Salmoneus wrote:'true' Caribbean creoles exist only as the extreme end of a spectrum of registers.
Disclaimer: I'm not a researcher, my information is from what I've read on-line. That said, as far as I know, you may be right with regards to the English creoles, especially Jamaican. However, with regards to Haitian Creole, as Wikipedia writes "Haitian Creole is spoken by about 9.6–12 million people worldwide. Haitian Creole is the first language of 90–95% of Haitians. (...) As of 2008 Haitians were the largest creole-speaking community in the world." Googling a bit, my perceived knowledge of the average Haitian not speaking French seems justified, e.g.
here: "The percentage of people who speak French fluently is about 5%, and 100% speak Creole". Note it's not just this one article, everything I've read about Haitian Creole and French in Haiti seems to point at this. So I think you are perhaps partly mistaken when you say that "Caribbean creoles exist only as the extreme end of a spectrum of registers" (which is true for the situation in Jamaica).
A relatively small, and shrinking, proportion of the population will speak true creoles
That depends on your definition of "true creoles". Fully "basilectal" perhaps yes (in Jamaica and other CEC speaking areas, though e.g. in Suriname the situation is different). But I don't see why other, mesolectal, varieties couldn't be called "true creoles".
For instance, there are only two creoles in the region that have gained official status (Papiemento and Haitian Creole - and the latter is only co-official with French)
The former is co-official with Dutch. But this:
so access to government services, and much media and entertainment, is in the European language.
is not true for the former Netherlands Antilles, as access to government services is also in Papiamento. I don't know about Haiti, but given the above, I'd be surprised if the average Haitian couldn't access government services at all due to lack of understanding of or fluency in French.
What's more, European languages are the primary lexifers of these creole registers.
Nobody disputes this.
Talk to a Jamaican in English, and then in Yoruba, and see which they understand better...
I'm not sure what you mean there. Talk to a Jamaican in your average Patois, and I expect
you don't understand much more than the Yoruba speaker.
zompist wrote:How so?
What I've understood (but my sources may be wrong or I may remember wrong), is that some or most features of the grammar of Caribbean creoles reflect grammatical features found in West African languages.
JAL