Introduction

Cane Walk is a pseudonym for a Guyanese village within half an hour's drive of Georgetown, the capital. In the mid 1970s, when the data for this study were collected, approximately 3,650 people lived there. About 97 per cent of these were East Indian, descendants of indentured labourers brought from India between 1838 and 1917 to replace and supplement Africans (emancipated in 1838) as the sugar industry's labour force. The Cane Walk community was created by the nearby LBI (La Bonne Intention)/Ogle Sugar estate in the 1950s to provide alternative housing for its workers, after the barrack-like ‘logies’ in which they had housed them, on the estate itself, were condemned. The community's stratification into two classes, which we will refer to as ‘Estate Class’ (EC) and ‘Non-Estate Class’ (NEC), reflects in part a sugar industry distinction between ‘laboureres’ and ‘junior class’ employees (see Jayawardena 1963: 28–52). Most EC members work as cane-cutters, weeders and in other labouring capacities in the canefields behind the village. Some NEC members are junior supervisors on the estate, but most work as shopowners, contractors, clerks and in similar ‘lower middle class’ jobs off the estate, some in Georgetown.

Data

In this paper, I will summarise some of the key findings about sociolinguistic variation in this community, drawing on an earlier study of pronominal usage in a judgement sample of 24 Cane Walkers (Rickford 1979).