Enslavement, forced migration, war and colonization have led to the global dispersal of Black communities and to the fragmentation of common experiences. The majority of Black language researchers explore the social and linguistic phenomena of individual Black communities, without looking at Black experiences outside a given community. This groundbreaking collection re-orders the elitist and colonial elements of language studies by drawing together the multiple perspectives of Black language researchers. In doing so, the book recognizes and formalizes the existence of a “Black Linguistic Perspective." Written exclusively by Black scholars on behalf of, and in collaboration with local communities, the book looks at the commonalities and differences among Black speech communities in Africa and the Diaspora. Topics include: language issues in Southern Africa and Francophone West Africa, the language of Hip Hop and the language of the Rastafaria in Jamaica.

The linguists in this volume interrogate the interpretations of the history of Caribbean languages, the use of these languages for literary expression and their role in the democratization of education and the development of Caribbean people. Several of the articles deal with profoundly controversial topics, including the question of competence in a Creole environment; the expansion of Rastafarianism globally and how word-formation devices reflect Rastafarian thinking; the use of the vernacular in West Indian education; the relevance of vernacular literacy for education; the use of Creole in Caribbean literary texts; and how to determine dialect boundaries, especially in linguistic situations in which Creoles from two distinct lexical bases vie for social space and supremacy.

The Haitian Creole Language is a book that deals broadly with a language that has too long lived in the shadow of French. With chapters contributed by leading scholars in the study of Haitian Creole, it provides information on this language's history, structure, and use in education, literature, and social interaction. The Haitian Creole Language is an indispensable tool for those seeking knowledge about the centrality of language in the affairs of Haiti, its people, and its diaspora.

Exploring the various contact points between Iberian colonialism and Indigenous cultures, the contributors identify the crucial parameters of language evolution that have led to today's state of linguistic diversity in Latin America. The essays approach language development through an ecological lens, exploring the effects of politics, economics, cultural contact, and natural resources on the indigenization of the Spanish and Portuguese languages in a variety of local settings. They show how languages adapt to new environments, peoples, and practices, and the ramifications of this for the spread of colonial languages, the loss or survival of Indigenous ones, and the way hybrid vernaculars get situated in larger political and cultural forces.

The contributors, many of them leading authorities on language variation in the Caribbean, explore various aspects of language, culture and identity in the Caribbean region, focusing on the following themes: Creole linguistics, Caribbean lexicography, language in folklore and religion, literature, music and dance, and language issues in Caribbean schools.

One of the original stated aims of Language and Liberation was to explain the language question to those involved in the fight to free the populations of the Creole speaking Caribbean from external political and economic control. The other was to provide a historical, political and socioeconomic context within which supposedly value-free official language policies and practices could be understood. The context within which official language policy operates has, however, become more complex, both internationally and within the Caribbean.

This book offers a description and assessment of the Jamaican language situation. It is aimed at providing basic information for interested laypersons as well as students of language and also at counteracting traditional social and linguistic prejudices. Topics specifically discussed include the functions of English and Creole (Patois) in the society and attitudes to these varieties, the origins, development and present state of English in Jamaica, the role of language in education and various proposals for taking Creole into account in classroom teaching. Although the main focus is on the Jamaican situation, this is also set within the framework of English worldwide and of developments outside of Jamaica involving the use of Creole.

This study embarks on the intriguing quest for the origins of the Caribbean Creole language Papiamentu. In the literature on the issue, widely diverging hypotheses have been advanced, but scholars have not come close to a consensus. The present study casts new and long-lasting light on the issue, putting forward compelling interdisciplinary evidence that Papiamentu is genetically related to the Portuguese-based creoles of the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, and Casamance (Senegal). Following the trans-Atlantic transfer of native speakers to Curaçao in the latter half of the 17th century, the Portuguese-based proto-variety underwent a far-reaching process of relexification towards Spanish, affecting the basic vocabulary while leaving intact the original phonology, morphology, and syntax. Papiamentu is thus shown to constitute a case of "language contact reduplicated" in that a Creole language underwent a second significant restructuring process (relexification). These explicit claims and their rigorous underpinning will set standards for both the study of Papiamentu and Creole studies at large and will be received with great interest in the wider field of contact linguistics.

This collection shows how linguists in sociolinguistics and Creole studies can benefit from utilizing data, theories and methods from each other. The volume addresses fundamental sociolinguistic topics such as social class, style, fieldwork, speech community, sociolinguistic competence and language attitudes with data from Guyanese and other Caribbean Creoles. Recurrent concepts are also considered including language versatility, variation and change, vernacular use, school success and criminal justice in African America and the Caribbean, using models, case studies and methodologies from sociolinguistics.