Problems that Creole Speaker has in Learning Standard English
Introduction In Central America, it is a kind of unofficial secret, often unknown even to residents of the individual countries, that there are hundred of thousands first language English derived Creole speakers all along the eastern Caribbean shores. Local varieties of Spanish are the official languages of all the Central American countries except Belize, but English derived Creole varieties as well as a host of Amerindian languages can be heard up and down the Caribbean costs of Central America. In Panama, there are more than 100,000 Creole speakers in three general locations: the Caribbean province of Bocas del Toro, near the Costa Rican border; Panama City and Colón Province. Most of these Creole speaking Central American might be labeled as Afro Caribbean of West Indies descents that are relocated to the area from Anglophone Island in the Antilles more than a century ago. ... Creole Language. ... What is a Creole language? Creole studies have only been recognized as a legitimate and discrete discipline worthy of linguistics inquiry since the late 1960´s and early in the 1970´s. Since then, there has been an explosion of researches and even a few positions at universities where creolists are encouraged to pursue this type of research. Creole languages are spoken all over the globe from the Americas and the Atlantic region to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific region. When we speak of a language being realized – say an English derived Creole – that designation typically means that a substantial amount of its lexicon is derived from that major contributing language, which would be regional dialect varieties of English spoken by settlers and colonist from the British Isles. Other components of the Creole may also derive from the lexifer language as well as the native language spoken by the subordinate (i. ... Creole languages can typologically be defined as a group in that they share many structural features with each other even when they do not share the same lexifier language. That is, many French derived, Portuguese derived, English derived Creoles share such features as noun + they to signal the plural, pre verbal tense and aspect markers, an unmarked past tense for non native verbs, etc. However, not all of the languages linguists call Creole shares all of these features (which will be presented in more details below, when we examine the specific features of Panamanian Creole English) B. Panamanian Creole speaker’s background Numbers vary regarding the numbers of Creole speakers in Panama. ... However, that doe not mean that PEC has not changed in some interesting ways in the last century and a half.