If you meet any of the five hundred thousand West Indian in Britain do not compliment them on their English. It's their mother tongue.
If you want to pay compliments, try cricket. West Indians are the finest cricketers in the world.
Most English people think of the West Indies as Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica.
But these islands are just part of an archipelago four thousand kilometres long, which stretches from Florida to Venezuela. The French call in the Antilles.
There are literally thousand of islands, the biggest being Cuba.
The English speaking islands were taken by the British during the days of Imperial expansion.
The rest were taken by French, The Spanish and the Dutch.
Then in a shameful period of British history, the islands were populated by slaves brought from Africa to work on the sugar plantations.
Slavery wasn't abolished until 1838 by which time the original African languages had died out.
Which is why English is the mother tongue.
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