There are six official languages spoken in the Caribbean:
Spanish (official language of Cuba, Dominican Republic, Panama, Puerto Rico, Antigua and Barbuda, Bay Islands (Honduras), Corn Islands (Nicaragua), Isla Cozumel, Isla Mujeres (Mexico), Nueva Esparta (Venezuela), the Federal Dependencies of Venezuela and San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina (Colombia) French (official language of Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Saint Barthélemy, French Guiana and Saint-Martin) English (official language of Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda (de facto), The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, Puerto Rico (which despite being a United States territory, has an insubstantial anglophone contingent), Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Sint Maarten, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina (Colombia), Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands) Dutch (official language of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten, and Suriname) Haitian Creole (official language of Haiti) Papiamento (a Portuguese and Spanish-based Creole language) (official and most spoken language of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao) There are also a number of creoles and local patois. Dozens of the creole languages of the Caribbean are widely used informally among the general population. There are also a few additional smaller indigenous languages. Many of the indigenous languages have become extinct or are dying out.
At odds with the ever-growing desire for a single Caribbean community,For Caribbean community see Commonwealth Caribbean and CARICOM the linguistic diversity of a few Caribbean islands has made language policy an issue in the post-colonial era. In recent years, Caribbean islands have become aware of a linguistic inheritance of sorts. However, language policies being developed nowadays are mostly aimed at multilingualism.
Languages Most languages spoken in the Caribbean are either European languages (namely Spanish, English, French, and Dutch) or European language-based creoles.
Spanish speakers are the most numerous in the Caribbean by far, with over 25 million native speakers in the Greater Antilles. English is the first or second language in most of the smaller Caribbean islands and is also the unofficial lingua franca of tourism, the dominant industry in the Caribbean region. In the Caribbean, the official language is usually determined by whichever colonial power (England, Spain, France, or the Netherlands) held sway over the island first or longest.
English
The first permanent English colonies were founded at Saint Kitts (1624) and Barbados (1627). The English language is the third most established throughout the Caribbean; however, due to the relatively small populations of the English-speaking territories, only 14%Using the 2001 census of the region. of West Indians are English speakers. English is the official language of about 18 Caribbean territories inhabited by about 6 million people, though most inhabitants of these islands may more properly be described as speaking English creoles rather than local varieties of standard English.
Spanish
Spanish was introduced to the Caribbean with the voyages of discovery by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The Caribbean English-speakers are vastly outnumbered by Spanish speakers by a ratio of about four to one due to the high densities of populations on the larger, Spanish-speaking, islands; some 64% of West Indians speak Spanish. The countries that are included in this group are Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and some islands off Central America (Cozumel, Isla Mujeres, San Andrés and Providencia, Corn Islands, The Bay Islands) and South America (Federal Dependencies of Venezuela and Nueva Esparta).
French
About one-quarter of West Indians speak French or a French-based creole. They live primarily in Guadeloupe and Martinique, both of which are overseas departments of France; Saint Barthélemy and the French portion of Saint Martin, both of which are overseas collectivities of France; the independent nation of Haiti (where both French and Haitian Creole are official languages);Orjala, Paul Richard. (1970). A Dialect Survey Of Haitian Creole, Hartford Seminary Foundation. 226p.Pompilus, Pradel. (1961). La langue française en Haïti. Paris: IHEAL. 278p and the independent nations of Dominica and Saint Lucia, which are both officially English-speaking but where the French-based Antillean Creole is widely used, especially Saint Lucian Creole which is related to Haitian Creole and French to a lesser degree. French was the official language of Martinique while Martinican Creole became a regional language as the island has European, French, Spanish, British, Indian (Tamil), Portuguese, Blacks (Africans), Martinicans, Caribs and many other ethnic groups.
Dutch
Dutch is an official language of the Caribbean islands that remain under Dutch sovereignty. However, Dutch is not the dominant language on these islands. On the islands of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire, a creole based on Portuguese, Spanish and West African languages known as Papiamento is predominant, while in Sint Maarten, Saba and Sint Eustatius, English, as well as a local English creole, are spoken. A Dutch creole known as Negerhollands was spoken in the former Danish West Indian islands of Saint Thomas and Saint John, but is now extinct. Its last native speaker died in 1987.Ureland, P. Sture. (1985). 'Entstehung von Sprachen und Völkern'(Origins of Languages and Peoples). Tübingen
Other languages
Caribbean Hindustani
Caribbean Hindustani is a form of the Bhojpuri and Awadhi dialect of Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) spoken by descendants of the indentured laborers from India in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, and other parts of the Caribbean.
Indigenous languages
Several languages spoken in the Caribbean belong to language groups concentrated or originating in the mainland countries bordering on the Caribbean: Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru.
Many Indigenous languages (actually spoken with the mainland Caribbean rather than the islands) have been added to the list of endangered or extinct languages—for example, Arawak languages (Shebayo, Igñeri, Lokono, Garifuna of St. Vincent, and the one now labeled Taíno by scholars, once spoken in the Greater Antilles), Caribbean (Nepuyo and Yao), Taruma, Atorada, Warrau, Arecuna, Akawaio and Patamona. Some of these languages are still spoken there by a few people.Amerindian Peoples’ Association.(2003). GuyanaDevonish, H., (Mar 2010) 'The Language Heritage of the Caribbean' Barbados: University of the West Indies
Creole languages Creoles are contact languages usually spoken in rather isolated colonies, the vocabulary of which is mainly taken from a European language (the lexifier).Lexifiers are languages of the former major colonial powers, whereas the grammatical structure is usually attributed to other languages spoken in the colonies, the so-called substrates. Creoles generally have no initial or final consonant clusters but have a simple syllable structure which consists of alternating consonants and vowels (e.g. "CVCV").Romaine, Suzanne (1988): Pidgin and creole languages. London: Longman, p.63
A substantial proportion of the world's creole languages are to be found in the Caribbean and Africa, due partly to their multilingualism and their colonial past. The lexifiers of most of the Caribbean creoles and patois are languages of Indo-European colonizers of the era. Creole languages continue to evolve in the direction of European colonial languages to which they are related, so that decreolization occurs and a post-creole continuum arises. For example, the Jamaican sociolinguistic situation has often been described in terms of this continuum.David, DeCamp. (1971) Pidgin and Creole Languages Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 13-39:351 Papiamento, spoken on the so-called 'ABC' islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao), shows traces of both indigenous languages and Spanish,see newspaper Civilisadó 1871–1875 Portuguese, and Dutch lexicons.).
In Jamaica, though generally an English-speaking island, a patois drawing on a multitude of influences including Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arawakan, Irish and African languages is widely spoken. In Barbados, a dialect often known as "bajan" have influences from West African languages that can be heard on a regular daily basis.
In Haiti, a French-speaking island that also mixed between the French and West African languages to be based on Haitian Creole after enslaved persons won independence from France on 1 January 1804 that was once mixed between the white French settlers and enslaved people taken from Africa to the New World. Haiti became the first Latin American country to gain independence and became the first black republic, the first Caribbean nation and the second independent nation in the Americas after the United States under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
Contact between the French and English-lexified creoles is fairly common in the Lesser Antilles (apart from Dominica and Saint Lucia), and can also be observed on Trinidad, Saint Vincent, Carriacou, Petite Martinique and Grenada.Loftman, Beryl I. (1953). Creole Languages Of The Caribbean Area, New York: Columbia University
In Martinique, which is now part of the French Republic, became part of the French Caribbean, the French are bound for the African coast where many captives were taken to the French colony of Martinique which began in 1635 after the discovery of Christopher Columbus in 1502. Code Noir was published by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the French statesman and minister of the Compagnie des Îles de l'Amérique where Martinique was colonized by the France during the reign of King Louis XIV, the Sun King. During the French colonization, many enslaved people were imported from Africa and sold in the Americas, the French founded the port city of Fort-Royal (now Fort-de-France) in 1638 as it was titled The Paris of the Caribbean or the French Pearl in the Caribbean. Martinique was changed six times between the masters of Britain and France during the Seven Years' War, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars until Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo during the War of the Seventh Coalition where he was exiled and died in Saint Helena at the age of 51 on 5 May 1821. Slavery was finally abolished on 27 April 1848 in the French Caribbean which marks the end of a long painful harsh chapter of the Slave eras. Martinique commemorates emancipation with a national holiday on 22 May that declared as the Abolition Day. In 1851, Martinique was seeking to replace former African enslaved laborers who had abandoned plantation work on being given their liberty, recruited several thousand laborers from the Indian French colonial settlement of Pondichéry. They are primarily most concentrated in the northern Tamil communes of Martinique, where the main plantations are located. A majority of the Indian community hails from Pondichéry and these immigrants brought them with their Hindu religion. Many Hindu temples are still in use in Martinique. French was the official language that was once used by the settlers and Martinican Creole that was also used by the African enslaved people are developed.