Types of Dialects or Varieties

• As mentioned previously, all languages are dialects, according to linguists. But in the Caribbean when we say dialect, patois etc. we are talking about languages that are not Standard English or Standard French; e.g. broken english or broken french. 

• Now in the past when Africans or other people from other countries were trading with Europeans or any other foreign group, they had to find a quick way of communicating, so they used the language below called pidgin.

Pidgin

 

The term ‘pidgin’ (believed to have been derived from the Chinese pronunciation of the English word ‘business’) “refers to a system of communication that has grown up among people who do not share a common language but need to trade or conduct business. Pidgins are unstable, have a limited vocabulary and grammatical structure and narrow range of functions. A pidgin is not a native language, but a creative adaptation of natural languages with structures and rules of its own.

 

 

 

Creole

 

Roberts (1988): The term ‘Creole’ is a good example of a word whose meaning has changed considerably in a relatively short time. Dell Hymes’book Pidginization and Creolization of Languages gives the following historical explanation of the term:

§ derived from Portuguese crioula, via Spanish and French;

§ Creole languages are the result of contact between English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch (‘languages

Of colonizing people’) and West African languages (‘languages of a colonized people’);

§ originally meant a white man of European descent born and raised in a tropical colony;

§ meaning later extended to include indigenous natives and others of non-European origin e.g. African slaves;

 § then it was applied to certain languages spoken by creoles in and around the Caribbean and in West Africa;

§ the term was later extended to other languages of similar types;

 § a creole which shares most of its vocabulary with English is traditionally called an English-based creole or creolized English;

§ Lord et al (2012) noted that a creole is a vernacular in its own right;

§ Creole languages are remarkable examples of the way in which speakers found ways of communicating effectively with those who were ignorant of their language or had been deprived of their own language.

In the space of one generation, African slaves in the Caribbean, originally speaking a range of several hundred African languages, created for themselves a language based mainly on African grammatical structures but using the vocabulary of their European masters and that language became creole. (Lord et al, 2012.)

 

Roberts said that the “word ‘patois’ is a French word which is also used in the English language. In French and also in English generally it is used to refer to a geographical dialect which differs from the standard language of the country….

In some cases in the West Indies, in Jamaica for example, the word ‘patois’…refer to Creole English. In other cases, especially in the Eastern Caribbean, the word is used with a more restricted or precise meaning. It is used to refer to the language spoken by the majority of people in Dominica, St. Lucia, Martinique and Guadeloupe, that is, French Creole.