How ‘barbecue’ came to London

Next time you’re planning a summer barbecue, or a canoe ride across a stunning lake, or even lazing around in your hammock on a Sunday afternoon, give a mental nod to Taíno – one of the first indigenous languages encountered by Europeans in the New World!

That’s because, many of the words now commonly used in everyday English – such as barbecue (barabicu), canoe (kanowa), cassava (kasabi), hammock (amaka) and hurricane (hurakan) – are derivatives of this Caribbean language.

Researchers say that over 300 languages are spoken in London, and one of the most distinctive has been the East End Cockney dialect. Interestingly, since the 1980s, as the immigrant population in East London grew, another dialect has emerged, and gained currency – ‘Multicultural London English’, or MLE, which has distinct traces of multiple Caribbean languages. As part of a project undertaken under the museum’s Black Heritage London programme, I focused on the ancestry from one of the Caribbean region’s rich tribal languages – Taíno.

But before we get into Caribbean oral history, it is important to understand the make-up of the Caribbean, aka the Antilles. The Antilles is a group of islands located in the Caribbean Sea and is made up of all of the West Indies. The Greater Antilles includes the five larger islands, and the Lesser Antilles, a long arc of small islands in the Caribbean Sea.

Before the arrival of the Europeans to the Caribbean, there were seven different indigenous speech communities in the Antilles:

• Ciboney Taíno in Hispaniola, all of central Cuba, all but the southern Lucayan Islands, and Jamaica
• Macorís, in two dialects, in the Dominican Republic section of northern Hispaniola
• Ciguayo on the Samaná Peninsula of northeastern Hispaniola
• Guanahátabey in Pinar del Río province of far-western Cuba
• Classic Taíno in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Vieques, and the Virgin and Leeward Islands
• Kalíphuna in the Windward Islands
• Karina in Carib, and also in the Windward Islands

When Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492, his first encounter was with the Taíno/Arawak people. At that time, Taíno was the most common language across the Caribbean. However, in just 60 years, colonisation by European powers destroyed the existing island cultures. Diseases brought by the Spaniards, starvation and European enslavement led to the near-extinction of the Taíno.

Their culture suffered a huge loss, and the language was replaced by Spanish and other European languages, such as English and French. Interestingly, the Caribs, another indigenous people, were the only people known to have resisted European settlement on their lands and were therefore seen by Europeans as aggressive and dangerous. Many of the Carib died fighting the invaders.

While the Taíno language was believed to have become extinct within 100 years of contact, smatterings are still spoken in isolated pockets in the Caribbean. Some Taíno influences have survived – in the beliefs, religions, language and music of many Caribbean cultures.

Groups of people currently identify as Taíno, mainly among the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, both on the islands and on the United States mainland. Recent research shows a high percentage of mixed or tri-racial ancestry among people in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, with those claiming Taíno ancestry also having Spanish and African ancestry.

Here’s a sample of some Taíno words.

By the 17th century, there were imperial rivalries between the British, French and Dutch forces seizing Caribbean territories from a declining Spanish Empire, in the hope of creating profitable colonies of their own. Thousands of people were transported as slaves to the Caribbean, particularly from West Africa. As a result of this, a number of pidgin languages came up.

Pidgin is a language that develops from a mixture of two or more languages. It evolves when people who do not speak each other’s language need to communicate. At the time, the enslaved people would have spoken a variety of West African languages, but the European slave owners imposed their own language onto them. Among the enslaved people from varied regions themselves, a pidgin language would have been used, based on the sounds, vocabulary and grammar of all the different languages.

Pidgin is not a mother tongue, but a functional language. Because of the coming together of a diverse group of people, it remained a means of communication on the plantations of the Caribbean. In fact, it became the first language for children within the community. Over time, this pidgin language began to expand as it was spoken in a wider range of contexts and developed into a fully-fledged language – creole. Creole is a pidgin language that has expanded in structure, vocabulary and has the characteristics of other languages, such as English, French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese (all languages of European colonisers), as well as West African languages.

What’s interesting is that different regions have different versions of creole, and this is separate from the “official language” (of the colonisers). For example, in St Lucia, they speak a French-based creole, but their official language is English.

Over time, even creole slowly faded through the generations in a bid to ‘fit in’. For instance, the Windrush generation – who came to the UK from the Caribbean in the 1950s, speaking both English and a Creole language – often did not pass the creole language down to their British-born children. The reason? Some thought it was better for the children to learn and speak British-English. As a result, many second-generation British-born people of Caribbean descent don’t speak the creole languages.

However, attitudes towards Creole languages in the Caribbean are changing. In Haiti, Haitian creole was named as an official national language alongside French in 1987.

Take a look at examples of Jamaican (where Ciboney Taíno was spoken) Creole. Do these words sound familiar?

As we now see, several Caribbean languages, such as Taíno, have contributed to the English language, with words such as tobacco, maroon (simarabo) and potato (batata) forming part of our everyday communication. When nearly half-a-million people migrated from the Caribbean to London 74 years ago, we saw the English language evolving again – especially spoken English. As the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants settled in, their dialects and accents further enriched the already multi-hued linguistic landscape in London. Over time, new varieties of English, such as London-Jamaican English, evolved.

Sometimes hard to understand, when heard, the meaning is usually clear, despite the simplification of words. For instance, “him tell me dat yesterday” for “he told me that yesterday”. Some typical elements of Caribbean vocabulary have persisted, such as “pickney”, meaning “young child”.

London Jamaican is most commonly spoken at home and in social groups as an informal language. However, the speakers may swap between London Jamaican, London English and British Standard English depending on the occasion. This is called code switching!

In the 1960s and 1970s, the integration of Jamaican creole into Multicultural London English (MLE) increased due to the popularity of music like reggae. By the 1980s, MLE became popular amongst young Londoners, transitioning from the East End cockney. Even today’s ethnic communities have an impact on the everyday spoken English of other communities. For instance, many young people, regardless of their ethnic background, now use the slang terms, like peng (good looking), innit and bare (very). Not to forget the re-introduction of pronouncing the ‘h’ in words. Interestingly, MLE can be commonly found among grime artists and their music. To name a few, Stormzy, Big Zuu and Morrison.

However, it’s important to remember that MLE also has influences from the pidgin languages of other immigrant communities from around the world, while Caribbean languages remain the key contributors.

Despite the English Language evolving through the use of MLE, not everybody sees it as a positive thing.

On BBC’s Newsnight in 2011, while analysing the London riots, historian David Starkey said:

“The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion, and the black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England, and that is why so many of us have this sense of, literally, a foreign country.”

As a response, educationist Katharine Birbalsingh responded in her Daily Telegraph blog: “Has David Starkey ever been to Jamaica? My mother is Jamaican, and I can assure you that she sounds nothing like our out-of-control kids! For one, the accent Starkey is talking about is specific to London…Two, that accent is uniquely English. It is a kind of fusion of many cultures including Cockney East End speech.”

What is interesting in this argument of ‘being a Londoner’ or the ‘English language’ is that English has always been a medley of languages (previously Latin, Greek, etc.), much like London has been a melting pot of cultures through the ages. Here I’ve tried to trace one of the strands back to the Taíno language of the Arawaks in the Caribbean, but there are hundreds more to be explored as we speak words rooted in those languages and cultures, every single day.

Kia is a Producer, and this article was part of a project undertaken under the museum’s 2021 Black Heritage London programme.