New Register of Caribbean English Usage

The New Register of Caribbean English Usage is a pan-Caribbean publication which seeks to provide a representative sample of the development of Caribbean English usage since 1992, after the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage was completed. The New Register, which was intended to be a companion work to the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage on a smaller scale, comprises about seven hundred items, including words with new senses or usages, acronyms, and abbreviations that have emerged out of the ecological and cultural domains of the CARICOM territories, from Guyana to Belize.

The New Register, like the Dictionary, shows the contribution of homeland British English to Caribbean English creoles which spread across the Anglophone Caribbean as it merged with the hundreds of West African languages introduced during trans-Atlantic slavery to form those English-based Creoles. It also identifies the various levels of Caribbean English usage from formal to anti-formal and the various sub-levels of the latter.

The continued inventorying and chronicling of Caribbean culture and history are vital in helping us to recognize and understand our unique Caribbean identity, and this is an essential reference book for students and educators in the region and in the diaspora. As well as being a practical guide to current Caribbean English usage, the New Register is a tool for raising the level of the production and use of English and for demonstrating the way in which Caribbean English works.

Richard Allsopp was retired Professor of Caribbean Lexicography and former Director of the Caribbean Lexicography Programme, University of the West Indies, Barbados. He was the editor of the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage.