ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a variationist account of subject-auxiliary inversion in question formation in several creole and vernacular varieties of English, beginning with Bajan, the English-based mesolectal creole of Barbados. This introductory section contrasts the canonical characterization of question formation in English-based creoles with the variation that encountered in recorded data. It also reviews prior studies of this variable in British and New World Black Englishes. After introducing the data and methods it presents a multivariate analysis, first addressing Bajan then extending it to Jamaican, Guyanese, African American Vernacular English, and Appalachian. The purpose of the present study is to remedy this situation, concentrating first on Bajan, but then considering Jamaican, Guyanese, Appalachian, and African American Vernacular English, as part of a larger study of grammatical variation and change. The non-inversion rate for Standard English more realistically as the non-categorical found in the Switchboard corpus of colloquial American English.
