You might have heard about the Caribbean words recently included in the latest update to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). As a note to readers from the United States in particular, in the English-speaking Caribbean this is the definitive dictionary for us, as former and current English colonies. The additions have been interesting. As a…
‘Tell Desperadoes when you reach that hill I decompose, but I composing still.’ ” Derek Walcott A statement so timely on the rot that pervades Trinidad that I had to double check the year it was written because I thought he was talking about our current state. We’ve been doing this nonsense for years.
We sang this hymn at my uncle’s funeral yesterday. He was born and raised in Maraval, but his wife was from Paramin, and they welcomed him with open arms. This song was a lovely tribute to the late “Mayor of Maraval”.
A message from the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico. We offer the Department at his family our condolences. I (Lisa) want to personally acknowledge my gratitude for his great kindness and warmth, which I valued immensely: Mervyn Coleridge Alleyne (1933-2016) Mervyn was a renowned sociolinguist and dialectologist whose ground-breaking work on […]…
As a journalist, every day I struggle with my use of the language to properly express my thoughts and experiences. I am always worried that I am saying the wrong thing, especially in my news scripts. But outside of matters of grammar and expression, and beyond issues surrounding the creative use of language, one of…
[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Eternity Martis (The Fader, 1 September 2016) writes about the trajectory of patois on the global stage concluding that “more than just slang—it’s a language of freedom.” [. . .] Patois, as well as its hybridized diasporic slang, is a language used by […]…
An article by Doreen St. Félix for MTV.Com. While listening to a radio transmission in Kingston, Stuart Hall suddenly felt lost. It was the early 1970s, and Hall had temporarily returned to his home country of Jamaica after two decades abroad. Back in 1951, Hall had won a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford,…