Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

Pidgin Creole
.
INTERVIEWER:
Right.
WOMAN:
Yes, yes.
INTERVIEWER:
Yes, so you do.
WOMAN:
A little bit, yeah, mm-hmm.
INTERVIEWER:
And did your family speak that when you 
were . . . ?
WOMAN:
No, no. Strictly . . .
INTERVIEWER:
No. Just strictly English.
WOMAN:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, you would, you 
would fi nd people really in the country, those are the 
ones that would speak that, and the 
Amerindians
, those 
are the ones that would speak that-that Creole language, 
but no.
INTERVIEWER:
Do you hear diff erences between your accent 
and other accents in the Caribbean?
WOMAN:
Yes, oh yes.
INTERVIEWER:
For example . . .

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The Us
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115
WOMAN:
Uh, Barbadians. Oh, you could tell the Barbadian 
accent, it’s, uh, I don’t know how to describe it, but you 
could tell that Barbadian accent. Th
e Jamaican accent 
is also diff erent. But the Guyanese, we roll our 
r
s when 
you’re speakin’ so people say that they could always tell a 
Guyanese by the way the 
r
s come out. Um, the Trinidadi-
ans, they have a singsong kind of way that they speak, so, 
yeah, you could tell the diff erence.
7. A SOUTHERN ACCENT
MAN:
Yes, very.
INTERVIEWER:
What kind of accent?
MAN:
Well, I grew up in Arkansas, and so I do have, uh, 
infl uence of the South in-in my, in my speech. I left 
Arkansas after high school, however, and so for, since 
high school, I’ve lived on the