The Caribbean

The Trini Sing-Song: Sociophonetic variation in Trinidadian English prosody and differences to other varieties

“…The development of English and Creole in Trinidad thus occurred under the influence of many additional (adstrate) languages and language varieties, most notably, (Trinidadian) French Creole and (Trinidadian) Bhojpuri (Youssef & James, 2008: 322-323). The latter is said to have influenced considerably the intonational phonology of TEC (and TrinE), that is, initially Trinidadians of Indian descent and later on, by way of convergence between the ethnic groups, also Afro-and mixed-identifying Trinidadians (Gooden & Drayton, 2017; see Section 3). Today, languages other than TrinE/TEC are only spoken by a very small number of people in Trinidad, and Trinidad's sociolinguistic situation is thus similar to that of many other Caribbean islands: standard English coexists with a (mesolectal) English-based Creole along a continuum of variation, while, on a functional level, both varieties have traditionally been in diglossic distribution (Winford, 1985), with TEC being associated with informal, oral and TrinE with formal domains, such as education, news media, business, and politics (Youssef, 2004: 44).…”

“…As reports indicate a high degree of direct influence from TEC on TrinE prosody (Ferreira & Drayton, 2017;Youssef & James, 2008: 324), a similar age-stratified pattern as well as variation along the same sociolinguistic lines might be expected in TrinE as in TEC. A key finding in Gooden and Drayton (2017) is that accentual phrasing marked with L* pitch accents and H boundary tones is generally well established in present-day TEC and (mostly) independent of a speaker's ethnic background and residence in urban versus rural areas. Older speakers, in contrast, born at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century showed marked ethnic differences.…”

“…The present paper thus provides a comparative phonetic perspective on pitch variation of TrinE with one variety whose intonational phonology is more similar (i.e., IndE) and one that is more different to that of TrinE, but historically influential (i.e., BrE). Additionally, while explicitly concerned with standard TrinE (and not TEC), the analysis of sociolinguistically conditioned prosodic variation in the current study is informed by previous findings on variation and change in the intonation of TEC (Drayton 2013;Gooden & Drayton 2017), considering that heavy influences of TEC on TrinE at the prosodic level are expected (Ferreira & Drayton 2017; also see Section 2). Specifically, drawing on comparable datasets for all three varieties, we address the following research questions:…”

“…Following the long-standing focus on the region's English-lexicon Creoles in linguistic research on the anglophone Caribbean, most studies on prosodic aspects of Caribbean varieties (e.g., Devonish, 2002;Gooden et al, 2009;Sutcliffe, 2003) have been concerned with Caribbean English Creoles. Similarly, in Trinidad, there is research into the prosodic system of Trinidadian English Creole (TEC) both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective (Drayton, 2013;Gooden & Drayton, 2017). By contrast, little research has investigated prosodic aspects of standard TrinE (or other Caribbean standard varieties).…”

“…The prosody of (standard) TrinE is reported to be heavily influenced by that of TEC and show the same intonational pattern (Ferreira & Drayton, 2017; see also Youssef & James, 2008: 334), but this claim is still to be verified by large-scale empirical research on standard TrinE. At the same time, differences in the extent to which older and younger speakers make use of such patterns also seem to exist, at least in TEC (Gooden & Drayton, 2017; see Section 3).…”