Barbados Culture & Language

Barbadian culture is West African in its foundations, British in its institutions, and emphatic about being neither straightforwardly.

Crop Over

Originally the celebration at the end of the sugar harvest, it lapsed with the industry and was revived in 1974 as a full carnival season. It runs from late June with calypso and soca competitions, the Pic-o-de-Crop finals and Bridgetown Market, and ends on the first Monday in August with Grand Kadooment — costume bands dancing the road from the stadium to the coast.

Rum

Distilling sugar-cane by-products into rum began in Barbados in the seventeenth century, and the island has a serious claim to having invented the spirit. Mount Gay’s records run to 1703, and the rum shop remains the social unit of every village.

Music

Calypso and soca, and the local form spouge, developed in the 1960s with a distinctive bass and cowbell pattern. Landship — a friendly society that parodies the Royal Navy with uniforms, ranks and a marching dance to tuk band music — is unique to Barbados and is UNESCO-listed.

Food

Flying fish and cou-cou, made from cornmeal and okra, is the national dish. Alongside it: pudding and souse on a Saturday, macaroni pie, fish cakes, conkies, and Bajan pepper sauce on everything.

The chattel house

The small timber house built to be taken apart and moved is Barbadian in origin and is the island’s most distinctive vernacular architecture. Plantation workers owned the building but not the ground beneath it, so the houses were designed to be dismantled and carted away if the tenancy ended — symmetrical, on loose blocks, with a steep roof and jalousie shutters, and extended by adding another unit behind. They are painted in strong colours and are still lived in across the island.

Language

English is official; Bajan, an English-based creole with West African grammar, is what people speak among themselves, and the shift between the two is fluid and constant.

English is the official language and is universal — in government, schools, media and every interaction a visitor will have. No other language is needed.

Bajan is what Barbadians speak among themselves: an English-based creole with West African grammatical structure, spoken fast, with its own vocabulary and rhythm. Visitors catch some and miss a good deal, and speakers switch to standard English readily.

A few Bajan words surface constantly: wuh part for where, lime for hanging out, bare for a lot of, cheese on bread as an exclamation of surprise, and gine for going.

The courtesy that matters is the greeting. Good morning, good afternoon or good night on entering a shop, a bus or an office is expected, and launching into a question without it reads as rude.