Arguments for the Bajan Creole, Iberian Influence

This essay argues that Barbadian Creole bears an additional, understudied Iberian layer, particularly Judaeo-Portuguese, visible in definite-marking strategies (de/da), prepositional stacking, prosody, and proverb structure. While Bajan’s grammar is fundamentally depicted as an English-lexifier creole, Sephardic contact in 17th-century Bridgetown/Speightstown likely reinforced or contributed to specific function-word patterns already emerging in the island’s multilingual contact ecology.This essay thus argues that Barbadian Creole may carry traces of Judeo-Portuguese-influenced phonetic speech, brought by Sephardic Jews fleeing Iberia, which have been overlooked by dominant Anglo-African centric narratives of creole formation within the British Empire. The Judaeo-Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese dimensions of Barbadian life are an additional layer in context to British and African norms, not an erasure of them.For clarity, I’ve placed a glossary of technical terms at the end, so you can refer to it if required.