Earlier Caribbean English and Creole in Writing

In research on Creoles, historical written texts have in recent decades been
fruitfully employed to shed light on the diachronic development of these
languages and the nature of Creole genesis. They have so far been much less
frequently used to derive social information about these communities and to
improve our understanding of the sociolinguistics and stylistic structure of
these languages. This paper surveys linguistic research on early written texts in
the anglophone Caribbean and takes a critical look at the theories and methods
employed to study these texts. It emphases the sociolinguistic value of the texts
and provides some exemplary analyses of early Creole documents.