The Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd Edition

6Caribbean Englishes

MICHAEL ACETO

1 Introduction

The terms Caribbean Englishes or restructured Englishes are used here as generally synonymous with other terms found in the linguistics literature: English‐derived or ‐based creoles and even dialects of English (Mufwene 2001, 2008). Creolists have never agreed upon a typologically distinct linguistic definition in terms of common structures, features or processes that demarcate so‐called creole languages from other natural human languages (Aceto 1999a; DeGraff 1999; Mufwene 1994, 1996, 2008; McWhorter 1998). Even Bakker, Daval‐Markussen, Parkvall, and Plag (2011), while insisting that purported creoles are typologically distinct (“typologically similar” would probably be uncontroversial; and I will not explore the observation that the conclusions of the article seem unfalsifiable, at least in the sense of Popper 1984), admit that “it is not possible to specify which individual features are responsible for the clusterings” (Bakker et al. 2011: 19) that make the group distinct. This absence of a typological distinction may at first seem troublesome or peculiar, but in fact there is still no principled definition as to what distinguishes a “dialect” from a “language,” either. Yet linguists comfortably and usefully employ both those terms in a general sense, as if they reference specific agreed‐upon linguistic phenomena.

The term “creole” derives more from the sociohistorical circumstances of colonialization surrounding the earliest ...