Diana Wengler’s Dialect on Air: Bahamian Creole in Historical Radio Broadcasts is an original and carefully argued contribution to creole studies, World Englishes and historical sociolinguistics. Its central empirical basis is distinctive: the book draws on surviving recordings of The Fergusons of Farm Road, a Bahamian radio soap broadcast in the early 1970s, and uses them as evidence for earlier forms of Bahamian Creole, or ‘Dialect’ in local usage, i.e. the English-lexifier creole spoken in the Bahamas. Because historical spoken data for Caribbean creoles are scarce (but see Gooden & Drayton Reference Gooden, Drayton and Hickey2017), the book stands out for the uniqueness of its source material. More importantly, The Fergusons emerged at a moment when the public use of Bahamian Creole was still heavily stigmatized in broadcasting, which makes the recordings significant not only as historical linguistic data but also as evidence of changing cultural and sociolinguistic evaluations. An underlying and carefully laid out assumption of the book is that staged radio language, when interpreted with due care, can serve as a source for sociolinguistic analysis and for the study of language change over time.
The study is situated against the backdrop of the sociolinguistic ecology of the Bahamas, where, not unlike in other anglophone Caribbean territories, a localized form of standard English coexists with Bahamian Creole in a functionally diglossic relationship along a continuum of sociolinguistic and stylistic variation (see chapter 2, ‘Research background’, pp. 4–17). Wengler places particular emphasis on urban mesolectal speech, such as that spoken in the capital, Nassau, while more basilectal forms are also mentioned and discussed where relevant. She contextualizes Bahamian Creole historically as a North American creole with particularly strong links to Gullah, a creole language spoken in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. This sociolinguistic constellation is important not only as background but also because it frames one of the book’s central questions: whether patterns of variation and change in Bahamian Creole are best understood in terms of decreolization.
Decreolization is a longstanding and much-debated concept in creole studies, commonly invoked to describe a process whereby over time a creole variety appears to increasingly converge with the lexifier language it originally derived from (see e.g. Winford Reference Winford1997 for an extensive and critical discussion). Wengler’s monograph revisits the question of whether, and to what extent, Bahamian Creole should be understood in these terms. As she notes, earlier claims about decreolization in Bahamian Creole and other creoles have typically been based on synchronic apparent-time data rather than real-time spoken evidence. The book’s central contribution, in my view, is that it addresses this question on the basis of unique historical spoken material in a diachronic fashion. Another strength of the monograph is that it resists the temptation to turn this into a binary question with a single answer. The overall conclusion is not that decreolization is either straightforwardly confirmed or straightforwardly disproved. Instead, Wengler shows that the picture is variable-specific and complex: some features show diachronic change (though not necessarily in terms of decreolization), others display stable constraint hierarchies and still others resist clear interpretation altogether.
Methodologically, the study is broad in scope (see chapter 3, ‘Data and method’, pp. 18–35). Wengler takes a comparative sociolinguistic approach and investigates both morphosyntactic and phonological variables. The grammatical variables include zero copula (e.g. what you Ø talking about), be-levelling (e.g. we was playing cards) and verbal negation (e.g. I ain’t know the name); the phonological variables include the low vowels in the lexical sets trap, bath, start and palm, as well as the diphthongs in mouth and price. This combination goes beyond the empirical focus of most works in creole studies, which typically focus on either grammatical features (the majority) or phonological ones (a small minority). The study is also methodologically rigorous. Wengler carefully reproduces, where possible, earlier analytical workflows to ensure comparability with both contemporaneous (1970s) and more recent datasets (1990s and 2010s) which are used for synchronic and diachronic comparison (e.g. Hackert Reference Hackert2004; Kraus Reference Kraus2017). She also employs advanced multivariate techniques in a transparent and convincing way, notably mixed-effects modeling and random forest analysis. The resulting figures are clear and help the reader navigate the complexity of the analyses.
The empirical chapters are informative and scrutinize both linguistically and socially conditioned patterns of variation and change; see chapter 4 ‘Grammatical variables’ (pp. 36–99) and chapter 5 ‘Phonological variables’ (pp. 100–50). The section on zero copula shows perhaps the clearest case of continuity in constraint patterns: the following grammatical context and the subject type condition the variable across the 1970s, 1990s and 2010s data, even though the overall rate of zero copula is higher in the historical radio data than in more recent Bahamian data (section 4.1). This is one of the few cases where decreolization remains a plausible interpretation. The be-levelling discussion yields a more mixed picture, with non-past invariant is showing low-frequency usage, while past was-levelling occurs nearly categorically in the historical material (section 4.2). The section on verbal negation usefully distinguishes between negation with be, have and do, and the discussion makes clear that verbal negation in Bahamian Creole cannot be reduced to a single, uniform pattern (section 4.3).
The phonetic-phonological component of the study, i.e. acoustic phonetic analyses of monophthongs and diphthongs, is very carefully conducted. The data are automatically aligned and manually corrected; acoustic vowel quality is analyzed using psychoacoustic transformation (to the Bark scale) and vowel-extrinsic vowel normalization; vowel duration is z-normalized; and the statistical modeling takes into account some confounding variables (e.g. voicing of the following environment) (see section 5.1). The findings for the low vowels reveal a system with substantial spectral and durational overlap but also sociolinguistic differentiation, especially in terms of F1/F2 (but less so in terms of duration) (section 5.2). The discussion of mouth and price likewise uncovers a differentiated picture, with mouth showing more evidence of social and structural variation, including raised nuclei and more monophthongal realizations in certain environments, while price appears more homogeneous (section 5.3).
One of the book’s most conceptually ambitious contributions lies in its sustained engagement with Irvine-Sobers’ (Reference Irvine-Sobers2018) distinction between load-bearing and non-load-bearing variables, a framework that Wengler introduces early on and returns to in the discussion chapter (chapter 6, pp. 151–74). Building on this framework, Wengler argues that the variables examined in the book differ in their load-bearing status or, in other words, the extent to which they index Bahamian Creole. Wengler’s contribution lies not only in applying this framework to the Bahamian case, but also in exploring whether and how it can be extended beyond phonology to grammar and how it can be operationalized through patterns of linguistic and non-linguistic constraints.
The book is also appropriately cautious in its treatment of evidence, and one of its strengths is that it explicitly acknowledges the methodological difficulties that complicate some of its interpretations. Wengler is explicit both about the challenges posed by analyzing staged speech and about the heterogeneous nature of the comparative datasets. As the conclusion makes clear (chapter 7, pp. 175–6), direct comparison is complicated by differences in register, audience effects, speaker backgrounds and recording contexts. Wengler does not ignore these limitations but, rather, builds them into the interpretive framework, repeatedly calling for careful and critical assessment of the individual datasets. The study demonstrates that, despite these limitations, carefully contextualized comparisons across different kinds of data can yield valuable insights into the recent history of Bahamian Creole.
In sum, Dialect on Air: Bahamian Creole in Historical Radio Broadcasts is a strong and innovative monograph. Its empirical foundation is particularly noteworthy, its analyses are careful and rigorous, and its theoretical discussions are thoughtful. The book’s main contribution lies in demonstrating how a sociolinguistic dataset of historical radio broadcasts can be employed for a rigorous and context-sensitive investigation of variation, indexicality, and language change in a postcolonial creole context. It will be of considerable interest to scholars working on Caribbean Englishes, creole linguistics, variationist and historical sociolinguistics, and diachronic World Englishes more broadly.
