Trinidad Creole Language Resources

Back to World Creoles

Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago
On Historical Principles by Lise Winer
The first comprehensive, historical, scholarly dictionary of the English and English Creole languages of Trinidad & Tobago.

Winer, L. (1990). Orthographic standardization for Trinidad and Tobago: Linguistic and sociopolitical considerations. Language Problems and Language Planning, 14 (3), 237-268.

Linguistics Gullah Geechee First, it is shown that there are mismatches between the description of Gullah phonology in the body of 'Africanisms' and the phonology of the narratives. Thus, a number of patterns described in the main text are not represented in the transcription conventions of the narratives. On the other hand, close study of the narratives reveals patterns that are not described in the text, such as Nasal Velarization (NV) and the deletion of unstressed syllables in pre-stress position (PSD) in English cognates.
In addition, the transcription of the narratives often provides phonological variants, thus enabling the study of phonological variation in Gullah.
As shown in this paper, NV in the narratives in 'Africanisms' transforms an etymological alveolar nasal into a velar nasal after the diphthong /aw/. Similar patterns are found in related Creoles such as Jamaican, Guyanese and Trinidadian/Tobagonian Creole English.

Derek Walcott Pulitzer Prize Winner : was born in 1930 in Saint Lucia, Windward Islands, West Indies. He graduated from the University College of the West Indies and was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study American drama in 1957. Presently, he divides his time between Trinidad and Boston and teaches Drama and Poetry in the English Department at Boston University.

Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean
A different type of research problem is taken up by Robin Sabino, Mary Diamond and Leah Cockcroft in their chapter, ''Language variety in the Virgin Islands: Plural marking''. Not that plural marking is particularly troublesome, but the authors use this data to explore the effect of audience on production. The so-called 'observers paradox' is a particularly troublesome aspect of fieldwork.

According to some sources , the Caribbean is home to nearly 400,000
Muslims. Mostly East Indian in origin, they live on at least a dozen
Caribbean islands, including Trinidad , Suriname, Guyana, Barbados,
Grenada, Dominica, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Jamaica.

Black French which developed by the middle of the 17th C around the French bases and colonies on both sides of the Atlantic. Goodman points out the African features of Creole French dialects in the Caribbean - Guadeloupe, Martinique, Trinidad , Haiti, etc & Louisiana in N.America, [Gumbo], Cayenne in S. America but also half a world away, in Mauritius, Reunion and the Seychelles. Black French survives in West Africa, the Wolof of Senegal has left an imprint on the creole of Mauritius.

Focusing specifically on the contemporary Carib community in Arima, Trinidad , a site that focuses primarily on written documents is that of the Santa Rosa Carib Community.

Trinidad Music- Performing Rights Societies

The Harder They Come inspired Michael X to return to Trinidad where he met his death / murder at the hands of American tools. Blood and Music . I think Jim Pines writes about the theme in Black cinema articles.