comment on style / language

Miguel Street has a very important and distinct linguistic style. The reader will notice immediately that nearly all of the characters speak an extremely broken form of English. The book is not intended to be an English translation of the spoken languages of Trinidad but rather the English pidgin language that developed in Port of Spain. Full sentences are often downgraded to phrases like "they have bag" instead of "they have a bag" or they sometimes replace singular and plural linking verbs with one another, like "They is big crab" instead of "they are large crabs".