[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Urban Panamanian English, a study of the English used by the descendants of the Afro-Caribbean builders of the Panama Canal, by Catherine Laliberté (Ludwig Maximilians University-Munich) will be published this month (August 2023) by John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Description: Urban Panamanian English presents the first detailed account of the English used by the descendants of the Afro-Caribbean builders of the Panama Canal. It offers an up-to-date sociolinguistic account of the Panamanian West Indian community of Panama City and Colón, including empirical coverage of the advanced state of language shift taking place among bilinguals. The book also showcases spoken interview data and takes stock of the variety’s grammatical features. In particular, it provides an advanced quantitative study of variation in the use of verbal -s which contributes to longstanding discussions regarding the principles constraining this variable in Englishes world-wide. This work of documentation and description richly complements existing research on Panamanian Creole English and spotlights Panama as part and parcel of the English-speaking Caribbean. As such, this book is of interest to all scholars and students of language contact, variation, and change.

Urban Panamanian English
John Benjamins Publishing Company, August 2023
225 pages
ISBN 978-9027214256 (hc)

For more information and TOC, see https://benjamins.com/catalog/veaw.g70

For more on the author, see https://www.ling.anglistik.uni-muenchen.de/people/laliberte-catherine/index.html