How the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (DCEU) came to be done

As a West Indian student in England just after World War II, I rather prided myself not only on my spoken English - as all West Indians, at least of my generation, do - but also on my French accent, which happened to be often commended. It so happened that, at a French summer school in Nice in 1947, I translated 'il ne pleuvait plus' orally as 'the rain had held up', and was given a clear negative finger signal by my tutor. The next speaker said 'it had stopped raining' and was told to continue. I was stung, but further annoyed (with myself) when my English buddies after class sided with the tutor. My problem was that I had used a standard Guianese (East Caribbean) idiom which was not standard English. The difference lay in Caribbean English Usage. That was the beginning.

As I was training to be a teacher of French in British Guiana (my homeland), I began listing what I actually knew to be regional usages - nouns, verbs, adjectives, phrases - that would suffer the same fate as 'the rain had held up' if my charges were to submit such to their overseas Oxford and Cambridge Board examiners.

What I thought would fill one exercise book turned out to be several, as I began to add to school work from personal experience and findings in newspaper columns. The exercise books were replaced by 6 × 4 cards as I now proposed to try publishing a glossary of Guianese words and phrases. I had never publshed anything before, and efforts at local publishing met with dismal response, but I collected anyway, in shoe-boxes. Encouraged by my former tutors at University College, London, to proceed to an MA - but in English - I got through a qualifying exam, and offered a thesis on Pronominal Forms in the Dialect of English Spoken in British Guiana. It got a mark of distinction, but, better still, in the process of preparation I had come into contact with Dr Randolph Quirk, through whom, as my mentor, I proceeded to do the PhD on Guianese verb forms, and now had the publication of what I hoped would be rather a sophisticated Glossary clearly in view.

I joined the University of the West Indies at Barbados in 1963, with ten shoe-boxes of cards ready. Then I found, from pedagogical contact with West Indian undergraduates in bulk, that their speech and writing were offering many new examples of the type 'the-rain-had-held-up'. Cross-referencing with my Guianese glossary began. Then, in 1971, Dr Phillip Sherlock, the Vice-Chancellor, got the Ford Foundation to fund a Caribbean Language Development Programme, spread over the three campuses (Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados); and my Caribbean Lexicography Project, accepted as such as part of the Programme, was launched, with myself as Co-ordinator and Director.

I began data-collection workshops in the East Caribbean Islands - St Vincent & The Grenadines and Antigua & Barbuda being the first two organized efforts. Ministries of Education and Teacher Training Colleges provided me with teachers and their time, and great was their enthusiasm indeed. Then the enormity of the job hit me. They came up with answers and suggestions almost higgledy-piggledy on hairstyles; bush-medicines; folk-remedies; lizards; insect pests; birds; flowers; fishing craft/methods/devices/equipment; superstitions and legendary figures relating to deaths/births/marriages/necromancy/love/planting, etc.; transportation; house-building styles; workmen's tools/styles/habits; domestic life/customs/utensils; fruit and fishes ad infinitum; religion and belief systems; folk and national festivals; trees and timber; coconut industry; banana industry; sugar industry; proverbs; riddles; etc., etc.

That was 1973-74. I was almost weak-kneed at what hit me. I had committed myself to the University and Ford for an encyclopedic task with no professional precedent but Cassidy and Le Page's Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967). However, it was immediately clear that (a) the urgent need - almost a clamour when I raised the matter with teachers - was for a work on current Caribbean English, and that (b) I was unequal to the task of a dictionary on historical principles on the Caribbean geographical scale, which would have to begin with research for historical resources anyway.

I had set out with a self-made checklist of (largely Guianese) idioms which I now expanded considerably. With further help from the (now independent) governments of Guyana, Barbados, and Trinidad & Tobago, Barclays Bank, the IDRC (Canada), the American Council of Learned Societies, the Commonwealth Secretariat, UNESCO, and the University of the West Indies, I also extended the coverage of my data-collection workshops to include every Caribbean territory. I held some seven in Guyana (area 83,000 square miles), three in Trinidad & Tobago, three in Jamaica, four in the Bahamas, and three in Belize. I made sure to include small territories such as The Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and 'appended' islands like Tobago, Barbuda, and Nevis, which form parts of twin-island states but are linguistically separate in their own right.

I had early noticed that Caribbean was a preferable term to West Indian, as the latter term connotes islands, whereas in fact bona fide Caribs exist - and substantially - only in Guyana (i.e. of our Anglophone territories), and their cousins, the Maya, in Belize.

Places like Belize, Guyana, Jamaica pointed up the clangorous reality of Caribbean Creoles, and I made sure to take as much account of their presence in our specturm of English as I realistically could. The same went for Amerindian loan words in Guyanese life.

In 1982 the Monitoring Committee that had been appointed by the UWI Vice-Chancellor called a halt to my seemingly never-ending data collection; for, having included, and signally so, back-up citations from West Indian literature, newspapers and journals, folksongs and calypsos, the danger appeared that editing the mass of material, without a senior assistant as had been recommended but not funded, might well overwhelm me. However, I had a number of Research Assistants at Cave Hill in Barbados, two in Guyana, four in Trinidad & Tobago, and one in Belize.

Shutting down only data-collection by travel, and avoiding arbitrary elimination as far as possible, the whole corpus of data was notably cut down, leaving at least half as much again to be treated in a later work, and I began editing in 1982. The University chose OUP as publishers, and they accepted, with Laurence Urdang as their quality-control monitor. Mr Urdang reviewed the A-Z manuscript, paid two or three visits to us at Cave Hill, and made many valuable suggestions from his fund of experience. A Caribbean French and Spanish supplement for schools, undertaken by Jeannette Allsopp, and based on selections of flora and fauna from the A-Z corpus, was also completed, and the whole text was submitted to OUP in 1992. But the nature of problems presented by cross-referencing and by territorial and status labelling caused many publishing delays. The work, at first promised for 1993, took nearly three more years, and appeared early in 1996.