Bahamian English

Last updated
Bahamian English
Region The Bahamas
Early forms
Language codes
ISO 639-3 –
Glottolog baha1263
IETF en-BS
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Bahamian English is English spoken in The Bahamas and by the Bahamian people. The standard for official use and education is largely British-based with regard to spelling, vocabulary, and pronunciation. [1] However, Bahamian English also contains a unique pronunciation system and certain vocabulary, along a scale with the local Bahamian (Creole) dialect. Moreover, perceptions of a standard are more recently changing toward American English; in particular, 21st-century news-industry and younger Bahamian speakers are often more influenced in their pronunciations by General American English or sometimes even African-American Vernacular English. [1]

Contents

Pronunciation

The phonology of Bahamian English is believed to be derived from those of Bermudian English, Cockney English, RP, Scottish English, African-American Vernacular English, and Gullah. [2] The English accent of both Black and White Bahamians is traditionally non-rhotic, [3] due to being British-influenced, but often now rhotic among some younger speakers. [1]

Bahamian vowel phonetics are basically shared with both General American English and British Received Pronunciation, except the following may be distinct: [3] [4]

Vowels
Wikipedia
diaphoneme 		Bahamian
English		Example words
/æ/ [ä]bath, man, trap
/ɑː/ [ɑ]blah, father
/ɒ/ bother, lot, wasp
[ɑː] (lower class),
[ɔː] (higher class)		dog, loss, cloth
/ɔː/ bought, taught, saw
/aɪ/ [äː] (Black),
[äi] or [ʌɪ] (White)		ride, shine, try
[äi], [ʌɪ] (also White)bright, dice, pike
/aʊ/ [aː,ɑɔ] (Black),
[aɛ,aø] (White)		now, ouch, scout
/eɪ/ [eɪ>eː]lake, paid, rein
/ɔɪ/ [əi,ɔi]boy, choice, moist
/oʊ/ [ou>oː] (Black),
[ɵu] (White)		goat, oh, show
Vowels followed by /r/
/ɑːr/ [ɑ̈ː]barn, car, park
/ɪər/ [eᴈ]fear, peer, tier
/ɛər/ bare, bear, there
/ɜːr/ [ɜː], [əi] (also Black)burn, first, herd
/ɔːr/ [oᴈ]hoarse, horse, poor

There is little or no distinction between the [v] and [w] sounds in Bahamian English. [5] The contrast is often neutralized or merged into [v], [b] or [β], so village sounds like [wɪlɪdʒ], [vɪlɪdʒ] or [βɪlɪdʒ]. The final example is especially common among White speakers. This also happens in Vincentian, Bermudian and other Caribbean Englishes.

The cheer-chair merger of vowels is common, combining certain vowels before /r/.

Dental fricatives are usually changed to alveolar plosives (th-stopping):

The sound /h/ is often inserted into words that are not spelled with the letter H, leaving "up" to be pronounced as [hʌp]. However, it is also frequently dropped from words that are spelled with an H, so "harm" is left to be pronounced as [ɑ̈ːm]. [6] [7]

The sibilant fricatives /z/ and /ʒ/ may be devoiced and pronounced as [s] and [ʃ] respectively.

Grammar

The grammar is not so different from the US ( as per Zaka ).

When emphasizing a word in Bahamian English, it is common to repeat it. [8] (the car was going fast → the car was going fast fast)

The past participle is not indicated using the verb "have" in Bahamian English. Instead, it is indicated with the verb "be", especially among white speakers. (I have already washed the clothes → I am already washed the clothes) It can also be omitted and replaced by "done", with the verb left in its present-tense form. (I done wash the clothes) This practice is common among both white and black speakers. [6]

For some speakers (particularly black speakers), the present progressive is written using the present participle preceded by "does be" (I does be washing the clothes). Among white speakers, it is more common to just use "be" when talking in the third person. (They be washing the clothes) [6]

The possessive indicator 's is often omitted. [6]

Questions retain the same syntax as statements; the subject and verb do not switch their positions. (What is she doing? → What she is doing?) Thus, the use of "ain't" is highly important to distinguish an interrogative sentence from a declarative sentence. [6]

Vocabulary

Much of Bahamian terminology is derived from British English, West African languages, and Spanish, due to the country's colonial past. [8] Bahamian English has also come under the influence of American English due to a boost in tourism after the country gained independence, along with the resulting diffusion of American media. [6]

Some distinctive Bahamianisms include:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American English</span> Varieties of English native to the United States

American English (AmE), sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States; the de facto common language used in government, education and commerce; and an official language of most U.S. states. Since the late 20th century, American English has become the most influential form of English worldwide.

In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. An example is the elision of word-final /t/ in English if it is preceded and followed by a consonant: "first light" is often pronounced "firs' light". Many other terms are used to refer to specific cases where sounds are omitted.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tuvaluan language</span> Polynesian language spoken in Tuvalu

Tuvaluan, often called Tuvalu, is a Polynesian language closely related to the Ellicean group spoken in Tuvalu. It is more or less distantly related to all other Polynesian languages, such as Hawaiian, Māori, Tahitian, Samoan, Tokelauan and Tongan, and most closely related to the languages spoken on the Polynesian Outliers in Micronesia and Northern and Central Melanesia. Tuvaluan has borrowed considerably from Samoan, the language of Christian missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yuchi language</span> Language of the Yuchi people in the southeastern United States

Yuchi or Euchee is the language of the Tsoyaha, also known as the Yuchi people, now living in Oklahoma. Historically, they lived in what is now known as the southeastern United States, including eastern Tennessee, western Carolinas, northern Georgia, and Alabama, during the period of early European colonization. Many speakers of the Yuchi language became allied with the Muscogee Creek when they migrated into their territory in Georgia and Alabama. They were forcibly relocated with them to Indian Territory in the early 19th century.

Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress). Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel (schwa) or with certain other vowels that are described as being "reduced". Various contradictory phonological analyses exist for these phenomena.

There are a variety of pronunciations in Modern English and in historical forms of the language for words spelled with the letter ⟨a⟩. Most of these go back to the low vowel of earlier Middle English, which later developed both long and short forms. The sound of the long vowel was altered in the Great Vowel Shift, but later a new long A developed which was not subject to the shift. These processes have produced the main four pronunciations of ⟨a⟩ in present-day English: those found in the words trap, face, father and square. Separate developments have produced additional pronunciations in words like wash, talk and comma.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Klallam language</span> Salishan language of North America

Klallam,Clallam, Ns'Klallam or S'klallam, is a Straits Salishan language historically spoken by the Klallam people at Becher Bay on Vancouver Island in British Columbia and across the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. The last native speaker of Klallam as a first language died in 2014, but there is a growing group of speakers of Klallam as a second language.

In phonology, apocope is the loss (elision) of a word-final vowel. In a broader sense, the term can refer to the loss of any final sound from a word.

In English, the digraph ⟨th⟩ usually represents either the voiced dental fricative phoneme or the voiceless dental fricative phoneme. Occasionally, it stands for. In the word eighth, it is often pronounced. In compound words, ⟨th⟩ may be a consonant sequence rather than a digraph.

The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected. As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as the umlaut.

Bhutia is a language of the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Bhutia people in Sikkim in northeast India, parts of Koshi province in eastern Nepal, and Bhutan. It is one of the official languages of Sikkim.

In linguistics, synaeresis is a phonological process of sound change in which two adjacent vowels within a word are combined into a single syllable.

New England English is, collectively, the various distinct dialects and varieties of American English originating in the New England area. Most of eastern and central New England once spoke the "Yankee dialect", some of whose accent features still remain in Eastern New England today, such as "R-dropping". Accordingly, one linguistic division of New England is into Eastern versus Western New England English, as defined in the 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England and the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE). The ANAE further argues for a division between Northern versus Southern New England English, especially on the basis of the cot–caught merger and fronting. The ANAE also categorizes the strongest differentiated New England accents into four combinations of the above dichotomies, simply defined as follows:

Ixcatec is a language spoken by the people of the Mexican village of Santa María Ixcatlan, in the northern part of the state of Oaxaca. The Ixcatec language belongs to the Popolocan branch of the Oto-manguean language family. It is believed to have been the second language to branch off from the others within the Popolocan subgroup, though there is a small debate over the relation it has to them.

Bahamian Creole, also described as the Bahamian dialect, is spoken by both white and black Bahamians, sometimes in slightly different forms. The Bahamian dialect also tends to be more prevalent in certain areas of The Bahamas. Islands that were settled earlier or that have a historically large Black Bahamian population have a greater concentration of individuals exhibiting creolized speech; the dialect is most prevalent in urban areas. Individual speakers have command of lesser and greater dialect forms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English language</span> West Germanic language

English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain. It is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire and the United States. English is the third-most spoken native language, after Standard Chinese and Spanish; it is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers.

Zulu grammar is the way in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the Zulu language. Zulu grammar is typical for Bantu languages, bearing all the hallmarks of this language family. These include agglutinativity, a rich array of noun classes, extensive inflection for person, tense and aspect, and a subject–verb–object word order.

Maybrat is a Papuan language spoken in the central parts of the Bird's Head Peninsula in the Indonesian province of Southwest Papua.

Kenyan English is a local dialect of the English language spoken by several communities and individuals in Kenya, and among some Kenyan expatriates in other countries. The dialect contains features unique to it that were derived from local Bantu languages, such as Swahili.

The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant,, is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic accents, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound and pronounces them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will preserve the in that position since it is followed by a vowel in this case.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Ammon, Ulrich; Dittmar, Norbert; Mattheier, Klaus J. (2006). Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society. Walter de Gruyter. p. 2069. ISBN   978-3-11-018418-1. British-based standard Bahamian English is the official language [...] Although standard Bahamian is non-rhotic, many Bahamians view r-full American pronunciations as "correct" and try to imitate them, even to the extent of introducing a hypercorrect /r/ in [...] Baharmas.
  2. ↑ Reaser, Jeffrey; Torbert, Benjamin (2008-12-19). Bahamian English: morphology and syntax. De Gruyter Mouton. doi:10.1515/9783110197181-101. ISBN   978-3-11-019718-1.
  3. 1 2 Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English. Vol. 3: Beyond the British Isles. Cambridge U. Press. pp. 565–570, 589–590. ISBN   978-0-521-28541-4.
  4. ↑ Childs, Becky; Wolfram, Walt (2004). "Bahamian English: Phonology". In: A handbook of varieties of English, 1. pp. 438-441.
  5. ↑ Childs, Becky; Wolfram, Walt (2008). "Bahamian English: phonology". In Schneider, Edgar W. (ed.). Varieties of English. Vol. 2: The Americas and the Caribbean. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 239–255.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "Linguistic Features".
  7. ↑ Aceto, Michael (2020-12-31), "Eastern Caribbean English-derived language varieties: phonology", A Handbook of Varieties of English, De Gruyter, pp. 481–500 (486), doi:10.1515/9783110197181-033, ISBN   978-3-11-019718-1 , retrieved 2024-10-06
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Smith, Rogan (19 July 2021). "16 Bahamian Words You Need to Know | This Bahamian Gyal".
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Storr, John Frederick (1964). Ecology and Oceanography of the Coral-Reef Tract, Abaco Island, Bahamas. Geological Society of America. ISBN   978-0-8137-2079-1.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 "15 Phrases to Know Before Visiting the Bahamas". 22 December 2017.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 "Bahamian Slang | This Bahamian Gyal". 27 May 2018.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 "Bahamas Slang Bahamian Speak Talk".
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 "Bahamas words and phrases 2022 | 15 fun sayings and quotes". 30 June 2018.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Talkin Sex Stuff". 21 March 2013.
  15. 1 2 3 "Ting's to Say".
  16. 1 2 How to Buy and Sell Real Estate in the Bahamas: Insider's Guide. Matthew Simon. 12 March 2012. ISBN   9781438250519.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.