Current issues

Today in Barbados, one still finds remnants of class and race stratification delineating the vestigial struggles of the colonial era. While black Barbadians have made social and economic strides, largely controlling the local political sector in the upper and middle classes, whites have near monopoly in the larger commercial sectors. Along these lines, class differences within the racial strata of the island are also evident. Within the scholarly literature on Barbados and other Anglophone islands, poor whites, although relatively small in number, are historically and socially placed in the national sphere, albeit as a mythical or oftentimes autonomous entity. Despite the social existing partitions, researchers note that Barbadian identity is tied to a strong sense of and commitment to a national identity and shared culture. Such portrayals are evident in the unofficial national slogan, “All O’ We Is One” [All of us are one]. However, the Bajan language, despite being viewed as the local national language, has been ideologically linked to the island’s black population. Blake’s (1997) research on a racially-mixed poor community in Barbados shows its black and white populations to speak the local vernacular in a typically creole manner, particularly regarding morphosyntactic features, with whites at times displaying even more creole-like behavior. The linguistic similarities of these two groups may be crucially linked to their socioeconomic status on the island, which can be located in the political economy.

Clearly, diachronic and synchronic studies of all aspects of the Bajan language are wanting. Rich areas for linguistic inquiry include internal and regional variation, contact-induced change, race relations, as well as changes due to the current social and political economy of the island. While the Bajan language has been adequately examined in terms of genesis arguments, it remains an area for research in terms of broader issues arising in creole studies and sociolinguistics.