’s Dictionary of Bahamian English).
| Caribbean Creole Properties | Bahamian Examples |
| 1. Tense, modality and aspect are expressed by preverbal free morphemes (Bakker, Post and van der Voort 248). | |
| Tense | |
| a. Simple Past is unmarked; that is, it is not realized by a preverbal marker. | Ay bil won haws de. I build one house there. I built a house there. |
| b. An anterior marker indicates that the verb that follows it, took place before the time in focus. This marker usually takes the form bin or did in Atlantic creoles (Schneider 90-1). |
Iy bin/did finish foh ay get
huwm. ‘e been/did finish ‘fore I get home. She had finished before I got home. |
| Mood | |
| Predictability | |
| Many Caribbean creoles use go for future reference (Schneider 89). | Dey sey da bowt go liyv tamohrow. They say the boat go leave tomorrow. They said the boat will leave tomorrow. |
| Aspect | |
| Completive aspect | |
| Schneider (89) identifies don as “the most widespread form” marking completive aspect in Caribbean creoles. | Ay don jriyngk it owt. I done drink it out. I have drunk it all. |
| Progressive aspect | |
| Schneider (91) identifies (d)a and – in(g) as progressive markers in Caribbean creoles. | Iniy taym yu pahs hya, ya kud heh miy da chap. Any time you pass here, you could hear me da chop. (weeding). Any time you pass here, you can hear me chopping (weeding). |
| Ay telin yuw bowl. I telling you bold. I am telling you boldly. | |
| 2. Creoles lack an equivalent for the typical European copula (be) which is used with equative, locative and adjectival predicates. There is instead, a three-way distinction made in these environments (Bickerton 68; Schneider 90). | |
| a. Subject (d)a/0 Equational | May ohda sista wey da huwm, wiy da smohl-smohl lil chilan. My other sister what there home, we da small-small children. My other sister and I who lived at home, were very small children. Dat moskita. That mosquito. That is a mosquito. |
| b. Subject de Locational | Miy de ya. Me there here. I am here. |
| c. Subject 0 Attributive | Iy nays. It nice. She is nice. |
| 3. Creole nouns are not inflected for plurality. Holm (“Features” 871) identifies dem as the definite plural marker for “most Atlantic creoles.” | Som diy tiycha dem, dey rizayn. Some the teacher them, they resign. Some of the teachers resigned. |
| 4. There is no gender distinction between third person pronouns (Schneider 95). | Iy hozban iz Huwdow. ‘e husband is Hugo. Her husband is Hugo. |
| 5. Serial verbs are typical of Atlantic creoles (Alleyne 92). Serial verbs refer to cases where two or more verbs occur in the same clause, and have the same subject. These verbs are not joined by a conjunction. | Wiyl wohk gow tis mohnin kech da low tayd. We’ll walk go this morning catch the low tide. We would go in the morning to catch the low tide. |
| 6. Holm says, the possessor and the possessed are juxtaposed to indicate possession (“Features” 874). | Das miy sista chilran. That’s me sister children. They are my sister’s children. |
| 7. The article systems of Atlantic creoles exhibit a three-way distinction: | |
| a. The indefinite article wan is used for specific nouns being introduced to the discourse. | Dey tay im op to won chriy. They tie him up to one tree. They tied him to a tree. |
| b. The definite article di is used in reference to specific nouns that have already been introduced to the discourse. | Win dey gohn bak, hiy wuzn tay ta di chriy now moh. When they gone back, he wasn’t tie to the tree no more. When they went back, he was not tied to the tree any more. |
| c. Holm says the zero marker is used for non-specific noun phrases. (Pidgins and Creoles, 869-70). | Duwng weyt til ay dehd ta liv loyk kyat an dohg. Don’t wait ‘til I dead to live like cat and dog. Do not wait until I am dead to live like cats and dogs | .
This paper presents just some linguistic evidence – there is more – that Bahamian “Dialect” is a creole language separate from English. These findings not only enhance the relatively small body of data available on Bahamian, but also confirm a link between Bahamian “Dialect” and other Creoles of the Caribbean region. In addition, these findings have important implications for cultural identity, future academic research and the teaching of English in Bahamian schools.
Alleyne, Mervyn. Comparative Afro-American. An Historical-Comparative Study of English-Based Afro-American Dialects of the New World. Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1980.
Bakker, Peter, Marike Post and Hein van der Voort. “TMA particles and auxiliaries.” Pidgins and Creoles. An Introduction. Ed. Jacques Arends, Pieter Muysken and Norval Smith. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1995.
Bickerton, Derek. Roots of Language. Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1981.
Holm, John. Pidgins and Creoles Vol. I: Theory and Structure. Cambridge: University Press, 1988.
-------. “Features in the noun phrase common to the Atlantic Creoles.” Linguistics 28 (1990): 867-881.
------- and Alison Shilling. Dictionary of Bahamian English. New York: Lexik House, 1982.
McPhee, Helean. Predicate Marking in the Bahamian Basilect: An Integrated Approach. Ph.D Thesis, The University of the West Indies, Mona, 2003.
Schneider, Edgar. “The Cline of Creoleness.” English World-Wide 11.1 (1990): 79-113.
© Helean McPhee, 2006.
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