Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Introduction ⇫ ¶

Bahamian Creole (autoglossonyms: (Bahamian) Dialect, Bahamianese) is spoken by ca. 250,000 speakers in The Commonwealth of The Bahamas, an archipelago of 700 islands and 2,400 cays covering 5,358 square miles and extending between southeastern Florida in the northwest and Hispaniola in the southeast. Only thirty of the islands are inhabited. The population of the Bahamas totals ca. 300,000. The country is heavily urbanized, with roughly two thirds of all Bahamians living in the capital, Nassau. Some 85% of the Bahamian population are black, with whites amounting to 12% and Asians and people of Spanish and Portuguese origin to 3%. The 2000 census registered 21,000 Haitians in the Bahamas, but some estimates including illegal immigrants put the current number as high as 78,000, or 25% of the population. The Bahamas is one of the wealthiest Caribbean countries, its economy being largely dependent on tourism and offshore banking.

2. Sociohistorical background ⇫ ¶

Although Columbus first set foot in the New World on the Bahamian island of San Salvador, the Spanish were not interested in settling in the Bahamas. They were aware of the poverty of the Bahamian soil, the lack of mineral wealth, and the treacherous waters surrounding the archipelago and thus contented themselves with carrying off the indigenous Arawak Indians to the gold mines of Hispaniola, where they died out in the early 1500s.

       The first permanent colony was established on the northern island of Eleuthera by a few dozen British religious dissenters from Bermuda in 1648. It was Bermudians, too, who – in 1666 – first settled on New Providence, on the site of what is now Nassau. From the beginning, servants and slaves were a part of the shipments that arrived. Since Bermuda had first been settled in 1609, those blacks could have been born either in Bermuda or in Africa, and it is unclear what they spoke. In any case, the Bahamian population grew; by 1671, when the first census was taken, it amounted to roughly a thousand (Craton 1968: 70). Whites clearly outnumbered blacks: About 60% of all Bahamians were white at the time.

       From the beginning of the colony, Bahamians had relied on the sea for a living in fishing, turtling, or the salvaging of shipwrecks. Log cutting, salt raking, and subsistence farming were important as well. Common to all these pursuits was the close contact between whites and blacks. During the early period of colonialization, thus, blacks in the Bahamas must have had ample access to the white settlers’ dialects – whatever they may have spoken upon their arrival. An interlude of piratical chaos and anarchy in the early 1700s did not change this situation. On the contrary, Craton & Saunders (1992: 111) note that piracy leveled both class and race distinctions, and suitable blacks were recruited to it just like whites and enjoyed the same privileges aboard the ships.

       It was during the 1720s, after order had been restored, that the first substantial cargo of Africans (295 slaves from Guinea) was brought directly to the Bahamas (Craton & Saunders 1992: 119). The same decade also saw the establishment of a few plantations on New Providence. Nevertheless, the Bahamian economy was still far from being a typical plantation economy: Of a total of 988 persons living in the Bahamas in 1722, only 28% were listed as black, with percentages varying between 35% for New Providence and 4% for Harbour Island.

       The black proportion of the population gradually increased over the course of the eighteenth century; by 1773, it had grown to 54%. Its increase was greatest on New Providence, where 64% were now black (Craton & Saunders 1992: 162). At the same time, the number of slaves per holding was rising, and ever more restrictive slave acts were introduced. Also, slaves imported from Africa came to be preferred to slaves from other colonies, because even though slaves from other parts of the New World were better “seasoned”, i.e. familiar with plantation society and work, they were seen as more difficult to control. What this implies linguistically is that access to white varieties of English must have become progressively restricted – particularly on New Providence, where the growth of the black population segment was most noticeable. The likelihood that a full-fledged creole was in general use among Africans in the Bahamas at the time, however, still seems small, as most blacks must still have lived in conditions that favoured the acquisition of more or less close approximations to the white settlers’ dialects.

Source: Hackert (2004: 37)

The creole spoken in the Bahamas today was imported at the end of the eighteenth century; it was brought by free blacks and the slaves of loyalist North Americans, who had supported the British Crown during the American Revolutionary War and – after the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 – left the newly independent United States. Of the approximately 100,000 who emigrated, only about 7,300 (of whom 5,700 were black) actually went to the Bahamas, but this tripled the colony’s population, increased the proportion of blacks from one half to three quarters, and raised the number of permanently settled islands from three to a dozen (Craton & Saunders 1992: 179). Historical and linguistic evidence (Hackert & Huber 2007; Hackert & Holm 2009) suggests that the Gullah-speaking areas, and South Carolina in particular, played a prominent role as a point of origin for both white and black loyalists, which makes it highly probable that what was taken to the Bahamas was an early form of Gullah rather than of African American Vernacular English, as had been assumed earlier (Holm 1983; Shilling 1984). Contemporary Bahamian Creole may therefore be regarded as a diaspora variety of Gullah.

3. Sociolinguistic situation ⇫ ¶

The majority of black Bahamians today speak a mesolectal form of Bahamian Creole. Basilectal speakers tend to be elderly Bahamians and/or those who live on the more remote islands, especially in the southeastern Bahamas. As in most other post-colonial speech communities, negative attitudes towards the vernacular prevail. It is often viewed as “bad” or “broken” English, associated with backwardness and a lack of education, and seen as an obstacle to the country’s modernization and integration into the global economy. Since independence in 1973, however, it has received a boost as a symbol of national identity; there are now a number of literary works which employ it (e.g. Strachan 1997), and traditional folk tales and songs are now being researched by Bahamians themselves (e.g. Glinton 1994) instead of by foreign anthropologists. In spite of the popularity Bahamian Creole has received through these works, the role of Standard English as the sole official language of the country is uncontested. A consensus seems to have emerged that although the “dialect” should not be eradicated, it should remain restricted to certain domains and functions. According to most Bahamians, Bahamian Creole is appropriate in informal, private situations as well as to convey humour and social authenticity; if “serious” topics are at hand, Standard English is the form of speech called for.

4. Phonology ⇫ ¶

Bahamian Creole has a vowel system with five front vowels, five back vowels, and two central vowels. This system shows features which unite Bahamian Creole with other English-based creoles of the Caribbean as well as with North American Englishes, particularly those spoken by African Americans and in the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country. As for individual vowels, the Bahamian vowel of the trap lexical set (Wells 1982) is often notably lowered and backed and thus realized as [a] instead of [æ]. The strut vowel may be rounded and thus be located close to the cardinal position of [ɔ]. The nurse vowel is often realized as [əi], with the result of near-homophones such as verse and voice. Bahamian Creole is non-rhotic and therefore possesses centring diphthongs in near, square, north, force, and cure. The diphthongs of near and square are generally merged, so that fear and fair are homophonous. Before nasals, [ɛ] may be raised to [i], possible homophones being same and seem. A similar merger underlies homophones such as home and whom. Whereas the prize diphthong is often monophthongized, the price diphthong is not. 

       Bahamian Creole has 24 consonants, the three bracketed consonants in Table 3 being rare or absent in all but acrolectal speech. A diagnostic feature is the stopping of both voiced and voiceless interdental fricatives in all positions, as in tree for ‘three’, udder for ‘other’, or toot for ‘tooth’. Again, Bahamian Creole appears to occupy an intermediate position, with the general pattern resembling that found in other Caribbean English creoles but rates for stopping more like those observed in African American Vernacular English (Childs & Wolfram 2004: 442). Another feature which unites Bahamian Creole with other varieties of English is syllable-final consonant cluster reduction, as in the realization of guest as guess or missed as miss (Childs & Wolfram 2004: 445–446; Hackert 2004: 148–155). As elsewhere in the Caribbean, when the velar stops [k] and [g] occur before [æ] or [a], they may be palatalized, as in the stereotypical gyal ‘girl’. A feature uniting Bahamian Creole with the dialect spoken by white Bahamians is syllable-onset [h] deletion and/or insertion (as in and for hand and/or harm for arm), with insertion much more frequent in the latter. Similarly, the alternation of [w] and [v] (as in wine for vine or velcome for welcome) tends to be more prominent in the speech of white Bahamians than it is in Bahamian Creole. Finally, the devoicing of voiced sibilants in syllable coda and intervocalic positions (as in since for sins) also occurs among both speaker groups but with greater frequency among whites.

As for prosody, Bahamian Creole has been described as more syllable-timed than British or American varieties of English, but syllable timing is not absolute. Word stress is generally on the first syllable. Noteworthy intonation patterns include the high rising terminal contours of affirmative sentences and a wider pitch range than is usually observed in British or American Englishes (Childs & Wolfram 2004: 447–448).

       There is no official orthography, so that varying techniques of “eye dialect” are employed in works representing Bahamian Creole in writing.¹

5. Noun phrase ⇫ ¶

There are various ways of marking number in Bahamian Creole. The plural may not be expressed on the noun at all (often when an expression indicating quantity is present); it may also be indicated via pre- or post-nominal them or the -s suffix:

In both positions, them may be combined with the plural suffix, as in (2):

Them also functions as the associative plural marker, sometimes introduced by and (e.g. my aunt and them ‘my aunt and her family/friends/associates’).

       Occasionally, mass or uncountable nouns are -s marked; they may nevertheless have singular meaning (e.g. advices ‘a piece of advice’). Plural marking in Bahamian Creole may be described as a case of inherent variation, as no speaker has categorically unmarked or marked plurals, and all speakers, even basilectal ones, exhibit at least some -s marking.

       The English possessive suffix ’s is also used variably in Bahamian Creole but tends to become more frequent as one moves toward the acrolect. In more basilectal varieties, simple juxtaposition of possessor and possessed is the norm (e.g. the boy uncle [ART boy uncle] ‘the boy’s uncle’). A further possibility of expressing possession is through own:

There are also phrases with for + noun; apart from the interrogative pronoun for who ‘whose’, however, for-constructions appear to be restricted to contexts of marriage or descent in contemporary Bahamian Creole:

There are three articles in Bahamian Creole, the definite article the, which is used with presupposed-specific noun phrases, and the indefinite articles one and a, which are employed with asserted-specific noun phrases. Of the latter, one is considered the more basilectal variant. A also occurs before nouns beginning with a vowel. No article is used with generics and non-specific noun phrases.

       Personal pronouns are often not marked for case; thus, the subject form can function in object position and as possessive pronoun, too. Reflexives also employ the subject pronoun (e.g. theyself). Gender is often not distinguished. There is an optional number distinction in the second person. Possible plural forms are you, yinna, and you-all, with you-all being regarded as the “educated equivalent” of yinna, which is now restricted to conservative speech (Holm & Shilling 1982: 227). Pronoun copying of subject noun phrases, as in (5), is common.

Adjectives precede the noun in Bahamian Creole. Comparative constructions may be regularized, with -er and -est extended to both longer (e.g. beautifuller, beautifullest) and irregular adjectives (e.g. worser, worsest). Double comparatives also occur (e.g. much more better). Reduplication has intensifying function (e.g. pretty-pretty). Much functions as a quantifying adjective for both count and non-count nouns (e.g. too much people).

6. Verb phrase ⇫ ¶

Just as in other creoles, the unmarked verb plays a very important role in Bahamian Creole. Most frequently, it is used as an instantiation of the aspectual category of perfective, where it typically refers to non-stative verb situations in the past:

Unmarked stative situations most frequently receive a non-past interpretation:

Depending on contextual information, a base form may also denote a past stative, as in the case of want in (8) as well as various imperfective situations, such as habituals and generics, both past, as in (9) and non-past in (10):

(8)       And then afterwards the policeman had to put handcuff on his hand and on his two feet

         'cause      he             want                    try       fight       them.

         because   3sg.sbj    want.stat.pst    try       fight      3pl.obj

         ‘… because he wanted to try to fight them.’

(9)       Once upon a time was a merry good time,

         the     monkey chew                  tobacco, and   he             spit                  white   lime.

         art    monkey                          chew.hab.pst tobacco    and                 3sg.m.sbj spit.hab.pst white     lime

         ‘… the monkey used to chew tobacco and spit white lime.’

In its range of past readings, the unmarked verb closely parallels the English simple past, and, in fact, variation between unmarked and inflected past-reference lexical verbs is one of the defining features of the Bahamian Creole verb phrase (Hackert 2004: 117–219). This variation has typically been attributed to socially induced decreolization but may simply constitute a case of language-internal grammaticalization (cf. Bybee et al. 1994: 91).

       The preverbal particle did is a highly salient marker of past temporal reference. As the mesolectal equivalent of the “typical” creole tense marker been (Bickerton 1975: 35–36), which also occurs in Bahamian Creole (cf. McPhee 2003: 30–36) but is much more frequent among rural and/or older speakers, did often conveys past meaning with stative verb situations (11) and past-before-past with non-statives (12):

Unfortunately, however, this pattern accounts for less than two thirds of all did-marked verb situations. Moreover, the latter make up only a small minority (ca. 2%) of all past-reference situations. Finally, did occurs not only with stative and non-stative verbs but also precedes adjectives (13) as well as other TMA markers (14):

As for the temporal relationships entertained by did-marked verbs, an anterior analysis is clearly insufficient, as the marker occurs just as frequently in coincident contexts (see ex. (15), where the speaker is talking about the sponging era in the Bahamas, which ended immediately before World War II) and even in posterior ones (16):

Its pragmatic functions are various, too (Hackert 2004: 95–97): Did may have the task of summarizing what precedes or follows, or of marking secondary story lines, elaborations, or reorientations. Sometimes, it signals temporal order or distance; it also occurs in hypothetical contexts. What all of these contexts have in common is that they contain background information (cf. Wallace 1982: 213). Bahamian Creole did is thus more profitably analyzed as a discourse strategy rather than merely as a marker of tense or temporal relations (Hackert 2004: 86–103).

       As in non-creole varieties of English, the progressive is instantiated in Bahamian Creole via the -ing form of the verb. What distinguishes Bahamian Creole from English is the nature and status of the auxiliary preceding V-ing (cf. below): In Bahamian Creole, be is often absent in the present but usually occurs in the past; moreover, it is generally levelled to is or was except among more acrolectal speakers (Shilling 1978: 39–41). There are remnants of a preverbal progressive marker in Bahamian Creole; they take the form of a (also spelled are) or de (da, dar, dare, or dere):

Bahamian Creole possesses an explicit present habitual marker, does, which may also be reduced to is or ’s:

Another possibility in habitual contexts is what Shilling (1978: 66) labels “lone be”, i.e. non-finite be in copula or auxiliary use, as in

The negative of this form is don’t be:

Finally, both the unmarked (or variably ‑s-marked) verb as well as will/’ll or would/’d are possible in present habitual contexts in Bahamian Creole. The prime marker of past habituality is used to:

As in English, this form is not obligatory; the unmarked verb and would/’d occur frequently as well. Less frequently employed options are will/’ll and does/is/’s:

Like many other Caribbean English creoles, Bahamian Creole has a preverbal marker of completive aspect, done, as in (23):

Done occurs with a wide range of predicates, both verbal and non-verbal. Verbal predicates can be either stative or non-stative and active or passive in meaning. Non-verbal predicates comprise noun phrases, adjectives, and locative complements, as in (24):

The precise status of done in Caribbean English creoles has been subject to some controversy, which is reflected in the terminological confusion surrounding the form, with suggestions ranging from “perfective” over “perfect” or “emphatic perfect” to “terminative”. I follow Winford (1993) and view Bahamian Creole done as a marker of completive aspect, with secondary meanings encompassing all of the above-listed terminological variants. These secondary meanings may arise either through the interaction of lexical and grammatical aspect (with activities favouring a terminative and stative verbs often requiring an “already” interpretation), or they may come about as contextually determined interpretations that are not (yet) grammaticalized but part of the pragmatic parcel carried by the form, such as the intensive or negative illocutionary force conveyed in particular done-marked contexts (Hackert 2004: 76–86).

Copula (and auxiliary) be structures (cf. above) show two distinguishing characteristics: First, there is often levelling to is in the present and was in the past, and, second, the copula may be variably absent. Factors favouring this absence in present contexts are:

(i)      copula type, with am and are more frequently absent than is;

(ii)    preceding grammatical environment, with personal pronouns conducive to copula absence compared to full noun phrases;

(iii)   following grammatical environment (Reaser 2004: 25–28), with high rates of copula absence before adjectives (as well as  before ‑V-ing and -gonna constructions) and low rates of absence before noun phrases – a pattern which has been observed not only for Bahamian Creole, but also for numerous other mesolectal Caribbean English creoles as well as for African American Vernacular English.

In past contexts, copula (and auxiliary) be is usually present. Whereas English distinguishes between its past forms according to whether the situation described has absolute past reference (was) or perfect meaning (been), for non-acrolectal speakers of Bahamian Creole, was appears to function as a universal past copula or auxiliary, with been favoured by locative environments as well as by bounded verb situations (Hackert 2004: 107–114):

Unlike English, Bahamian Creole does not possess a single perfect category. Depending on the perfect meaning to be expressed, various options are available. The perfect of result takes preverbal done:

The experiential perfect is expressed either by the unmarked verb (27) or a been + locative construction (28):

The perfect of recent past takes the unmarked verb again, whereas the perfect of persistent situation is variously marked via was or been followed by V-ing  (ex. 29 and 30), noun phrases (ex. 31 and 32), adjectives, or locative complements:

An unmarked stative verb may also express a perfect of persistent situation:

(33) She             know            me         long  time.    

       3sg.f.sbj    know.prf     1sg.obj long  time

       ‘She has known me for a long time.’

Bahamian Creole has an elaborate system of modal verbs, whose English etyma are, for the most part, clearly recognizable. In terms of meaning, however, Bahamian modals often differ significantly from the latter. Thus, coulda, woulda and shoulda are usually best translated by English could, would, and should, while Bahamian could and would are generally equivalent in meaning to English can and will, the latter being rare in all but acrolectal Bahamian Creole:

The negative corresponding to could is can’t [kja:n]. A frequently occurring form expressing a speaker’s probabilistic interpretation of events is mus’e [mʌsi:]. Even though historically a modal interpretation is plausible, synchronically mus’e shows the freedom of distribution characteristic of an adverb:

Table 5 summarizes the forms of the verb complex in Bahamian Creole.

7. Simple sentences ⇫ ¶

Word order is generally SVO. With ditransitive verbs, Bahamian Creole varies between a double-object construction (37) and an indirect-object construction (38):

There are a number of passive constructions in Bahamian Creole. There is, first, what Winford (1993: 118) labels the “basic passive”. This type involves no agent phrase, no morphological marking to indicate that the verb is passive, and no copula:

Second, there is the get-passive, which consists of the auxiliary get and an unmarked transitive verb as its complement:

The Standard English be-passive, finally, only occurs among very acrolectal speakers.

       According to Shilling (1978: 50), Bahamian Creole “does not have inversion for questions”. Thus, wh- questions simply have the wh- word sentence-initially, as in (41):

Tag questions possess the invariant tag hey (or eh; Holm & Shilling 1982: 102), and yes-no questions employ intonation only. A single type of question regularly has inversion: Negative sentences of the kind Ain’t you hear her say that? (Shilling 1978: 131), which convey “the speaker’s assumption that the positive is correct”, always begin with the initial verbal negator ain’t.

       The negator ain’t constitutes an important element of the Bahamian Creole system of negation. It is used in all copula or auxiliary environments in which Standard English employs negated forms of be (e.g. He ain’t coming) or have (e.g. I ain’t never been there); in such environments, it “persists well up in the continuum” (Shilling 1978: 96). More basilectal speakers also use ain’t in places where Standard English has don’t/doesn’t or didn’t, as in

Another negator, don’t, is employed categorically to negate non-stative non-past verbs, as in (44), as well as habitual be (cf. above).

It also occurs after modals or quasi-modals, as in

In stative non-past contexts, don’t varies with ain’t even among basilectal speakers (e.g. I ain’t know vs. I don’t know). In past contexts, there is variation between didn’t and ain’t, with stative verbs taking didn’t much more frequently than non-stative ones. In such contexts, never constitutes another alternative (e.g. I never knew him in high school vs. I didn’t know him in high school and I didn’t grow up like that vs. My parents never grow us up like that). A final important element of negation in Bahamian Creole is negative concord, which is most common in post-verbal position (46), but also affects indefinites before the verb (47), and occurs cross-clausally as well (48):

Subject-verb concord constitutes another case of inherent variation in Bahamian Creole. Third-singular -s occurs but appears to be an optional feature not affected by well-known factors such as subject type (Reaser & Torbert 2004: 397). Instead, verbal -s is variably attached to all persons, where at least for some speakers it seems to have assumed the function of marking habituality (e.g. Children does that. ‘Children do that.’; We plays a lot. ‘We play a lot.’)

8. Complex sentences ⇫ ¶

In Bahamian Creole, relative clauses follow the head noun. The two most frequent relative markers are who and what. The latter may occur with both non-human and human referents. There is no case marking on the relative marker, and it may also be missing entirely, as in

For, sometimes followed by to, functions as a verb complementizer, e.g. in purposive constructions:

Verbal complements following like may not be overtly introduced at all (e.g. She like cook). Apart from its use as a main verb, say often immediately follows utterance verbs such as tell or talk but also cognitive or emotion ones such as believe, know, or hear, as in (51):

In all such constructions, say functions as a serial verb with “complementizer-like function” (Winford 1993: 292). Possibly in extension of this complementizer function, say occurs very frequently as what might be termed a “quotation marker”. In this function, in which it occurs on its own at the beginning of clauses or sentences, say merely indicates the continuance of quoted matter (cf. Hackert 2004: 313–322):

9. Lexicon ⇫ ¶

The lexicon is one of the best documented aspects of Bahamian Creole. Apart from a standard reference work, the Dictionary of Bahamian English (Holm & Shilling 1982), there are at least two popular collections of Bahamian vocabulary (Glinton-Meicholas 1994, 1995). Lexical evidence has been adduced to argue for the origins of Bahamian Creole in two ways.

First, as early as 1923, American folklorist and anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons had pointed to similarities in the vocabularies of Gullah and Bahamian Creole (Parsons 1923: XVII). Taking up this thread, Holm (1983) presented almost sixty words and expressions found in both Gullah and Bahamian Creole but not in other Atlantic English creoles, concluding that the two had to be “sister” varieties descending from a formerly much more widespread North American creole. Based on a statistical analysis of 253 phonological, lexical, and grammatical features, Hackert & Huber (2007), finally, confirmed the close relationship between Gullah and Bahamian Creole, arguing, however, that the latter must be considered a descendant of the former (cf. §2).

Second, vocabulary has been adduced to investigate the regional provenance of the Bahamians’ British forebears. In a comparison of 2,500 Bahamian expressions not used in contemporary standard British or American English with British regionalisms in the English Dialect Dictionary, Holm (n.d.) assigned a full 43% of them to Scotland or the Northcountry, with another 25% from Ireland and the Westcountry. The Scottish bias of the Bahamian vocabulary has been questioned by Smith (1983: 113), who points out that “the vast majority of these items or usages are also evidenced from other forms of English.” Conclusive evidence in this regard remains to be established.