Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States the Caribbean Community. OECS currently has ten Eastern Caribbean members, which together form a near-continuous archipelago across the Leeward Islands and Windward Islands. Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands and Martinique are only associate members of OECS. Diplomatic missions of the OECS do not represent the associate members. For all other purposes, associate members are treated as equals of full members. Six of the members were formerly colonies of the United Kingdom. Three others, Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, and Montserrat remain overseas territories of the UK while Martinique, is a part of the French Republic as an overseas department and
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