The official language of Jamaica is English. This would be unremarkable were it not for a 2001 report, cited by the Linguistics Department of the University of West Indies (JLU n.d. online) which states: ‘many Jamaicans lack competence in English’. English exam results from 2007 reflect this: a failure rate of seventy-one percent among children (Irvine 2008b online). While this suggests the relevance of sociological factors, it is clear that on a simpler level a difference exists between the standard, official language and the common language of everyday use. We are talking, of course, about ‘Jamaican Standard English’ (JSE) and ‘Jamaican Creole’ (JC).

In the following, I will attempt to trace the growth of the field of linguistics in the “West Indies”. The following overview will make it clear that significant development has taken place in Caribbean-based linguistics, particularly at UWI, in a relatively short period of time, and that this is largely due to the efforts of Caribbean-born scholars. However, these developments have also come at a cost: at times, linguistics at UWI has been rather insular and restricted. I argue that there has been a view among Caribbean linguistics that the realities of the Caribbean are, somehow, incompatible with theoretical linguistics, which, it is thought, is pursued as a goal in itself, divorced from reality, and will neither do justice to language in the Caribbean, nor find practical use there. I will argue that this view is unjustified.

Increasingly, there have been proposals for grammar writers to take into account the realities and needs of the community in order to produce grammars that can serve the interests of the native speakers (e.g. Kadanya 2006, Rehg 2014). Obviously, a grammar of an endangered language should, among other things, lead to the maintenance and/or revitalization of the language. However, grammars that are comprehensive and clear (Noonan 2007, Payne 2014, Rice 2006), and yet focus on and meet the needs of the target community, are still rare. This paper provides a reflection, from a community linguist's perspective, on how a community-based grammar could be conceived and written in the African context. It is based on an exploration of grammars written by native and non-native speakers, as well as on the feedback from native speakers. The paper points out some practical challenges involved (e.g. with data collection, and actual use of the grammars), and upholds that a grammar that is based on community mobilization, sensitiza-tion, and training requires a greater involvement and follow-up by the grammar writer, especially after publication.

The development of the sugar industry in the town Violeta (located in the central region of Cuba), at the end of the second decade of the 20th century, caused the external and internal migration of Haitians to this territory of Ciego de Ávila; whose presence has been notable not only in economic terms, but also culturally, especially in the contact between Creole and the Spanish language. However, today it is evident that the linguistic identity brought from Haiti has been weakened by a group of descendants who deny its Antillean roots; while others advocate its maintenance. In this sense, a sociolinguistic study was carried out to determine what level of conservation is manifested in Haitian creol and what are the causes or reasons that contribute to the existence of diverse linguistic realities. For this, we worked with a group of 28 informants —without distinction of sex— that correspond to Haitian emigrants and their descendants born in Cuba; those who kept the Creole language in a diglossic state, but gradually replaced it with other modes of speech. The present study focused on the phonetic and syntactic level, which shows how, from the contact between languages —and the need for the Haitian to try to learn Spanish as a second language—, a mixture of linguistic codes was produced without that a Creolization of Spanish was produced. In addition to understanding how three evolutionary trends have manifested in creol: maintenance, weakening and cancellation.