Bajan

Survey

Bajan, then, a member of the Caribbean English Creole (CEC) family, shares a number of distinctive linguistic features at the level of phonology, grammar and lexicon with its sister territories. Nonetheless, it has several marked phonological features that lend to the distinctive Bajan ‘accent’. Very often speakers of other CECs stereotype Bajan speakers by their r-fullness, their seemingly ubiquitous use of glottal stops and the quality of the first vowel of PRICE/PRIZE. Unlike the other CECs, Bajan is fully rhotic, with [r] rarely deleted among all levels of society. Moreover, within the Caribbean, glottalizing of the voiceless obstruents [p, t, k] in syllable-final position is specific to Bajan; an example is departments pronounced [dɪ'pa:ɹʔmənʔs] . Also distinctive to Bajan is the phonetic quality of the first element of the diphthong that is pronounced as [ai] in the other CECs. Typically, the nucleus of PRICE/PRIZE backs and heightens to [Λɪ]. The last two features, specifically, often cause non-native Bajan speakers to conjecture that Barbadians are speaking some form of dialect reminiscent of the west of England, or an Irish English brogue.