Dialect on Air

Despite the increasing interest in diachronic linguistic studies, such research remains particularly scarce for creole varieties, largely due to the limited availability of historical data on non-standard languages. This book addresses this gap by introducing a soap opera from the early 1970s as a source of historical creole data. It presents the first real-time analysis of selected grammatical and phonological features of Bahamian Creole English. Situated within the framework of comparative sociolinguistics, the study provides quantitative variationist analyses of the zero copula, BE-levelling, verbal negation, low vowels (i.e., the lexical sets of BATH, PALM, START, and TRAP), and the closing diphthongs of MOUTH and PRICE. This book will appeal not only to those interested in the analysis of creole and non-standard varieties but also to those studying language variation and change more broadly.