The interplay of the national, regional, and global in standards of English

An accent recognition survey was designed and distributed among respondents from the anglophone Caribbean with the aim of finding out whether they can recognize different standard accents of English as spoken by newscasters from five Caribbean countries, namely Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. The results revealed that there is a general difficulty in placing Caribbean newscaster accents in the correct country. The only exception was a Trinidadian accent that was recognized in 60 per cent of all cases. The results suggest that in the context of newscaster accents, recognizable national standard varieties are the exception. This paper also introduces the idea that to some extent, standard accents of English in the Caribbean might be recognizable on a subregional level.