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Caribbean English, also called West Indian English, is the variety of English as used in the Caribbean region. Since their European discovery by Columbus in 1492, the islands and coasts of the Caribbean have been claimed, disputed, settled, and governed by the Spanish, Portuguese, French, British, Dutch, Danish, and Americans with obvious long-term varied effects on the languages spoken there. Most of the territories are now independent, but colonization has created a complex inheritance. In such mainland areas as Belize and Guyana, indigenous languages survive; in all territories there is a complex "continuum" between standard American and British English, Dutch, French, and Spanish on the one hand and their related creoles on the other.
In general terms, the creoles have a majority of European vocabulary items, as well as words from other languages, with varying degrees of African and other structural features. In most Anglo-Caribbean territories, although school-based standard English is the official language, it is a minority form. Apart from Barbados and Guyana, r is usually not pronounced in such words as art, door, and worker in Caribbean English. The most salient differences between the Creole-like varieties of Caribbean English and standard English include the absence of inflected endings in -ing and -ed, e.g. name for named; the absence of some past verb forms; the absence of -s in third-person singular present verb and plural nouns; the pronunciation of /th/ as /t/ or /d/; and the different usage of parts of speech, e.g. tired as both adjective and verb, hungry as both adjective and noun.
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