Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
What Caribbean languages have a default between them, even if only Native to Broken?
I tend to allow such a default if speaking or reading one language fluently grants any kind of useful head start on learning the other, to make it less expensive in terms of points to model real people who not only speak their own language, but can get by in a lot of neighboring languages, which is more the rule than the exception in the world as a whole, for all that Anglophones are prone to monolingualism.
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I can only speak to the nations I or good friends have experience with (Guyana, Trinidad, St. Vincent, Jamaica, Grand Caiman, and Suriname). You'll need to find other sources on french and Spanish derived languages, and I don't have any special knowledge about Belize, the Bahamas, or even the Virgin islands.
Grand Caiman pretty much uses international English. I'd recommend using Jamaican Creole and East Caribbean Creole English, defaulting to each other at accented. International English* should default to them at accented, but start out at broken for the first few weeks as a familiarity penalty. Taki Taki (from suriname) is its own thing, I wouldn't default it to anything else at higher than broken, but I'd try to make it easy to learn**. Not sure where st. Vincent french Patois fits in, but it doesn't default to english. I can't speak to how pure or common Suriname Dutch is. Many English West Indians can vary the strength of their dialect intentionally. None of these dialects can be bought written (except maybe Taki-Taki. Not sure about that).
*No Idea if that's the correct term or not.
**basically all of Suriname speaks Taki Taki, which is very opaque if you're not experienced with it, but easy for speakers of many different languages to learn. Its not a terribly large language, with a vocabulary of around 500 words. Yes, they're proud of speaking what they claim is the world's smallest language.
Caribbean peoples have a history of inventing languages specifically to hide communication from Europeans. St. Vincent french Patois and Taki Taki both have this kind of history. Taki Taki became the main language, while St. Vincent french Patois is dying out. Look out for others, I only know a few parts of the Caribbean, and its big and diverse, which was the point of my first post.
These dialects co-exist alongside international english, of course, and many nominally english west Indians can speak and understand international english just fine, but many can't, or struggle with it.
While East Caribbean Creoles are mostly interchangeable, they still have strong accents and you can determine where people come from by listening to them. Reiterating the original point, Each nation has its own accent and its own attitudes, geography, and architecture. Some nations are close to each other, but its worth checking, because each nation feels different.
I hope this helps!