Author: Douglas MacRae Taylor

Publisher: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

"Based upon more than forty years of linguistic and ethnographic research, Douglas Taylor's work presents the languages of the Caribbean in all their variegated richness. Focusing as it does on language contact and linguistic change in the Caribbean from pre-Conquest times to the present, it brings the perspectives of linguistics, anthropology, and history to bear on a crucial area of the New World experience. The author concentrates first on the Amerindian languages of the Caribbean (Nepuyo, Shebayo, Yao, Taino, Arawak and Island-Carib). He provides the fullest account ever given of the linguistic situation and the history of these languages. Second, he turns to the so-called creole languages of the region, languages commonly associated with the enslaved Africans whose descendants make up the majority of the Caribbean population. He shows the derivations of the various language systems and the borrowings each language makes from another. Today, as Taylor demonstrates, these languages vie with standard dialects of European tongues in much of the Caribbean. In Haiti alone, probably more than five million persons speak a creole as their first language. By choosing these two important and radically contrastive dimensions for description and analysis, Taylor provides the reader with a broad, yet remarkably particular, overview of the phenomena of language and language change. Creole languages are spoken by millions of contemporary speakers; but the language of the Island-Carib has disappeared from the insular Caribbean. Thus, the idiom that once provided all the inhabitants of the lesser islands with their principal medium of communication has now been almost completely supplanted. The principal languages of much of the region today are the outgrowth of lengthy and complex encounters among speakers of many different tongues, speakers who were themselves descended from newcomers whose own native languages were not or are no longer spoken in the region. As Taylor points out in his introductory comments, language, as the primary means of perpetuating culture, profoundly reflects and informs the culture itself. Its presence is a living representation of the way of life of people; its disappearance or destruction usually signals the replacement of our cultural system by another. In sum, Taylor has provided original and crucial evidence that the origin and character of the Caribbean creole languages must be sought in cultural history of the Caribbean creole-speaking peoples. He adopts the view that the early stage of the language reflected a lexicon, largely of Portuguese origin, that had been shaped in West Africa and subsequently reshaped in other regions under the influence of other languages. To this "reflexication" hypothesis, as it is called, he joins a necessary grammatical hypothesis."-- Book Jacket.