Research background

Researchers have almost exclusively examined the morphosyntactic structure of Bajan in their quest to discover the linguistic origins of the language. Since the 1980s, linguistic research on the Bajan language has focused on the extent to which the language was influenced by the provincial dialects of England and the West African languages spoken by the slave populations. Debates ensued regarding the genesis of Bajan in terms of whether it should be considered a dialect of English or a Creole (similar to other Caribbean Creoles) with linguistic links to West Africa (cf. Hancock 1980; Cassidy 1986; Fields 1995; Rickford and Handler 1994). In the end, historical and synchronic studies of its grammatical structure suggest that Bajan has shown a wide range of linguistic variation throughout its history, with great co-occurrence of features attributable to superstrate (British dialects spoken in Ireland and southwest England), as well as substrate (African) influences (cf. Winford 2000).

The work of Fields (1995) reveals linguistic residues (e.g., invariant word order for questions, absence of number distinction in nouns, invariant pronoun usage) of a pidgin stage for Bajan that appears at least since the 18^th century. Fields argues that the social history and demographics of Barbados in the 18^th century provided an environment conducive to the formation of a creole from an earlier formed pidgin. Firstly, there was a dominant white planter group and a subordinate slave group with little social interaction between the two. Secondly, there was a period in which blacks vastly outnumbered whites. And thirdly, there was at some point a steady influx of new African slaves onto the island. Due to its extensive contact with English, Bajan has decreolized. One may argue that the language has decreolized to the extent that the range between its most creolized forms and Standard English is the smallest for the Anglophone Creoles spoken in the Caribbean.