Acknowledgements
Remarks from Glenda. The curiosity that inspired When Creole and Spanish Collide started back when I was a graduate student at Ball State University in 2004. I was enrolled in Professor Elizabeth Riddle’s “Language and Culture” class and had to write a term paper. In my exploration, I learned there were English Creole-speaking communities in Central America. Of particular interest to me was the research I had found on calypso music sung in Limonese Creole.1 My initial reaction was, “My people are out there in Costa Rica,” being a Creole-speaker myself from Trinidad. It was a visceral feeling of connection to the diaspora that I have never forgotten, like a strange longing to speak with my cousins from the borderlands of the Caribbean Sea.
Fast forward to 2016, I met Dr. Leticia Burbano de Lara, a scholar in applied linguistics and education, who at that time was at the Center for Intercultural and Multilingual Advocacy, Kansas State University. As our collegial relationship and friendship unfolded, I learned that Leticia was from Costa Rica. I had the wild and admittedly very ill-defined idea of collaborating on something that would somehow land us in Costa Rica. When I mentioned Limón in particular, I remembered how Leticia’s pores raised as she spoke about the discrimination and injustice that had been meted out to Afro-Costa Ricans by the Costa Rican government during the early to mid 20th century.
Though in the early inception, that interaction with Leticia was a defining moment. I knew then that When Creole and Spanish Collide needed to be polyphonic space. We brought our colleague and friend Dr. Miki Loschky into the fold, given her rich research experiences and grounded personality.
Remarks from Miki. As a linguist, the intertwined nature of language and culture has always been fascinating to me. Although my doctoral dissertation at Kansas State University was based on experimental research on reading, my heart has always been with descriptive research on how language is actually used in a given society. For my Master thesis at the University of Hawaii, I collected and analysed data on code-switching (one of the distinctive bilingual phenomena) in Honolulu, Hawaii where multiple languages and cultures co-exist. The university was home to Dr. Derek Bickerton, who is well known for his research on how children’s innate language acquisition processes (the language bioprogram hypothesis) transform their parents’ pidgin contact languages into grammaticalized creole languages. While at University of Hawaii, I also studied language acquisition from an ethnographic perspective under Dr. Karen Watson-Gegeo. When my respected colleagues (Dr. Glenda-Alicia Leung and Dr. Leticia Burbano de Lara) first approached me to collaboratively work on this book on sociolinguistics, I instinctively said, “Yes.” I hope that my training in this area, and my passion for researching how a language is acquired while interacting with its culture, have had a positive impact on editing this special issue of language and cultural contact in the Caribbean.
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Gratitude. There are many people to thank for the fruition of this volume. First and foremost, none of this would have been possible without the staff at Brill who supported our vision for the volume every step of the way: Jason Prevost, Debbie de Witt, Clovis Jailet, and Brill’s desktop publishing team who did a beautiful job with the layout. Special thanks to the series editor Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken who has journeyed with us. We’ve appreciated your invaluable feedback over many iterations and most of all, your humanity and collegiality. We would also like to sincerely thank the two reviewers who recommended the manuscript for publication. Their feedback was priceless in refining and polishing the work. Thanks for your instrumental part in helping us bring this scholarship to the world. The true champions are the authors who shared their research, knowledge, and care for their subject matter in the meticulous preparation of their contributions. Gratitude goes out to Christian Mair, Veronique Lacoste, and Rhea Ramjohn, all of whom provided instrumental feedback at various stages of manuscript preparation. Thanks also to Dixie-Ann Belle and Mayling Eaves for their generosity in proofreading parts of the manuscript. Special thanks to friends and family who kept us grounded throughout the journey: Leticia Burbano de Lara, Lester Loschky, Felisha Maria, Bina Leung, Nicolai Narine, Mitra Narine, Aziah McNamara, and R.M. Cloyd.
Side note: At Ball State University I had the pleasure of working with Professor Frank Trechsel, an avid music lover, who embraced my idea of using lyrical data for sociolinguistic analysis of a genre of soca music (the descendant of calypso) that was emerging in Trinidad during the late 1990s through early 2000s.