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Nation Language
"Nation language" is the term coined by scholar and poet Kamau Brathwaite McArthur, Tom,"Nation language" ''Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language'', 1998. and now commonly preferred to describe the work of writers from the Caribbean and the African diaspora in non-standard English, as opposed to the traditional designation of it as "dialect", which Brathwaite considered carries pejorative connotations that are inappropriate and limiting. In the words of Kamau Brathwaite, who is considered the authority of note on nation language and a key exemplar of its use: We in the Caribbean have a ..kind of plurality: we have English, which is the imposed language on much of the archipelago. It is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch and Spanish. We also have what we call creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported languages. We have also what is called ...
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Kamau Brathwaite
The Honourable Edward Kamau Brathwaite, CHB (; 11 May 1930 – 4 February 2020), was a Barbadian poet and academic, widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon.Staff (2011)"Kamau Brathwaite." New York University, Department of Comparative Literature. Formerly a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite was the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry ''Born to Slow Horses''.Staff (2006)"Kamau Brathwaite." The Griffin Poetry Prize. The Griffin Poetry Prize, 2006. Brathwaite held a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968)Staff (2010)"Bios – Kamau Brathwaite." The Center for Black Literature. The National Black Writers Conference, 2010. and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM).Robert Dorsman, translated by Ko Kooman (1999)"Kamau Brathwaite", Poetry International Web. He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and was a winner of the ...
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John Agard
John Agard FRSL (born 21 June 1949 in British Guiana) is an Afro-Guyanese playwright, poet and children's writer, now living in Britain. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry."Poet John Agard is selected for Queen's poetry medal"
BBC News, 20 December 2012.
He was awarded BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award in November 2021.


Biography

Agard grew up in Georgetown, British Guiana (now ). He loved to listen t ...
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Spanglish
Spanglish (a portmanteau of the words "Spanish" and "English") is any language variety (such as a contact dialect, hybrid language, pidgin, or creole language) that results from conversationally combining Spanish and English. The term is mostly used in the United States and refers to a blend of the words and grammar of the two languages. More narrowly, Spanglish can specifically mean a variety of Spanish with heavy use of English loanwords. Since different Spanglish arises independently in different regions of varying degrees of bilingualism, it reflects the locally spoken varieties of English and Spanish. Different forms of Spanglish are not necessarily mutually intelligible. The term ''Spanglish'' is first recorded in 1933.Lambert, James. 2018. A multitude of ‘lishes’: The nomenclature of hybridity. ''English World-wide'', 39(1): 31. It corresponds to the Spanish terms Espanglish (from ''Español'' + ''English'', introduced by the Puerto Rican poet Salvador Tió ...
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Guyanese Creole
Guyanese English Creole (''Creolese'' by its speakers or simply Guyanese) is an English-based creole language spoken by the Guyanese people. Linguistically, it is similar to other English dialects of the Caribbean region, based on 19th-century English and has loan words from African, Indian, Arawakan, and older Dutch languages. Varieties and influences There are many sub-dialects of Guyanese Creole based on geographical location, urban - rural location, and race of the speakers. For example, along the Rupununi River, where the population is largely Amerindian, a distinct form of Guyanese Creole exists. The Georgetown (capital city) urban area has a distinct accent, while within a forty-five-minute drive away from this area the dialect/accent changes again, especially if following the coast where rural villages are located. As with other Caribbean languages, words and phrases are very elastic, and new ones can be made up, changed or evolve within a short period. They can also ...
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Creole Language
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar (e.g., by eliminating irregularities or regularizing the conjugation of otherwise irregular verbs). Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist. The precise number of creole languages is not known, particularly as many are poorly attested or do ...
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Jamaican Patois
Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with West African influences, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. A majority of the non-English words in Patois come from the West African Akan language. It is spoken by the majority of Jamaicans as a native language. Patois developed in the 17th century when enslaved people from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned, and nativized the vernacular and dialectal forms of English spoken by the slaveholders: British English, Scots, and Hiberno-English. Jamaican Creole exhibits a gradation between more conservative creole forms that are not significantly mutually intelligible with English, and forms virtually identical to Standard English. Jamaicans refer to their language as ''Patois'', a term also used as a lower-case noun as a catch-all description of pidgins, creoles, dialects, and vernaculars worldwide. Creoles, ...
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Édouard Glissant
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a French writer, poet, philosopher, and literary critic from Martinique. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary and Francophone literature. Life Édouard Glissant was born in Sainte-Marie, Martinique. He studied at the Lycée Schœlcher, named after the abolitionist Victor Schœlcher, where the poet Aimé Césaire had studied and to which he returned as a teacher. Césaire had met Léon Damas there; later in Paris, France, they would join with Léopold Senghor, a poet and the future first president of Senegal, to formulate and promote the concept of '' negritude''. Césaire did not teach Glissant, but did serve as an inspiration to him (although Glissant sharply criticized many aspects of his philosophy); another student at the school at that time was Frantz Fanon. Glissant left Martinique in 1946 for Paris, where he received his PhD, having stud ...
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Martinique
Martinique ( , ; gcf, label= Martinican Creole, Matinik or ; Kalinago: or ) is an island and an overseas department/region and single territorial collectivity of France. An integral part of the French Republic, Martinique is located in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies in the eastern Caribbean Sea. It has a land area of and a population of 364,508 inhabitants as of January 2019.Populations légales 2019: 972 Martinique
INSEE
One of the Windward Islands, it is directly north of Saint Lucia, northwest of

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Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for '' The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific '' A Treatise on the Astrolabe'' for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament. Among Chaucer's many other works are '' The Book of the Duchess'', '' The House of Fame'', '' The Legend of Good Women'', and '' Troilus and Criseyde''. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyn ...
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Jamaican Patois
Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with West African influences, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. A majority of the non-English words in Patois come from the West African Akan language. It is spoken by the majority of Jamaicans as a native language. Patois developed in the 17th century when enslaved people from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned, and nativized the vernacular and dialectal forms of English spoken by the slaveholders: British English, Scots, and Hiberno-English. Jamaican Creole exhibits a gradation between more conservative creole forms that are not significantly mutually intelligible with English, and forms virtually identical to Standard English. Jamaicans refer to their language as ''Patois'', a term also used as a lower-case noun as a catch-all description of pidgins, creoles, dialects, and vernaculars worldwide. Creoles, ...
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New Day (novel)
''New Day'' is a 1949 book by Jamaican author V. S. Reid. It was Reid's first novel. ''New Day'' deals with the political history of Jamaica as told by a character named Campbell, who is a boy at the time of the Morant Bay Rebellion (in 1865) and an old man during its final chapters. It may have been the first novel to use Jamaican vernacular as its language of narration. Morris, Mervyn. "Introduction" to V. S. Reid's ''New Day''. Caribbean Writers Series 4. Kingston & London: Heinemann, 1973. Reid employed the Jamaican dialect as a springboard for creating a distinctive literary variant and for achieving a greater depth in the English language.Cooke, Michael G., "V. S. (Vic) Reid", ''Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 125: Caribbean and Black African Writers'', second series. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993, pp. 256–60. Reid was motivated to write ''New Day'' by his discontentment with how the leaders George William Gordon and Paul Bogle of the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) wer ...
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The Jamaica Gleaner
''The Gleaner'' is an English-language, morning daily newspaper founded by two brothers, Jacob and Joshua de Cordova on 13 September 1834 in Kingston, Jamaica. Originally called the ''Daily Gleaner'', the name was changed on 7 December 1992 to ''The Gleaner''. The newspaper is owned and published by Gleaner Company publishing house in Kingston, Jamaica., ''The Gleaner'' is considered a newspaper of record for Jamaica. History ''The Gleaner'' is the oldest continuously published newspaper in the Western Hemisphere, and is considered a newspaper of record for Jamaica. The morning broadsheet newspaper is presently published six days each week in Kingston. The Sunday paper edition is called the ''Sunday Gleaner''. The Sunday edition was first published in 1939, and it reaches twice as many readers as the daily paper. The influence, particularly historically, of the newspaper is so large that "Gleaner" has become synonymous in Jamaica for "newspaper". ''The Gleaner'' contains regu ...
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