Linguistics: Episode 1

In this episode Wendell explores the genesis of the way Trinbagonians talk, and gives a tutorial of how to communicate with other Trinis in their unique and melodic accent while using parlance from the twin-island republic. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:27

And today I will be talking about uh the Trinidadian and Tegonian or Trin Begonian accent. The Trini accent has for many years been lauded as one of the sexiest accents on the planet, routinely ranking in the top ten of some very scientific online polls. Like I'm talking real science. People describe a Trini accent as melodic or sing song, and in many ways it reflects the cultural diversity of our Twin Island Republic. Now I am not a language expert and there are actual scholars out there who have studied and broken down our accent. But as an expert living in the southern United States, I have had to do my own in-depth deconstruction of the way I speak as part of living and a and communicating in a town like Shreveport, Louisiana. For more on that, you can check out episode two of this podcast, which is called A Taco by Any Other Name. Now, that said, based on my research, here are some of the fundamental tenets of what makes our accent so unique. There are three basic ways to describe a Trini accent. And just for the record, when I say accent, I talk also, I'm speaking also about syntax. I know that is not actually correct, but again, I am not uh any specialist or scholar when it comes to language. I am just a guy with a microphone and a podcast. So the uh the first tenet of our accent is rhythm and pitch. Um, again, what we describe as a very sing song cadence. It is very musical, even when we are saying basic things or making simple declarative statements. A simple greeting may sound like, hey girl, how you going? Which is how I would say hello to a female colleague or family member. So Gil being our way of saying girl, and how you going is basically how are you doing. There's a lot of tempo and flow. So it's almost like we are singing or or lyrically chanting. The second part of it is that Trini speech is very, very fast. So if you are not from Trinidad and you know a Trini who speaks slowly to you, chances are they are showing you restraint in order to help you stay with them. So be thankful to them for that. Uh when we get going with our natural rhythm, we go very, very fast, and there's a lot of tempo and flow, so it's almost again like we are singing while we are speaking. Another thing to note is that there are some major differences in how we pronounce words, which we will get into later. So, for example, the th sound becomes just T or D. I'll give examples of that later. We drop consonants uh sometimes at the beginning of words and sometimes at the end of words. Uh, we also tend to have sharper vowel shaping. Now I don't know what the hell that actually means, but I saw it online and it sounds like an intelligent thing to say, so I'm including that in my research. Uh so there you go. It also says that our vowels uh tend to be shorter, sharper, and more frontal than in an American English accent, giving them a distinct Caribbean crispness. In terms of syntax and sentence structure, context is very important in the way that we talk, and we often shorten sentences by dropping words and sometimes whole clauses favoring an almost um poetic approach in terms of flourishes to either ramp up emotion, meaning, and often humor. To do this we draw upon the many cultures that have folded into each other in our history, and words like ent or the French we are used for punctuation and emphasis. And we often use we at the ends of declarative sentences to give them an extra little bit of weight. So a typical exchange between two trinies looking at someone who is uh is slightly disheveled and um you know wearing uh creased clothing might sound like this. Trini one. A whole hour he take to iron he clothes and they still ram full up we trinity two and so yes. We both agree that this person needs to either improve their ironing technique or buy some rink of free clothing, but you see how we use the word we and then the response instead of being any long drawn out response was just ent meaning yes we are in total agreement with the fact that that young man probably needs to wheel and come again. Now we have other ways of emphasizing things like adding or wa right to the end of a question. So or wa being uh a reduction of or what? So for example, if someone in America is acting a fool, yeah a typical American response to that would be something like, have you lost your mind? But in truly, we s n we swap the lost your mind for the word mad, as in are you mad? And then we would just say, you're mad or wa. The aw that we added to the end of the sentence just adds a little extra pepper sauce to the question. Suggesting that your madness is so clear that we have to rhetorically ask if you could possibly go further on that continuum. But some of you out there, maybe ten of you, might be wondering, well, how did the the Trinidadian accent, the Trinbegonian accent actually come about? I am also not a historian, but I have access to Google. And so I did a little bit of digging. Uh, but if you want to learn more of this, of course, I will uh obviously uh suggest that you check out many of the online resources or academic papers or books on the subject, many of which have been written and published. Um, but there are also lots of uh videos online. Uh there's a guy called uh Johan Patap. He did a series of fun videos on YouTube several years ago about Trinidadian slang. Um and again, a quick Google search will get you where you need to go on that. But here's my body of research that I put together. The Trinidadian language is described as a rich multicultural tapestry shaped by centuries of colonization, slavery, indentured labor, and global migration. Now Trinidad had its own indigenous people, the Arawaks and the Caribs, and they of course had their own language. Um Spain's arrival in 1498 marked the start of the slow decline of those languages, but places like Shaguanas and Arima, both of which are major cities in Trinidad, they actually got their names from our indigenous ancestors. When Christopher Columbus and his crew rolled up to Trinidad, legend has it that they were adrift in the ocean and Columbus saw three peaks, the three peaks of our northern range sticking out into the sky, and that is why he decided to call our island Trinidad. Now, I am not here to do a commentary on colonization, but we do know that Spain held Trinidad for nearly 300 years, but surprisingly, Spanish did not endure as the dominant language. This is often confusing to many people, particularly with our geographical proximity to South America. You could actually see Venezuela from our southern coast on a clear day, but destiny apparently had other plans for us. Now there are still some very strong footprints of Spanish in our local lexicon. And again, if you look at the names of places in Trinidad, many of them have Spanish names like Sangre Grande, which we call Sandy Grande, or San Fernando, and so on. Then came the French in the 18th century, and French planters and workers migrated from the French West Indies, and that birthed our Trinidadian French Creole or Patois. Now that became the island's lingua franca, and for uh for those of you don't know what lingua franca is, that is essentially uh a universal language that is adopted between speakers whose native languages are different. A modern and really silly example is the Star Wars universe, where English is the lingua franca because George Lucas was American and George Lucas speaks English. So the majority of the characters in Star Wars, even though they're from all over the galaxy, they speak English as well. Back to our history. So then came the British, and they took over Trinidad and made English the official language of the country in 1823, and so enslaved Africans and immigrants adopted English vocabulary and merged it with the grammar and rhythm of their native West African tongues, such as Yoruba, Ibo, and Akan, and that gave birth to Trinidadian English Creole. In the mid-1800s, indentured laborers from India came in also to help work the lands that African slaves were working, and they brought with them their own language, introducing Hindi derived words into local dialect before English Creole ultimately became the universal bridge for the whole population. All that to say, English is still now the official language of Trinidad and Tobago, and as a former colony, we primarily have a hybrid version of the British education system and systems of government which we still use today despite gaining our independence on August 31st, 1962. And that, in a nutshell, is how we got to where we are today. Again, for any historians, uh researchers or academics who are now screaming at me through your listening devices, I apologize for any inaccuracies, but my brief loose history lesson was more to provide context for the discussion that we are having today and not meant to stand on its own as some definitive history of Trinidad and Tobago. So, as the kids say, you can at me online, but um you know this episode is not designed to stand up to any scrutiny steeped in academic rigor, but it's just a simplest guide for non-trinees to understand how we speak and to engage in basic communication with their Trini counterparts and compatriots. So think of this as like Duolingo, but without the money or research or expertise to run a platform like that. So, without any further ado, how to speak like a Trinidadian or as we would say it, how to talk like a Trini. A good starting point is how we greet each other. A ru a good rule of thumb is to repeat your greeting as it suggests sincerity and openness. For example, in the early part of the day, you can greet someone with a simple morning, morning. At midday, you greet them with a good day, good day, or the longer but clunkier, good afternoon, good afternoon, and when the sun sets, you say good night, good night. Note this is a greeting and not a way to send someone off to bed. Introduct when you say goodnight to somebody, that is actually a greeting and a way to send them off. Uh, it's kind of like aloha in Hawaii, I guess. Um so these repeated greetings work when you run into somebody on the street or when you are entering their homes or when you're at their gate calling, trying to get someone's attention inside, or when you are greeting a group, whether a familiar group or even strangers. So try out any one of these on your favorite trainees and they will appreciate you for it. Okay, so now that we've greeted each other in the Trinidadian native tongue, you have now opened Pandora's box, and it is likely that said trainees will take the training wheels off of the rest of the conversations, and so you will have to keep up. So now here are some additional basic rules of thumb. Like the British and American New Englanders, we do not pronounce ER as er. So ER, we just pronounce it as. Well, I'll give you some examples to illustrate. The word beer, we say as beer. Uh, we don't sit in a chair, we sit in a chair, we comb the hair on our head, we drive in a car, and we drink in a bar. Now, this creates more complications than you might think. A recent example is uh so I run a nonprofit arthouse theater, I'm the executive director, and part of my job is that I select the films that we show at our cinema. Uh there's a film that is out and it is called Tuner T-U-N-E-R, but the way I pronounce it is Tuna. So here I was sitting with my board of directors talking about the fact that I am trying to book the film Tuna, and I realized after about five minutes that they were all staring at me with this weird look on their face. And then one of them raised their hands and they were like, Are you saying tuna? Is this a movie about tuna fish? And I was like, No, no, no, tuna, tuna, tuna, like, and then I had to realize that I was trying to communicate tuner and I was not pronouncing it properly, and hijinks ensued. This is a very typical conversational pattern when I forget that my audience do the hard Rs at the end of words versus the way I say it, which is again tuner. But to bring everything back, what I will be doing for the next segment is using the words that I just gave you in a sentence, and so we will take that sentence from regular American English, right, to Trinipalans. So our sentence is I combed my hair and then drove my car to the bar where I sat in a chair and had a beer. Now note, we do not pronounce the double E in the middle of words, but we we flatten them. So whereas an American would say beer, we say bear. So we don't pronounce the R at the end, and we also don't pronounce the double E as that E sound. But a bear that you drink when we pronounce it is the same as a bear, the uh black or brown thing that you might find in the forest that may want to murder you. So again, context is very helpful when you're talking to a Trini. We also again don't pronounce the TH in words, so depending on the word, we reject the H's softening of the TH sound, or sometimes we simply replace it with a D. So the number three is pronounced tree, which is the same thing as the thing that grows outside in the dirt, that is also a tree. Um the word cathartic becomes cathartic and therefore, which starts with a th, we replace that one with a D and we say therefore. So to modify our earlier example, I combed my hair and then drove my car to the bar where I sat in a chair and had a bear. Now, because we trainees can be bold faced, we often break the rules of time when we're speaking, so we jettison the need for past and present tenses. Also, it is worth noting that we don't really use past participles as we find them to be clunky and boring. So combed in our example becomes comb, drove becomes drive, and sat becomes sit. So our example is further modified into I comb my hair and then drive my car to the bar where I sit in a chair and had a beer. We also tweak subject pronouns and possessive adjectives, swapping I for a and my for me. So the example again becomes I comb my hair and then drive my car to the bar where I sit in a chair and had a beer. Okay, if you're still with me, this is where it gets slightly more complicated because this is where we start putting these poetic flourishes in. It is not enough to say I drive my car to the bar because directions for Trinidadians are very important, but generally our directions are either up or down. So uh in addition to that, words that end in W N get an on sound, um and sometimes words that end in N D get an Ong sound. So uh an example of that is so clown is clung, don't is dong, sound or song, song, yeah. But song is also song and dong a dong is also dong. So you could be talking about a clong making a song when you step on the dong. Okay, this is unraveling a little uh quickly, but so let's bring it back to our example. So our sentence is now modified to a comb my hair and then drive my car dong by the bar where I sit on in a chair and had a beer. Now those who were paying attention may have noticed that we did not go to the bar, but we went dong by the bar because I I don't know why. We don't go to things, we go by them. Um we go by the grocery, we go by the cinema, we go by the airport. Okay, so finally we could put some additional flourishes in here, some adjectives to add color and shape to the proceedings, and then we can also drop some unnecessary words to make room for again a more poetic and descriptive flow. So the sentence becomes I come up my hair and drive down by the bar where sit on a dirty old chair and drink a beastly cold bear. A beastly cold bear is a good thing, a dirty old chair, which is our version of the words dirty and old is not. Also, we like to do things up or down for emphasis, not just for directions. So if I comb up my hair, it suggested I put a little effort into it. Conversely, if you're very distraught, you could cry Dong the place, meaning quite simply that your grief was so intense and all-encompassing that it rained down on everything in the space that you were in. So you're crying Dongdi Place. You could hear my dog outside, Happy, who was featured in the episode Go Party. She is back in Dongdi Place right now. So many of you may have also noticed the inclusion and pronunciation of the word sidong, which in addition to having an on song at the end. Is not really a portmanteur or a word formed by mashing two words together, but rather just a faster, more lyrical way of saying sit down. This is as close as we get to pronouncing T's as D's, which uh uh many of my Trinidadian compatriots who live in North America know that the soft T is something that uh causes many problems for Trinidadians because instead of saying the word water, Americans say water and Trine's say water. Instead of saying theater, Americans say theater and Trinity say theater. Also, sometimes a well placed Y can add necessary flourish to a word. Uh it's like again, it's like pepper sauce. We like to add sauces to stuff in Trinidad, so but only for certain words. So girl becomes girl, but we don't say mian. Kat becomes kyat, but we don't say biat or ryat. I think trilli I I mean I honestly just think Trinidadians like to say the word kiat. But let's move on. Uh there are a few other general rules from our example. So we drop the D's at the end of words, but not all of them. So end becomes N, the N of a sentence, instead of the end of a sentence. Uh cold is coal, but word is still word. Hard is still hard, especially Harry Creed. Because all Trinidads know that Harry Creed is the hardest hard. But I digress. So if all of this is as clear as mud and in no way helps you communicate with your Trinity brethren and sisters, let me give you some basic vocabulary translations that will surely endear them to you. So instead of saying parking lot, if you're talking to a Trinidadian, say car park. If you are talking about the sidewalk, you should refer to it as pavement. If you are referring to the pavement, that is what Trinidadians call the road. A windshield is called a windscreen. The hood of your car is what we call the bonnet of a car. If you want to offer a Trinidadian a soda, offer them a sweet drink. If you're ever in Trinidad and you want to get fried chicken, and that is a very high possibility because there's fried chicken all over Trinidad, you could ask for a box of bird or a box of dead or just a box of chicken and chips. Coke is Coke. Juice is well, juice is basically anything from freshly squeezed fruit juice juice that was just picked from the tree all the way to Kool Aid or Fresco Royale or whatever. We just call all of that juice. We don't call morbid juice, we don't call cereal juice, but everything else is basically juice. Um if you are having difficulty walking, you have broken foot. If something is dirty, you could say dirty, because people make fun of me in the south food the way I say dirty. But you could also say dirty or you could say stink. Uh stupid is stupid. If you are in a state of manic confusion, that means you're bazoody. If you are bamboozled, that means you're totobi. If you're behaving badly, that could be interpreted as you getting on wasy or gain on wasy. Uh if you have bad breath, your mouth stinks. However, if you also use a lot of bad language, your mouth also stinks. So you can have stink mouth twice over. Heartache is tabanka. Shrimp is shrimps. Uh if you have an old school camera and you want to take some pictures, you need to make sure you buy some film for it instead of film. If a Trinidadian tells you they're going to bathe, that just means they're going to take a shower. If they're going to take a bath, that also means they're going to bathe, but it's just a longer way to bathe. In North America, in particular, in temperate climates, after you bathe, you need to cream your skin, which is our way of saying lotioning your skin. Because you don't want to be ashy, whether you have a Trinidadian accent or not. Uh if you're like me and you like wearing Chuck Taylors, that just means you like to wear gym boots or washi kongs. Uh and uh butt, which is something that I think everybody likes to know in every language, is a bam C or a Bum C or a Bam Bam. Uh and uh chaos or drama is commerce, bacanal or confusion. So I'll take it one step further as we're getting close to the end of this episode. And so I asked my crew um for some sayings. I sent them a WhatsApp to ask them for some sayings in Trinidadian that we could use for this episode. Um and these these are actually some of the same guys that were in a documentary with me that we made several decades ago in Woodbrook called linguistics, uh, that had nothing to do with language, and it is also uh blessedly something that we'll never see the light of day again. But uh big up to the Zero T crew. Um uh you you know you'll hear all about them as as we go along in the series. Uh, but these are guys that I grew up with, and so and I love them daily. But anyway, so here are some of the ones that we got better belly bus than good food waste. So this one is simple. We don't like to waste food. Um, again, you could check out the episode Never See Come See for more information on this. But the saying is better belly bus than good food waste. Um now another cool one, another funny one is monkeys know which tree to climb. So monkeys know which tree to climb. Uh, this means of course individuals know who to approach to get what they want. Uh, for example, if a child knows that their parents, one parent is going to say no, they'll probably go to the other one. Another good one is Gopal Luck is not seapol luck. Now, Gopal and C Paul are two names, Indian uh names. Uh so Gopal luck is not seapal luck means that the fortune that allows you to accomplish your goals may not apply to me in a similar situation. So different people have different uh different uh types of luck. And finally, what sweet in goat mouth is sour in the bam bam. So uh the the Google definition of this one was actions that feel good or bring instant gratification initially often lead to painful or unpleasant consequences later. And again, if you think of a goat eating something delicious and then having trouble passing it, this very, very colorful saying should make a lot of sense. So memorize any or all of these and regale your Trinidadian friends with them, and I will tell you they will be very excited, and some of them might even high-five you. So, on that note, I want to say thank you for listening, and please like and share, and most of all, give us a five-star rating on your favorite podcast platform. Uh, if you would like to support the show financially, there is uh uh a link in the link tree uh below this episode where you could click on it and subscribe uh and support us that way. Uh, and finally, thank you again for listening. And as we stay in Trinidad, uh go on there.