The course introduces you to the scientific study of language. The basics of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics will be covered, so that you will begin to understand how linguistic analysis is carried out. The emphasis will be on the analysis of the range of structures which exist in the linguistic repertoire of a speaker in a Caribbean Creole community.

The course also introduces you to Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of Language, specifically to issues concerned with language variation, criteria for describing language situations, attitudes toward languages and the function of particular languages in a speech community.

The course will enable you as a teacher to make preliminary formal and functional analyses of the speech communities from which your students come.