Ever listened to a Tobagonian speak? Sister Pam is a good case in point. Don’t use President Robinson or Morgan Job as examples.

Their Tobago accents have become somewhat diluted or, shall we say, Anglicised, while our Member of Parliament for Tobago East remains unrepentantly native.

Chief Secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly, Hochoy Charles, yes. He's from Les Coteaux and when I inquired as to what type of accent he had, my respondent said "from the time you hear a Tobagonian speak you will know!"

How does the Tobago speech band get thrown into the archives of traditional mas' characters?

I was to experience them for the first time last year at the Viey la Cou annual celebration of these vintage characters at Queens hall, and many are the relationships with the customs and traditions that were brought across the oceans with the various diaspora.

These youngsters dressed in clownish type satin costumes with pantaloons and stockings were criss-crossing each other on the stage in a dancing march to the brisk wheeze of fiddle and drums.

They carried short sticks representing swords from earlier times and sported wire headpieces worked with fluttering tissue paper. These were shaped like ships; or, perhaps they represented admirals' hats?

In turn, one would grab the microphone and chant in the widest brogue that you ever heard, of things political or personal. The stanza would end in a rhyme designed to provoke reply and laughter, as s/he would call out to the musicians "Drag yuh bow, Mr. Fiddler." The music would start up energetically until the next person took over the mike.

It is criminal, really - the paucity of information that is accessible on the vintage, whether we speak of "parang" or "Tobago speech bands", and so, in the case of the latter, it was with a whoop of joy that I discovered a treasure of a booklet published by Oris Job-Caesar since 1987 entitled Drag yuh bow Mr. Fiddler. But, we will leave its review for another time.

What she says, though, corroborates my thoughts on the Tobagonian speech that, as with their music, speech was a hybridization of the many influences, not the least of all being the Scottish brogue introduced by land overseers and church missionaries of the nineteenth century.

According to Job-Caesar, the original speech bands adopted the "proper" use of English, complete with the Scottish rolling of the Rs when visiting the Great Houses.

There they performed on Carnival Tuesday, going house to house and collecting money for a performance designed to poke fun at the social order of the day.

Two weeks before that, they would stage a two to three part play every night in a bamboo tent during the pre-Emancipation period, eventually coming out in their band son Carnival Tuesday to go from one Great House to another.

Today, Job-Caesar bemoans the loss of the original integrity of the replays, as the presentation that I saw was indeed a shallow re-creation of what she describes as "a European folk drama transported to the New World."

The dialect, then, was "broken English in which some middle English words have been found, at times even including high flown verbose English of the Victorian era!"

Notwithstanding, the quaint presentation by the youngsters was humorous and the accompanying music can still be described as "a quaint but not unpleasing combination of Afro-British music."

"The fiddle and flute carried the basic melodies played for British folk dances and, combined with the Tobago tarmbrins called cutters and rollers, gave a quaint harmony of African and British folk rhythms."

But let's return to the accent once more.

Unlike the singsong kaiso intonation of its Big Sister, the accent that you would hear from a native is described as "flat and not cultured."

"Ting", which we can easily recognize as "thing", or where the "h" is dropped (more for convenience on our Trini part, I suspect, with the word "thing" than for the earlier influences that affected the districts like Charlotteville, Plymouth and Black Rock) remind me of the Jamaican dialect.

And so "head" becomes "ed" and "heat" as my informant suggested led to her housekeeper's interpretation of "eat" - an order with which she readily complied!

In recalling this precious vintage band of characters, it is with delight therefore that I understand that the national Carnival bands Association will be staging its first big gathering of the Vintage in competition at Victoria Square on Carnival Sunday at 1 p.m.

Prior to this, John Cupid's national Carnival Committee umbrella has been responsible for reviving the ole mas' on a regional basis, thereby keeping the traditions alive over the past six years or so throughout the country.

As for Val Roger's increasingly popular "Viey La Cou", this takes place on Sunday coming at the Queens hall from 2 p.m., while the Caribbean Basin Exhibit will be hosting a lecture demonstration on the Tobago Speech Band on Wednesday, February 18, at 10 a.m.

So, just in case a Tobagonian says to you "Me wan fuh go home," you will have no doubt as to what is the speaker's intention.

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