This paper examines how the Model of Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces (EIF; Buschfeld and Kautzsch 2016), an offshoot and further development of Schneider’s Dynamic Model (2007), fares in explaining the coming-into-being and current situation of Bahamian Englishes. By integrating colonial and postcolonial forces into a unified account, the EIF Model elegantly accounts for the long-standing regional and supra-regional ties linking the Bahamas with Britain and the United States and for how they have led to the sociolinguistic and linguistic complexity characterizing the Bahamian situation today. The paper also offers some critical remarks on developmental models of World Englishes in general; these revolve around the ideas of varieties as sets of features, that a variety’s most natural basis is the nation, and that all varieties of English undergo not just change but evolution, culminating in a more or less homogeneous standard variety.

The study investigates language attitudes in The Bahamas, addressing the current status of the local creole in society as well as attitudinal indicators of endonormative reorientation and stabilization. At the heart of the study is a verbal guise test which investigates covert language attitudes among educated Bahamians, mostly current and former university students; this was supplemented by a selection of acceptance rating scales and other direct question formats. The research instrument was specifically designed to look into the complex relationships between Bahamian Creole and local as well as non-local accents of standard English and to test associated solidarity and status effects in informal settings. The results show that the situation in The Bahamas mirrors what is found for other creole-speaking Caribbean countries in that the local vernacular continues to be ‘the language of solidarity, national identity, emotion and humour, and Standard the language of education, religion, and officialdom’ (Youssef 2004: 44). Notably, the study also finds that standard Bahamian English outranks the other metropolitan standards with regard to status traits, suggesting an increase in endonormativity.

This study examines newspaper writing from ten Caribbean countries as a window on the norm orientation of English in the region. English in the former British colonies of the Caribbean has been assumed to be especially prone to postcolonial linguistic Americanization, on account of not just recent global phenomena such as mass tourism and media exposure but also long-standing personal and sociocultural links. We present a quantitative investigation of variable features comparing our Caribbean results not just to American and British reference corpora but also to newspaper collections from India and Nigeria as representatives of non-Caribbean New Englishes. The amount of American features employed varies by type of feature and country. In all Caribbean corpora, they are more prevalent in the lexicon than in spelling. With regard to grammar, an orientation toward a singular norm cannot be deduced from the data. While Caribbean journalists do partake in worldwide American-led changes such as colloquialization, as evident in the occurrence of contractions or the tendency to prefer that over which, the frequencies with which they do so align neither with American English nor with British English but often resemble those found in the Indian and Nigerian corpora. Contemporary Caribbean newspaper writing, thus, neither follows traditional British norms, nor is it characterized by massive linguistic Americanization; rather, there appears to be a certain conservatism common to New Englishes generally. We discuss these results in light of new considerations on normativity in English in the 21st century.

The present study investigates the system of verbal negation in Bahamian Creole and relates it to the respective systems of historically connected varieties in North America, i.e. contemporary as well as earlier varieties of African American Vernacular English and Gullah. Building on a corpus of roughly 98,000 words, the study provides a variable analysis of the all-purpose negator ain’t and its competitors and offers some remarks on invariant don’t, negative concord, and the preverbal past-tense negator never. It shows that in particular the syntactic and temporal distribution of ain’t, which have repeatedly been discussed in connection with the debate about the origins of African American Vernacular English, reveal striking similarities between Gullah and its immediate descendant Bahamian Creole, while confirming a more distant relationship with African American Vernacular English.

The current study investigates variation in the marking of two aspectual subcategories of the imperfective in Bahamian English. First, it looks into variable auxiliary be use in progressive and future constructions, that is, the variation between full, contracted and zero be in non‐past V‐ing environments and related contexts. Second, the paper examines variable application of preverbal does/is/’s in non‐past habitual environments. The two variables were selected to represent the ‘informal’ and ‘anti‐formal’ group respectively, that is, one feature that classifies as a reduction of English structure and one direct transfer from the creole (Allsopp, 1996, pp. lvi–lvii). Thus, in addition to examining the linguistic constraints, the study will take a close look at the stylistic factors conditioning the variation, placing a special focus on the distribution of the non‐standardized variants over various registers as well as how speakers employ them to create linguistic styles.