Barbuda

The following information is from Aceto (2002b). Barbuda lies 28 miles north of Antigua. As is common in the Leeward Islands, droughts are often prolonged. Amerindian sites on the island indicate that Arawaks lived on Barbuda until the 13^th century. Carib Amerindians visited the island occasionally from (what would eventually be called) Dominica from the 13^th century to the early European period. The first group of European colonists arrived from nearby St. Kitts in 1628; due to Carib attacks and poor soil, this first effort was soon abandoned. In 1632, colonists, again from St. Kitts, made another attempt to settle Barbuda; however, they were driven away again by Caribs. In 1681, Caribs from St. Vincent and Dominica raided a settlement of 20 Europeans on Barbuda in several hundred canoes, killing eight of the settlers.

In 1668, James Winthorpe leased Barbuda and began the first period of private “ownership” of Barbuda by English speakers from Europe. Winthorpe eventually relinquished his lease, and in 1685 Christopher and John Codrington leased the island for the next 200 years. Thus, Barbuda became the private property of the Codrington family, who first settled in Barbados but were often absentee owners living in Somerset, England. The Codringtons’ goal was to use Barbuda as a means to create supplies for their plantations on nearby Antigua. Barbuda was not a “true colony” since it was the private property of the Codringtons. The presence of Europeans on the island during the colonial period varied from a single Anglophone to perhaps as high as three or four. Slaves lived virtually on their own except for a solitary (and often absent) Codrington manager and one or two overseers.

The population of Barbuda has never been large. Even today it is only about 1,500 persons. In 1715, there were 118 persons on the island; in 1804, 314; and in 1832, 492.

Barbudan Creole English (BCE) exhibits many of the same sound segments typical in the Anglophone Eastern Caribbean. However, there are contraction processes and reciprocal phonetic effects similar to vowel harmony rules that, to my knowledge, have not been described in the creolistics literature. That is, discrete grammatical markers may appear to be reduced or even disappear on the surface of some utterances. Some examples of the vowel harmony-like effects (in bold) are: [ya ga du dat tumaro] “Are you going to do that tomorrow?” and [mo go du dat tumaro] “I’m going to do that tomorrow.” In isolation, the future marker is [go] and the first person singular pronoun is [mi]. Examples of contraction processes at play are (note that the forms within parentheses are a transitional stage assumed by this researcher; contracted forms are in bold): [ʃi a go siŋ (ʃi a ga siŋ) i ga si ~ ʃi gaa siŋ] ”She is going to sing” (the [a] of the future tense marker a go influences the quality of the vowel in go) and [(mi go biit yu) ~ mo go biit yu ~ moo biit yu] “I’m going to hit you” (the [o] in go influences the quality of the earlier vowel in the pronoun mi).

Some of the more robust contraction processes involve the co-occurrence of bilabial nasals when past tense utterances are spoken in the first person singular. That is, when the first person pronoun mi is immediately followed by [mIn], the past tense marker, the pronoun mi is often submerged or contracted within the past tense form: [mɪn de crai haad ~ mi mɪn de crai haad]  “I cried hard” and [mɪn da taak ~ mi mɪn da (de + a) taak] “I was talking.”