Language
Throughout Guyana, English is the main language, and it is the only English speaking country of South America, although it is primarily spoken with a Caribbean dialect. Although Guyanese speak English, the Latin influence and words remain. For example "Chico" is gum in Guyana also referred to a boy. "bailar" is a common phrase used when people are about to dance. The Spanish/Portuguese languages are used very little now in Guyana because of the British influence, but the Hispanic culture still appears in certain words, particularly surnames, as well as the sounds of Musical instruments used
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Guyana
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.”
—Njabulo Ndebele (b. 1948)
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)