Pirate English of the Caribbean and Atlantic trade routes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Linguistic hypotheses based on socio-historical data

Abstract

Pirate English has been academically overlooked and historically marginalized since its inception in the seventeenth century. Yet it was a formative variety in port settlements of the Caribbean, Europe, West Africa and the Americas and likely to have influenced creoles and dialects of littoral regions. However, there is little reliable data on which to base a diachronic analysis due to the nature of the outlaw speech community that was mostly illiterate. Given the difficulty of compiling...