Caribbean English

In some countries with a plurality Indian population, such as Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, Caribbean English has further been influenced by Hindustani and other South Asian languages.

[citation needed][note 4] The development of Caribbean English is dated to the West Indian exploits of Elizabethan sea dogs, which are credited with introducing to England names for new-found flora and fauna via, for instance, Hakluyt's Principall Navigations of 1589 and Raleigh's Discoverie of the Empyre of Guiana of 1596.

'[9] Two sorts of anglophone immigrants to the seventeenth-century West Indies have been described in literature – the first, consisting of indentured servants and settlers mainly from southwestern England, predominantly speaking non-standard vernaculars of English; the second, consisting of colonial administrators, missionaries, and educators, predominantly speaking more standard forms of the language.

[10] The former, along with African slaves, are credited with the development and spread of [non-standard-] English-derived creole languages, while the latter are noted as frequent sources of derision of such speech.

[38] Notably, the earliest public teachers, credited with first developing Standard Caribbean English, had been 'imported direct from Britain, or recruited from among the "coloured" class on the islands who had benefited from their mixed parentage by receiving the rudiments of education.

[43] During Easter of that same year, the Caribbean Association of Headmasters and Headmistresses resolved – Be it resolved that this Association request the appropriate department of the University of the West Indies to compile a list of lexical items in each territory and to circulate these to schools for the guidance of teachers.Said resolution was promptly forwarded to Richard Allsopp, who by mid-1967 'already had some ten shoe-boxes each of about 1,000 6 × 4 cards and many loose unfiled cuttings, notes and other material [from Guyana, the Lesser Antilles, Belize, Jamaica, and Trinidad].

'[45] In 1971, Allsopp introduced the Caribbean Lexicography Project as 'a survey of [English] usage in the intermediate and upper ranges of the West Indian speech continuum.