Languages of the Caribbean
In the Caribbean, the official language is usually determined by whichever colonial power (England, Spain, France, or the Netherlands) held sway over the island first or longest.
French was the official language of Martinique while Martinican Creole became a regional language as the island has European, French, Spanish, British, Indian (Tamil), Portuguese, Blacks (Africans), Martinicans, Caribs and many other ethnic groups.
On the islands of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire, a creole based on Portuguese, Spanish and West African languages known as Papiamento is predominant, while in Sint Maarten, Saba and Sint Eustatius, English, as well as a local English creole, are spoken.
Many indigenous languages (actually spoken with the mainland Caribbean rather than the islands) have been added to the list of endangered or extinct languages—for example, Arawak languages (Shebayo, Igñeri, Lokono, Garifuna of St. Vincent, and the one now labeled Taíno by scholars, once spoken in the Greater Antilles), Caribbean (Nepuyo and Yao), Taruma, Atorada, Warrau, Arecuna, Akawaio and Patamona.
[12] A substantial proportion of the world's creole languages are to be found in the Caribbean and Africa, due partly to their multilingualism and their colonial past.
[13] Papiamento, spoken on the so-called 'ABC' islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao), shows traces of both indigenous languages and Spanish,[14] Portuguese, and Dutch lexicons.).
In Jamaica, though generally an English-speaking island, a patois drawing on a multitude of influences including Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arawak, Irish and African languages is widely spoken.
In Barbados, a dialect often known as "bajan" have influences from West African languages that can be heard on a regular daily basis.
In Haiti, a French-speaking island that also mixed between the French and West African languages to be based on Haitian Creole after the slaves won independence from France on 1 January 1804 that was once mixed between the white French settlers and African slaves that was imported from Africa to the New World.
Slavery was finally abolished on 27 April 1848 in the French Caribbean which marks the end of a long painful harsh chapter of the Slave eras.
Saint Lucian Creole emerged as a form of communication between the African slaves and the French colonizers.
While the French Revolution broke out in Paris in 1789, a revolutionary tribunal was sent to Saint Lucia, headed by Captain La Crosse.
The Battle of Vertières led by the former slaves including Dessalines defeated the French and declared the colony of Saint-Domingue independence on 1 January 1804 and renamed the country Ayiti meaning (Land of Mountains).
In earlier historical times, other Indo-European languages, such as Danish or German,[16] could be found in northeastern parts of the Caribbean.
Widespread syntactical structures include the common use of adjectival verbs for e.g.: "He dirty the floor", the use of juxtaposition to show possession as in English Creole's "John book" instead of Standard English's "John's book", and the omission of the copula in structures such as "he sick" and "the boy reading".
Quite often, only one term is used for both animal and meat; the word nama or nyama for animal/meat is particularly widespread in otherwise widely divergent Caribbean languages.
