The Westindian, like St. Peter, cannot hide safely behind his speech. His "accent" will give him away in North America, Britain, West Africa or in any part of the world where the English Language holds sway. Indeed I should be surprised if the same remark does not hold good mutatis mutandis for Frenchand Dutch-speaking Westindians but I am concerned here with the Anglophone confraternity of the Caribbean region. Just as the bystanders spotted Peter by his speech as being "another of them" so outsiders readily spot us as Westindians firstly - and l would contend, often, only - by the way we speak. I am sure it must have happened to the St. Thomian and the Cruzian, away from home in North America or Britain, as it has often happened to me, a Guyanese, to be casually identified as "'Jamaican'', that label being used to mean "Westindian prototype" and giving that albeit dynamic people, the Jamaicans, a distinction some of us may feel they do not deserve. Well, outsiders may, but Westindians do not see or feel themselves as one: divided more by our history than we actually are by geography, and by economic forces far more than by history, we find ourselves grouped only by circumstance; and perhaps the most significant such circumstance, though not the most powerful alas, is language.