Not too fast please.
Any accent would do, including Caribbean accent, of course.
The people who came
From an ethnic point of view the majority of the population in the English-speaking Caribbean is of black African origin, which is a direct legacy of the slave trade.
The original inhabitants of these territories were wiped out in the early days of the colonizing process and today the only descendants of these Amerindians can be found in Dominica, in St Vincent (“the Black Caribs”) and in Belize. In Trinidad there is a community in Santa Rosa (Arima) that claims to be of Carib ancestry.
Other minorities in the English-speaking Caribbean include the descendants of Portuguese, Chinese, Lebanese, Syrian and Indian settlers that came to the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery.
By far the largest of these minorities is the “East Indian” one. East Indians came to the Caribbean as “indentured labourers” between 1844 and 1917, when indentureship was ended because of protests against that scheme in India. Today East Indians account for about 50% of the population in Guyana and about 40% in Trinidad. In Jamaica, they make up 2% of the population.
The Portuguese were peasants from the island of Madeira and the Azores and, between 1834 and 1880, 41,000 of them migrated to Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Grenada and St Vincent. These labourers proved unable to adapt to plantation work, and soon went into commerce.
The Chinese migrated to the Caribbean mainly in the 1850’s and the 1860’s (apart from an early immigration scheme in Trinidad in 1806) and they soon left the plantations to go into laundering, catering and general shopkeeping, and all over the Caribbean the local grocery store is simply known as the “China shop”.
The Lebanese and Palestinians (known as “Syrians” in the Caribbean) first came in the 1890’s as peddlers, and they naturally became merchants and traders, specialising in dry goods.
Apart from the Chinese, Portuguese and “Syrians”, the minority which has done best in the Caribbean is the Jewish community, particularly prominent in Jamaica. Jamaican Jews are the descendants of Sephardic Jews who came in the 17th century, fleeing persecution in Europe.
