Bahamas Culture & Language

Bahamian culture is West African in its roots, shaped by a plantation economy that failed early and by a maritime one that did not.

Junkanoo

Costumes are built over months from crepe paper glued to cardboard, worn as enormous headdresses and shoulder pieces, and judged on craftsmanship as much as performance. The music is goombay — goatskin drums heated over fires at the roadside to tighten them, cowbells, whistles and brass. Groups are large, long-established and fiercely competitive.

Rake-and-scrape

The rural music of the Out Islands, played on a carpenter’s saw scraped with a screwdriver, an accordion and a goatskin drum. Cat Island is its heartland and holds a festival for it.

Boats

The Bahamian sloop, a working sailing design, is raced at regattas across the islands — the National Family Island Regatta at George Town is the biggest — in boats built locally to strict traditional rules.

Food

Conch above all: cracked, in fritters, and raw in a salad made in front of you with lime, onion and pepper. Alongside it: rock lobster, grouper, peas and rice, johnnycake, guava duff, and a rum punch the strength of which is not usually disclosed.

Straw work

Plaiting palm-top and sisal into hats, bags and mats is a craft passed down by Bahamian women and sold at the straw markets in Nassau and Freeport. The genuine article is hand-plaited on the island and is quite distinct from the imported goods sold alongside it — the difference is visible in the evenness of the plait and in who is sitting behind the stall making more of it.

Language and belief

Bahamian Dialect, an English-based creole, is what people speak among themselves. Obeah, a folk practice of the same African inheritance as Junkanoo, persists quietly alongside a very strong church culture.

English is the official language and is universal. No other language is needed anywhere in the country.

Bahamian Dialect is what Bahamians speak among themselves: an English-based creole with West African grammatical patterns, spoken quickly and with a distinctive rhythm. Visitors follow some of it and miss a good deal, and speakers switch readily.

Some words recur: conchy joe for a white Bahamian, jitney for the minibus, sip sip for gossip, switcha for limeade, and een for is not.

The courtesy that matters is greeting first. Good morning or good afternoon on entering a shop, a bus or an office is expected, and going straight to your question reads as rude — a point visitors from North America in particular tend to miss.