“You want a good Bethel twang? Is a mix up, mix up.” Issues of language authenticity in the Anglophone Caribbean with specific reference to Trinidad & Tobago
Abstract
This paper considers to what extent authentic language varieties can be identified in the Anglophone Caribbean, and most specifically in Trinidad & Tobago at the present time, and makes a case for our recognizing that we need to acknowledge mixed varieties and mixed language usage as authentic where we find it to be normative. The paper sets the Caribbean quest for authenticity of language in the broader frame of the search for a Caribbean aesthetic and examines briefly the evolving process aimed at authenticating creole languages through codification and literary representation. In so doing, it notes that our intellectual pursuits do not necessarily mesh with the concerns of community speakers and that ultimately a line has to be drawn between our own perceptions of authenticity and those of the everyday speaker. The comment in the title of the paper that tells us that the ‘real’ language is, in fact, a ‘mix-up’, was produced by an informant who was being quizzed on this very matter and who spoke in the context of a small rural village in Tobago, untrammelled by the forces of late-modern contact in a setting which might have allowed for the continued existence of a single coherent historically derived variety if any such context might be found
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Authenticity in creole-speaking contexts: An Introduction
- “Did you know? Did you know? Dis Trini could flow”: Mobilizing sociolinguistic resources in Trinidadian Rapso music
- The appropriation of African American Vernacular English and Jamaican Patois by Nigerian hip hop artists
- Making it real: ‘Jamaican’, ‘Jafaican’ and authenticity in the language of British youth
- The local, the global, and the authentic: Language change and the construction of authenticity in Bequia
- “You want a good Bethel twang? Is a mix up, mix up.” Issues of language authenticity in the Anglophone Caribbean with specific reference to Trinidad & Tobago
- Buchbesprechungen
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Authenticity in creole-speaking contexts: An Introduction
- “Did you know? Did you know? Dis Trini could flow”: Mobilizing sociolinguistic resources in Trinidadian Rapso music
- The appropriation of African American Vernacular English and Jamaican Patois by Nigerian hip hop artists
- Making it real: ‘Jamaican’, ‘Jafaican’ and authenticity in the language of British youth
- The local, the global, and the authentic: Language change and the construction of authenticity in Bequia
- “You want a good Bethel twang? Is a mix up, mix up.” Issues of language authenticity in the Anglophone Caribbean with specific reference to Trinidad & Tobago
- Buchbesprechungen
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
