ICE-Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad and Tobago are the most southerly islands in the Caribbean archipelago. With a population of about one million, the two islands form the second largest anglophone Caribbean nation (after Jamaica). Independence from Great Britain was achieved in 1962. Trinidad, the larger island, was French- and French-Creole-speaking until the 19^th century. Today the islands share a local variety of Standard English as well as a mesolectal English-based Creole; a basilectal variety is retained only in Tobago. Although there has been increasing use of Creole in education since its official recognition as a linguistic system in its own right in 1975, Standard English still predominates in formal and official communication, while Creole remains primarily associated with informality, emotion and humour. However, some degree of linguistic variation is characteristic of all but the most formal spoken language situations.

Reading
Deuber, Dagmar & Valerie Youssef (2007). “Teacher language in Trinidad: A pilot corpus study of direct and indirect creolisms in the verb phrase”. Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics 2007 Conference. Link
Youssef, Valerie (2004). “‘Is English we speaking’: Trinbagonian in the twenty-first century. Some notes on the English usage of Trinidad and Tobago”. English Today 80: 42-49.
Youssef, Valerie & Dagmar Deuber (2007). “ICE Trinidad and Tobago: Teacher language investigation in a university research class”. Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics  2007 Conference. Link