This book draws on applied linguistics and literary studies to offer concrete means of engaging with vernacular language and literature in secondary and college classrooms. The authors embrace a language-as-resource orientation, countering the popular narrative of vernaculars as problems in schools. The book is divided into two parts, with the first half of the book providing linguistic and pedagogical background, and the second half offering literary case studies for teaching. Part I examines the historical and continued devaluing of vernaculars in schools, incorporating clear, usable explanations of relevant theories. This section also outlines the central myths and paradoxes surrounding vernacular languages and literatures, includes productive ways for teachers to address those myths and paradoxes, and explores challenges and possibilities for vernacular language pedagogy. In Part II, the authors provide pedagogical case studies using literary texts written in vernacular Englishes from around the world. Each chapter examines a vernacular-related topic, and concludes with discussion questions and writing assignments; an appendix contains the poems and short stories discussed, and other teaching resources. The book provides a model of interdisciplinary inquiry that can be beneficial to scholars and practitioners in composition, literature, and applied linguistics, as well as students of all linguistic backgrounds.

Today's popular tassa drumming emerged from the fragments of transplanted Indian music traditions half-forgotten and creatively recombined, rearticulated, and elaborated into a dynamic musical genre. A uniquely Indo-Trinidadian form, tassa drumming invites exploration of how the distinctive nature of the Indian diaspora and its relationship to its ancestral homeland influenced Indo-Caribbean music culture. Music scholar Peter Manuel traces the roots of neotraditional music genres like tassa drumming to North India and reveals the ways these genres represent survivals, departures, or innovative elaborations of transplanted music forms. Drawing on ethnographic work and a rich archive of field recordings, he contemplates the music carried to Trinidad by Bhojpuri-speaking and other immigrants, including forms that died out in India but continued to thrive in the Caribbean. His reassessment of ideas of creolization, retention, and cultural survival defies suggestions that the diaspora experience inevitably leads to the loss of the original culture, while also providing avenues to broader applications for work being done in other ethnic contexts.

This collection of humorous short stories in the Guyanese Vernacular (Creolese) by master story teller, Barney Singh, has entertained Guyanese in the Toronto Area at various functions over the last thirty years. Available in print for the first time, these stories immediately transport the reader to Guyana. Readers dipping into this treasuary of short stories, can satisfy feelings of nostalgia for their homeland, Guyana, as they strive to show “what Guyana's sons and daughters can be” in environments bearing no resemblance to home as they knew it.

Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean traces the contradictory cultural trajectories constructed and re-produced in the fluid diasporic spaces we call the Trans-Caribbean. Particular emphasis is placed on such cultural expressions that reflect or derive from the cultural vernacular and popular culture as it exists in these spaces. Its multidisciplinary approach and focus on different language areas in the Trans-Caribbean are of particular interest to scholars in cultural studies, migration, literary theory, and cultural criticism.

My memoir is laced with nostalgia and at the same time it is my sincere intention to portray the true essence of the Guyanese culture without offence. Keep in mind that this is not based on the experience of every Guyanese. This was the way I saw and experienced things back then. The use of colloquialism is of utmost importance; it is the vernacular we understand. It may sound like another language so unless you were born and bred in Guyana you will need to refer to the glossary provided. Folklore and mothers preaching life lessons through proverbs played a large part in Guyanese life. This is not only an account of the first twenty-one years of my life in Guyana; it also contains anecdotes of visits back to my homeland. You will also find a sprinkling of information pertaining to my new life in Australia. Before immigrating to Australia I believed the sun only rose and set in Guyana; I never imagined another paradise existed on the planet. There is a saying that most Guyanese use to identify their roots after they have voluntarily immigrated or simply fled to another country. When we say, My navel string is buried in Guyana, we simply mean: My roots are there. Its a place where true and enduring friendships were formed forever. We will meet one another decades later and feel as if it was yesterday, reminiscing about our beloved land; lapsing into the language only a fellow Guyanese can understand. A famous Australian crooner said I still call Australia home, and I can assure you that saying applies to Guyanese who have immigrated to every corner of the globe. Navigating the labyrinth of family secrets was my one mission in life; I just had to know.

This volume brings the data that many in formal linguistics have dismissed as peripheral straight into the core of syntactic theory. By bringing together experts from syntax, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, language acquisition, aphasia, and pidgin and creole studies, the volume makes a multidisciplinary case for the existence of nonsententials, which are analyzed in various chapters as root phrases and small clauses (Me; Me First!; Him worry?!; Class in session), and whose distinguishing property is the absence of Tense, and, with it, any syntactic phenomena that rely on Tense, including structural Nominative Case. Arguably, the lack of Tense specification is also responsible for the dearth of indicative interpretations among nonsententials, as well as for their heavy reliance on pragmatic context. So pervasive is nonsentential speech across all groups, including normal adult speech, that a case can be made that continuity of grammar lies in nonsentential, rather than sentential speech.