Producing linguistic authenticity

This paper investigates two datasets of Bahamian Creole, a historical radio soap opera from the early 1970s and a set of sociolinguistic interviews recorded in 1997/1998, with the double aim of (1) assessing the former’s value as a source of vernacular speech and (2) tracing recent grammatical change in the variety. Our linguistic feature is past inflection, a high-frequency morphological variable whose language-internal and external constraints are well-researched across a number of high-contact varieties of English, including African American English and Caribbean English-lexifier creoles. Employing mixed-effects modeling, we show that linguistic and social constraints work in very similar ways in both datasets, but the historical radio data generally show higher probabilities of the creole variant, i.e., zero marking. This need not necessarily be attributed to decreolization but can also be explained by way of the hypercorrect usage of load-bearing features, which, however, does not mar these data’s overall authenticity.