Deconstructing English in the Caribbean and beyond

The historical underrepresentation of European languages in research on Creole communities due to approaches that have tended to cast them as monolithic and static coupled with the need to legitimise Creoles is taken up in this chapter through the lens of Caribbean varieties of English. We interrogate the linear approach of fitting language varieties into neat categories, a legacy of standard language ideologies, and advocate for examining concepts like “English”, “standard”, and “acrolect” as ideological constructs using the notion of forcefields to understand the various influences on Caribbean Englishes. The chapter reviews the place of English in Caribbean Creole communities in some of the major models of World Englishes and advocates for a more nuanced understanding of such post-colonial multilingual contexts. We also examine the continuum model and its problematic assumptions and claims in relation to varieties of English. The chapter supports the call to recognise so-called mesolectal speech as focused and stable varieties and encourages more work on registers, styles, and identities associated with English, and the indexical values attached to different ways of deploying linguistic resources that are traditionally classified as “English”.