Grenada Culture & Language

English is Grenada's official language, used in government and school with British spelling, and Grenadian Creole French, called patois or Kéyòl-La-Gwinad, is still spoken on the main island and on Carriacou and Petite Martinique. The 2011 figures made the country 49 per cent Protestant -- Pentecostal, Seventh-day Adventist, Anglican -- and 36 per cent Catholic; literacy is 98.6 per cent, and St. George's University, founded in 1976 for medicine and veterinary science, fills the south-west with students.

The kitchen is African with Indian and French seasoning: oil down, the national dish, is breadfruit, coconut milk, turmeric that the island calls saffron, dumplings, callaloo and salted meat or smoked herring cooked until the milk is gone and only the oil remains; nutmeg and mace go into everything from ice cream to spice cake. The calendar is Spice Mas, the August Carnival that generates each year's soca and calypso; the Carriacou Maroon and String Band Music Festival in April; the Carriacou Regatta, begun in 1965; and on the sister island the Big Drum or Nation dance for West African ancestors at Maroon feasts, wakes and tombstone feasts, with the European quadrille beside it.

Cricket is the national and most popular game. The built culture is French: the capital's 1700s houses, the star fort of 1705–1710, the cathedral tower of 1818, and a capital laid out on a horseshoe harbour that the Ports Authority still calls the most beautiful part of town.

English is official and everyone's, with a lilt and a vocabulary of its own -- liming for hanging out, a lime for the gathering -- so nothing is needed. The French patois, Kéyòl-La-Gwinad, survives among older people and on Carriacou and Petite Martinique; the place-names are French, and Sauteurs is said Sau-tez.