St. Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles: The Texts of Samuel Augustus Mathews in Perspective

It was on the small island of St. Kitts in the 1620s that both the English and the French established their first colonies in the Caribbean; and it was from there that both nations began to settle other islands in the region. St Kitts is thus potentially the birthplace of the first English- and French-based Creole languages of the Caribbean. The recently rediscovered texts of Samuel Mathews in Kittitian English Creole, first published between 1793 and 1822, provided a Creolists’ workshop with the opportunity of analyzing these texts and assessing their historical significance for the evolution of the Atlantic English Creoles. The 21 papers in this volume, which derives from that workshop, include contributions by many prominent specialists in this field.