Diversity in the Caribbean, Part I

A few weeks ago, I was invited to attend a workshop in St. Lucia related to Caribbean Diversity as related to ICTs. It's organized by Funredes with the support of Agence de la Francophonie and the collaboration of Union Latine. It's name is Caraibes, Diversidad Cultural and Information Society - or CARDICIS - and the website, under construction, is here. The site, understandably, is still under construction at the time of this writing.

The main factors related to this are language and culture - and it's only after I started preparing myself for the workshop (I am going, of course) that I began to understand just how diverse the Caribbean is in these respects.

Through the Free Software Consortium (FSC) mailing lists, I have become more aware of language differences. The most active FSC mailing lists are Spanish and Portugese - the languages of Latin America. Picking my way through the language differences alone has been interesting, but the cultural differences are often hidden behind the language differences. Phrases in English often do not suffer literal translation, and I expect that the same is true of phrases in Spanish and Portugese - and in other languages. In a way it's amusing to me that I am posed with the problems I had as a teenager when I meagerly attempted to learn other human languages.I was more interested in programming languages at the time, and while speaking fluent C, C++, Python, Perl, and others - I find myself where I was in the 1980s, with only a better understanding of how necessary language is.

But what do I know of these other countries in the Caribbean? That is the first place my preparations took me. I found it important to stay away from commercial and government websites at first while gaining understanding of Trinidad and Tobago's neighbours.

In alphabetical order, here are links of interest:

Anguilla(English),

Antigua and Barbuda(English),

Aruba(Dutch),

Bahamas (English),

Barbados (English),

Belize (English),

Bermuda,

Cayman Islands (English),

Cuba (Spanish),

Dominica (English),

Dominican Republic (Spanish),

Guadelope (French),

Guyana (English),

French Guyana (French),

Haiti (French),

Jamaica (English),

Martinique (French),

Montserrat (English),

Netherlands Antilles (Dutch),

Puerto Rico (Spanish),

St. Kitts and Nevis (English),

St. Lucia (English),

St. Vincent and the Grenadines (English, French Patois),

Suriname (Dutch),

Trinidad and Tobago (English),

Turks & Caicos (English),

UK Virgin Islands (English),

U.S. Virgin Islands,

There is an amazing read in these, with interesting parallels and histories. And each one has it's own particular culture, and it's one particular colloquialisms within language (though I note that 'lime', a phrase equivalent to 'hang out', appears in quite a few former British colonies, which supports a theory I have).

One would think with so many commonalities, there would be less diversity - and yet, by altering different thinks, very different outcomes have shown up. Natural resources plays a large role as well.

More thoughts on this coming as they percolate.