common to the Caribbean creoles. Likewise, past perfective or completive done (already
mentioned) is found in these creoles.
The verb does not have to be marked for tense, although the particle been (or did or
had) + verb is available for marking the past and go or gain + verb are used for the future.
However, aspect is always expressed, whether process (e.g. da or duz + verb, sometimes
with the ending -in), completive or perfective (e.g., dun + verb), or active of a dynamic
verb or stative of a state verb (zero marking). These particles can also be combined in
various more complex structures. These examples of verb usage are taken from Bajan,
the Barbados basilect (Roy 1986). In addition, the creoles make use of serial verbs, such
as come or go, indicating movement towards or away from the speaker (carry it come
‘bring it’) or instrumental tek (tek whip beat di children dem ‘beat them with a whip’)
(Roberts 1988: 65). The passive is widely expressed by the intransitive use of a transi-
tive verb (The sugar use already ‘was used’), but there is also a syntactic passive with
the auxiliary get (The child get bite up) as well as the possibility of impersonal expres-
sions (Dem kill she ‘She was killed’) (ibid.: 74f.).
All of these points make clear the close relationship within this ‘family’ of creoles.
These correspondences have sometimes been strengthened and sometimes weakened by
the one factor or the other such as population movement in the Caribbean (see 11.5). The
single most important factor affecting almost all of these English creoles is the presence
of Standard Caribbean English as the acrolect.
West Africa The linguistic situation in West Africa is significantly different inasmuch
as there is no large native English speaking population in this region. English is, it is true,
the official language of Cameroon (with French), Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria
and Sierra Leone, but it is almost exclusively a second language. One of the chief results
of this is that there is no continuum like that found in the Caribbean. Instead, English is
the diglossically High language (as are such regional languages as Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa
in Nigeria), and West African Pidgin English (WAPE) is diglossically Low (as are
the numerous local indigenous languages). There are intermediate varieties of English
and, therefore, a continuum of sorts. However, these forms are not like the mesolects of
the Caribbean, but are forms of second language English noticeably influenced by the
native languages of their various speakers. Note that in West Africa there are relatively
few creole speakers and relatively many pidgin users. West African Standard English is
in wide use by the more highly educated in the appropriate situations (administration,
education, some of the media). WAPE is employed as a lingua franca in inter-ethnic
communication in multilingual communities, sometimes for relaxed talk or joking and as
a market language, even in the non-anglophone countries of West Africa.
However, because the pidgin has such a great amount of internal variation, some people
feel that there is a need for some type of standardization of it. Sometimes the pidgin is
a marginal pidgin or jargon, which is more severely limited in use, vocabulary and
syntax; and sometimes, an extended pidgin, which has all the linguistic markers of a
creole without actually being a mother tongue. Furthermore, creolized (mother tongue)
forms of it are in wide use in Sierra Leone, where it is becoming more important than
English, and in Liberia, both of which are countries to which slaves were returned – either
from America, Canada and the West Indies or from slave ships seized by the British navy
– from the late eighteenth century on. Their first language was or became a form of
(Creole) English. This accounts for the approximately five per cent of Liberians who are
342 NATIONAL AND REGIONAL VARIETIES OF ENGLISH