Trinidad

If we examine Trinidad first, as the larger territory in size and population, we find that the Spanish had little sustained interest in it since it did not yield precious metals. As a result, the Spanish residents of the island never numbered more than a few hundred, though these did succeed in severely decimating the native Amerindian population in the course of time. By 1765, the Amerindians numbered only 2503 of an original 30-40000 (Brereton 1981). It is notable, however, that a great many towns in Trinidad have retained Amerindian names down to the present e.g. Arima, Tunapuna, Arouca, Tacarigua. This is unlike Tobago, whose main retention is the name of the island itself, originally Tavaco.

In the late eighteenth century, the Spanish encouraged French migration to Trinidad. This allowed those fleeing the political upheaval which climaxed in the French Revolution to set up sugar plantations, using slaves brought either directly from West Africa or from French Caribbean territories such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Grenada, St. Lucia and Cayenne (now French Guyana). Chacon, the then governor, granted a second Cedula giving free land to settlers bringing slaves with the result that Trinidad’s population was transformed between 1783 and 1803. At that time there were reported to be 20,464 ‘French’-speaking slaves, 5275 free coloureds of whom the majority spoke French, and 2261 whites of whom the majority again were French speaking (Wood 1968: 33).

As a direct result of these incursions the first Creole language spoken in Trinidad was a French-lexicon creole (Thomas 1869). That language, which we see recorded by Wood as French, was undoubtedly a French-lexicon creole, for the slaves at least, and most probably for the plantation owners at that time. This language survived intact throughout the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the establishment of a strong British rule during that period. The first attestations of an English creole are found recorded for 1838 in the diaries of a Mrs. Carmichael (quoted in Winer 1984) and by others. They reported on some of the slaves knowing two creole varieties, French- and English-lexicon, and feigning ignorance of the latter for reasons of excluding the British master class from their conversation.

Trinidad is sometimes held not to have had a basilectal English-Creole variety, but the Spectator texts found by Winer and Gilbert (1987) show that she did have a basilect in the 1860’s. It appears that the island experienced a gradual shift in language use from a French-lexicon basilect to an English-lexicon mesolect under the steadily encroaching influence of English varieties. Villages such as Paramin, Blanchisseuse and La Fillette on the north coast, and Carenage in the west, retain elderly native French Creole speakers down to the present time.

Solomon (1993) makes a strong case for a language crossover element in the evolution of the creole languages, noting the lack of syllable final -r in words such as car and cart as being a direct effect of this. He argues that this feature distinguishes Caribbean islands with a French background e.g. Grenada, St. Lucia, Dominica, from those with an English background like Barbados, Guyana and Jamaica with a history of colonization by r-pronouncing British varieties including the south-west of England and Ireland. However, basilectal Tobagonian exhibits lack of syllable-final -r also as well as some Jamaican varieties with no French influence.

Trinidad had to look outside for the support of its agrarian economy. From 1845 until 1917 there was continuous Indian migration to Trinidad as the British government encouraged labourers to come mainly from Uttar Pradesh in Northern India to populate the plantations that the African population had abandoned following emancipation. They brought a number of languages including Bhojpuri and Tamil, but the one which won out and became a lingua franca was Bhojpuri, a language related to, but not a dialect of, Hindi. Moving to the rural areas of central Trinidad, the Indian population retained Bhojpuri for some time with French Creole as their first Trinidadian language. Historically it has been difficult to disambiguate some of the lexicon between these two languages. Winford (1972; 1978) found the speech of rural Trinidadians to be the most conservative phonologically. Solomon (1993: 166) has also noted the fact that syllable-final [-r] is pronounced in words and names of Indic and Arabic origin as distinct from those of European origin.

There was a Spanish presence in the nineteenth century through a group of 4000 Spanish-Amerindian persons who came mainly from Venezuela and settled in the foothills of the Northern Range to cultivate cocoa. These were the ancestors of the few remaining Spanish speakers in Trinidad today.

Also contributing to the multiracial and cultural environment of the time were 1298 Madeirans who arrived in 1846 and approximately 2400 Chinese who arrived between 1853 and 1886. Between 1841 and 1861 a large number of African ex-slaves, including 6500 from St Helena and Sierra Leone, came into Trinidad; these Alleyne (1980: 211) considers to have had a direct influence on the emerging English-lexicon creole of Trinidad. There were others who spoke Yoruba, Ibo, Congo and Manding. In addition, there were many who migrated from other parts of the Caribbean, including 14,000 Barbadians. These migrant Caribbean people introduced a number of creole varieties to Trinidad and were particularly important in the transition of Trinidad from French-lexicon to English-lexicon Creole earlier alluded to.