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Age‐grading in the Anglophone Creole of Tobago
Author(s) -
YousseF Valerie
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/1467-971x.00194
Subject(s) - creole language , grading (engineering) , standardization , standard english , competence (human resources) , psychology , sociology , linguistics , social psychology , political science , philosophy , civil engineering , law , engineering
This study investigates the range of Creole and Standard English tense‐aspect markers used by men and women at two age levels in the island of Tobago in the southern Caribbean. People aged 70 and over, and people aged 16–21 were compared on critical social variables and interviews were designed to tap their full range of communicative competence. The educated young people evidenced low usage of Standard English relative to the older group. In addition, all the young people showed evidence of focusing on new mesolectal norms for public use. In contrast, older more educated speakers favoured the acrolect as their public variety while the least educated manual workers disfavoured mesolectal marking. The study is not taken to suggest a directionality of language change for the whole society because differences suggest themselves to be age and circumstance specific. It indicates, however, that we may have overestimated the extent to which norms are shared in any given Caribbean sociolinguistic complex and may have overestimated the trend to standardization in present day societies.