ABSTRACT
Today the decolonisation process has taken the British back some three hundred years, to the region where they originally began their worldwide colonisation: the Union Jack still flies on many of the islands conquered by the United Kingdom during the first global wave of colonisation in the seventeenth century. These included Barbados, Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Leeward Islands and Jamaica; in the second half of the eighteenth century to be followed by Dominica, St. Kitts-Nevis, Grenada, St. Vincent, Tobago and St. Lucia. Trinidad and British Guiana, seized from France and the Netherlands respectively after the Napoleonic wars, were among some of the latest Caribbean territories to be colonised by the British. 1 This extensive colonisation history has seen the majority of Caribbean territories adopt English as the main language. 2 However, the former British West Indies consists of many relatively small territories with equally small populations. Therefore only around one quarter of the total 37 million inhabitants of the Caribbean is English speaking.
