This remarkable new dictionary represents the first attempt in some four centuries to record the state of development of English as used across the entire Caribbean region.

The method and plan of this dictionary of Jamaican English are basically the same as those of the Oxford English Dictionary, but oral sources have been extensively tapped in addition to detailed coverage of literature published in or about Jamaica since 1655. It contains information about the Caribbean and its dialects, and about Creole languages and general linguistic processes. Entries give the pronounciation, part-of-speach and usage of labels, spelling variants, etymologies and dated citations, as well as definitions. Systematic indexing indicates the extent to which the lexis is shared with other Caribbean countries.

Using the historical principles of the Oxford English Dictionary, Lise Winer presents the first scholarly dictionary of this unique language. The dictionary comprises over 12,200 entries, including over 4500 for flora and fauna alone, with numerous cross-references. Entries include definitions, alternative spellings, pronunciations, etymologies, grammatical information, and illustrative citations of usage. Winer draws from a wide range of sources - newspapers, literature, scientific reports, sound recordings of songs and interviews, spoken language - to provide a wealth and depth of language, clearly situated within a historical, cultural, and social context.

The New Register of Caribbean English Usage is a pan-Caribbean publication which seeks to provide a representative sample of the development of Caribbean English usage since 1992, after the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage was completed. The New Register, which was intended to be a companion work to the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage on a smaller scale, comprises about seven hundred items, including words with new senses or usages, acronyms, and abbreviations that have emerged out of the ecological and cultural domains of the CARICOM territories, from Guyana to Belize. The continued inventorying and chronicling of Caribbean culture and history are vital in helping us to recognize and understand our unique Caribbean identity, and this is an essential reference book for students and educators in the region and in the diaspora.

This book presents an in-depth study of English as spoken in two major anglophone Caribbean territories, Jamaica and Trinidad. Based on data from the International Corpus of English, it focuses on variation at the morphological and syntactic level between the educated standard and more informal educated spoken usage. Dagmar Deuber combines quantitative analyses across several text categories with qualitative analyses of transcribed text passages that are grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and recent approaches to linguistic style and identity. The discussion is situated in the context of variation in the Caribbean and the wider context of world Englishes, and the sociolinguistic background of Jamaica and Trinidad is also explored. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, world Englishes, and language contact.