Introduction

Although the Anglophone Caribbean has had a large output in varied and localised discourse/text-types in the post-independence era, there has been little linguistic scrutiny of them. This has been the case even though more recent linguistic work done on English in the Caribbean has clearly shown a tendency towards endonormativity and more local forms within several countries’ developing standards (Schneider 2009; Deuber 2014; Hackert 2016). Language varieties which have histories of being minoritised or peripheral in many spheres of public life have also gained increasing acceptability—particularly the region’s Creoles (c.f. Mühleisen 2002; Youssef 2011). This edited collection recognises the specific, unique, and complex nature of the evolving Caribbean language milieu, and the need for more rigorous descriptions of discourse types arising out of this space. Based on work presented at the University of Trinidad and Tobago’s “Stylistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Language Use in the Caribbean” 2021 conference, the present volume draws together papers from established Caribbeanists seeking to address the lacunae of research focused on the region’s unique uses of linguistic structures in important aspects of socio-political/cultural life. Much like Esposito (2021), we see this book as bridging “an existing theoretical and analytical gap between the more macro aspects of socio-political investigation and the more micro aspects of linguistic analysis that has the potential to open up new prospects in Caribbean Studies” (p. 175).