Trinidadian English: Sociophonetic Variation and Multinormativity in Secondary Schools

This book presents an in-depth study of standard English speech production and perception in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, focusing on the secondary school context and aiming to contribute to the question of endonormativity. Sociophonetic variation in the speech of teachers and students is analyzed with respect to vowels, consonants, prosody, and covariation patterns of segmental features. The study also investigates attitudes toward local and non-local accents of standard English. The book offers one of the most extensive phonetic analyses of a postcolonial English variety to date. It will be relevant for researchers in World Englishes, phonetics, and variationist sociolinguistics.