Back when Twitter was a thing, I’d bring this up from time to time. Growing up in the region, I only ever heard people say their specific nationality, Caribbean people, or West Indian. There wasn’t a single time, not a one, that anyone actually from the Caribbean referred to the people there as “Caribbeans.” 😅 Well, online, you get exposed all sorts of people, and that includes every diaspora. From what I saw, it was usually Americans or British people calling people from the Caribbean…”Caribbeans.”

I don’t know… Hearing someone say “as a Caribbean” has always sounded so strange. Like, a Caribbean WHAT? 🧐

While writing this, I was reminded of this iconic scene from Inglourious Basterds.

Of course, what I’m talking about here doesn’t go that deep lol. Still, can you imagine being a spy back in the old days? How did they deal with the paranoia… There are so many mannerisms and sayings we don’t even think about that can “give you away.”

Anyway, I found this after a little googling, and it sounds about right:

As a proper noun, the word “Caribbean” is reserved for the geographic region of the Caribbean. It is used as an adjective for both people and things Caribbean, hence ‘a Caribbean woman’ and ‘Caribbean people’. It would sound decidedly odd to Caribbean ears to say “I’m a Caribbean living in the Caribbean” or “We are Caribbeans living in the Caribbean.” ‘Caribbean’ is never used as a noun by Caribbean people in the Caribbean to describe or refer to themselves, and is in fact considered strange, and/or viewed negatively as non-standard usage. Similarly, one would say ‘an Englishman’ and ‘English people’, but never ‘an English’ or ‘Englishes’

Society for Caribbean Linguistics

You can’t blame anyone, though. People can’t be expected to know every little detail about different regions. It’s easy to mess up because we say Asians, so Caribbeans sounds like it’s the word. I feel different when it comes to the usage in entire organizations or research papers though… Did they not consult with anyone from the region, or did no one tell them? 👀

Another silly but related example is how oxtail all of a sudden got popular in the US and the name got turned into oxtails. It’s not oxtails to Caribbean people; oxtail with no s is the name of the dish and plural. Conch is never pronounced with a ch at the end (it sounds like konk). Another one is curry goat, not goat curry…🐐

That being said…

There are plenty of terms that differ from island to island. Look up a Johnny cake recipe on YouTube and the person in the video might list off the name variations and give a disclaimer before even getting started. Last year, my cousin was highly offended that me and my sisters said “guineps” instead of quineps. Or the other way around…I can’t even remember. 😂 I think we’re only ever united when it’s the Caribbean as a whole vs somewhere else lol

And to end this post, here’s my recent silly gaffe. This is definitely more of an island-specific thing, but when I went back to AXA last year and ordered a sandwich at a bakery, I said “mixed cheese” and the cashier was like “cheese mix”? Anytime a local ordered, they’d indeed request “a cheese mix.” 😌 It wasn’t just one specific bakery referring to their cheese sandwich like that either, it was all of them!