Eastern Caribbean English-derived language varieties: phonology Conclusion

There are many polemical topics of great interest to creole studies (e.g. the nature of the creole continuum, the possible effects of decreolization, possible loci of creole genesis and language diffusion, the structural features and historical processes shared by the group of languages called creoles by linguists, et al.) and most conclusions based upon English-derived data are largely drawn from Jamaican, Guyanese, and, most often, one of the several English-derived creoles of Suriname. This reductionist attitude is insufficient since the sociolinguistic profiles of many of the locations in the Anglophone Eastern Caribbean have never even been documented. Once we have documented the languages spoken in these neglected locales, only then, will researchers be able to accurately and precisely discuss – with an extensive set of attested data in hand – how these varieties fit into a larger linguistic and sociohistorical view of English-derived language genesis in the Caribbean and the Atlantic region in general.