9-13 AUGUST 2010
BARBADOS

Special Features

Keynote Speaker

Dr Curwen Best is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture and Literary Studies in the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. He is an authority on Caribbean and Western popular culture. His published books include: Barbadian Popular Music (1999); Roots to Popular Culture (2001); Culture @ the Cutting Edge (2005); The Politics of Caribbean Cyberculture (2008) and Kamau Brathwaite and Christopher Okigbo (2009).

Back to Top

SCL President's Address

John R. Rickford (PhD, U. of Pennsylvania, 1979) is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University. His interests include language and ethnicity, social class and style, language variation and change, pidgin and creole languages, African American Vernacular English, and educational applications of linguistics. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and several books, including: A Festival of Guyanese Words (ed., 1978), Dimensions of a Creole Continuum (1987), Sociolinguistics and Pidgin-Creole Studies (ed., 1988), African American English (co-ed., 1998), African American Vernacular English: Features and Use, Evolution, and Educational Implications (1999), Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse (co-ed., 2000), Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, with Russell Rickford (2000), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (co-ed, 2001), and Language in the USA (co-ed., 2004).

Back to Top

Special Panel

"The Evolution of Pidgin and Creole Studies (1968 to the present): The Caribbean Contribution"

Chair: John R Rickford

PANELLISTS
	Mervyn C. Alleyne  is considered a pioneer in the field of Creole Language Studies and is known for his rejection of the notion that creole languages necessarily develop from prior pidgins. His position that the variation manifested among these languages should be attributed to the differing degrees of acculturation among Africans who came in contact with Europeans. He has written extensively on many topics, including the history, structure and use of French-lexifier and English-lexifier languages in the Caribbean, acculturation, African influences in the Caribbean and North America, race and ethnicity, theoretical issues in creolistics, and folk medicine of the Caribbean. Among his recent works are The Folk Medicine of Jamaica  (2004),  The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World  (2002), Syntaxe Historique Créole  (2000), and Roots of Jamaican Culture  (1997).
	Silvia Kouwenberg 's research explores questions regarding the contribution made by substrate languages in the genesis of Caribbean creole languages, and issues in the study of Caribbean creole grammar, in particular Berbice Dutch, Papiamentu and Jamaican Creole. She is author of  A Grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole, editor of  Twice as Meaningful, and co-editor of the  Blackwell Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies. She has been lecturing at The University of the West Indies, Mona since 1991. She has been a fellow at the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig, Germany), Warwick University (UK), and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and recipient of a Mona Campus Research Fellowship.
	John McWhorter (PhD, Linguistics, Stanford 1993) is Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Lecturer at Columbia University, and columnist/blogger for The New Republic. His academic specialty is language contact and change.  His books include  The Power of Babel, on how the world's languages arise, change, and mix,  The Word on the Street,  Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars,  Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: Untold Stories in the History of English, and a second Teaching Company audiovisual course,  The Science of Language.  He has written three books on creole languages, including Defining Creole. He has also written on race and cultural issues for The New York Times,  The New Yorker,  New York Magazine,  The Washington Post,  Forbes, and Ebony.

Back to Top