Member states of the Caribbean Community British heritage. In November 2013, CARICOM announced that it would "suspend consideration of the request by the Dominican Republic for membership of the Caribbean Community" in response to a Dominican court ruling which revoked citizenship from tens of thousands, mostly descendants from illegal immigrants from Haiti. The French Republic extends to several islands in the Caribbean that are not associated with CARICOM, and are instead part of the European Union: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Martin, Saint Barthélemy and French Guiana. The CARICOM-DR-EU Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) presently provides these areas with access to CARICOM markets. It was announced during summer of 2012
Languages of the Caribbean can also be observed on Dominica, Saint Vincent, Carriacou, Petite Martinique and Grenada. Asian languages such as Chinese and other Indian languages such as Tamil are spoken by Asian expatriates and their descendents exclusively. In earlier historical times, other Indo-European languages, such as German, could be found in northeastern parts of the Caribbean. Throughout the long multilingual history of the Caribbean continent, Caribbean languages have been subject to phenomena like language contact, language expansion, language shift, and language death. Two examples are the Spanish expansion, in which Spanish-speaking peoples expanded over most of central Caribbean, thereby displacing Arawak speaking peoples