The Caribbean Language

Situation: An Overview

Dr. Shondel Nero

UWI, Mona - School of Education
Semester 1
2011
Language in Jamaica
The following is an exchange heard in a grade
seven classroom
Teacher:What did I say the family is?
Student 1: Miss the family is a group of people living together
and caring for each other
Student 2: Mis dis bwai tomp mi aa push di des paa mi
Teacher:Last week we looked at members of the family
Student 3: Yes Miss. Mother, children, father, sister, brother
Teacher:Last week we looked at the roles of the father
Student 4: Mii tiicha/go out an werk/ an ern di moni tu bai
fuud
Teacher:Now we are going to look at the roles of the
mother
Student 5: Mek shuor di fuud iz kuk/mek shuor shi pripier
di chiljren far skuul
Features of Jamaican
classrooms
Children enter the school system with English or
Jamaican Creole (JC) or a mixture of both.
JC is used within the school, almost all the time.
Many teachers do not use English (Shields, 1989)
A range of varieties
A continuum or 2 co-existent systems
 A range of varieties
im a nyam im dinna
im a iit im dinna
im iiting im dinna
him is eating him dinna
he is eating his dinner.

(Hall-Alleyne, 1981: 32)

 Where did Jamaican come from?
The Acquisition Process in Jamaica:
Plantation system
Many different languages
Twi-Asante paramount
In contact with English
Importance of language contact (central to L2
acquisition)
Many different points of access to English (stratification)
 Standardising English
 The development of the printing press by William Caxton.
 Caxton spoke the East Midlands dialect, which was in use in
parts of southern England around the Thames.
 The language used in his first printed work.
 The two major British universities (Oxford and Cambridge)
used this particular variety; also helped to secure its
status.
 Choice of dialect was not rule-governed- helps to explain
why English is so unpredictable and the rationale for some
of the demands made on what you learn.
 English was one of the European languages brought to the
Caribbean. It is the language used in this part of the world
as an international means of communication..
 Creole Continuum
------------------------------------------------------------------

Basilect Mesolect Acrolect

Creole Creole English Standard English

Patois/Patwa

Creolese
 Phonology (African continuities)
Archaic forms “ratta” “yerri” musu end in vowel-
suggests that at one time all words in Jcn ended
this way- an attempt to align English and West
African syllabic structures
Insertion of vowel in nasal consonants sinake
sumaal
Pitch/tone (stress as the word rises or falls; sound
can be ordered on a scale of high to low);
important feature in older Jcn kyaang
Shift in sounds of D to or V to B eg beks hebi
 Morpho-syntax (African
continuities)
Where properties of morphology and syntax apply e.g.
number in nouns - add s + sing. - subject takes sing.
verb)
Changed little since established in 16th and 17 th
centuries, except in changes connected with continuum
.
Blurring of distinctions between verb and adjective eg.
Dem mad mi (big-up)
Use of transitivity
Serial verbs: he take picture show his child
Use of seh anyhow she; relic of Niger Congo, also found
in London
 Lexico-semantics (African
continuities)
Some African words died out if they
were not tied to things still in use:
benta; some still in use with Jamaican
things afu, pumpum, backra, ackee etc.
Gender and generation: expressed by
affixing words meaning eg male/female
man cow (bull)
Juxtaposition: must be definitional
eyewater; nose hole (what of
babyfather?)
 20th century ideologies (with
African continuities)
Rastafarianism – African continuity
e.g. philosophical idea of the power of
the word
Pronominal system (I and I)
Reveals Jamaican facility with
language
 Some rules of Jamaican Creole
(according to Bailey and Craig)
 Unmarked verb for:
 Tense (e.g. She come yestadie)
 Subject/verb concord (e.g. Im waak to skuul)
 Zero copula (verb “to be”) if:
 Predicate is adjective (e.g. Yuh sick)
 Verb in progressive form (e.g Im workin)
 Location (e.g. Mih sista outside)
 Rules of Jamaican Creole
(cont’d)
Flexible pronoun use (e.g ‘im tell she/her)
Inverted sentence
Serial verbs (e.g. she come start cook right away)
Zero marking for plurals if number already
indicated (e.g. t(h)ree dahla; if no number
indicated, use “dem”, e.g. dih man dem
 Summary
Creoles based on language coming out of plantation
society
English-based Creoles are fraught with controversy
Two co-existent grammatical systems OR
Unidirectional Continuum
Social differentiation
Language inextricably tied to identity
Implications for school
 Status of Creole in the Caribbean
(Carrington, 2001)
 Tendency to assess the status of Creole by reference to its
co-existence with a European standard variety

 Literature on the status of Creoles in two categories

 (1) Functional distribution of the language in various

domains, specifically the level of penetration into those
domains

 (2) Attitudes of different categories of users towards use of

Creole in various domains.
 Domains used as measures of
Creole penetration
Politics and government

The media

Performing and literary arts

Education
 Politics and government
Haiti is the only country in the region that
identifies Creole (along with French) as a
language within its constitution
In Aruba and Netherlands Antilles –
Papiamentu used for govt to people
communication
 The Media
Creole has already penetrated print media,
especially newspapers and church periodicals the
latter (notable in French Creole territories)
Widespread on the radio, especially call-in talk
shows
Popular on religious stations in French Creole
territories
Creole not as common in TV news broadcasts in
anglophone territories; more so in French
territories.
 Performing and literary arts
Creole has long penetrated performance poetry
(e.g., Louise Bennett, Mutabaruka, Paul Keens-
Douglas)
Evident in literary publications (e.g work of
Pollard, Olive Senior, Merle Hodge, etc.
Has dominated the music industry – reggae,
dancehall, etc.
 Attitudes Towards Creole
 Contradictory attitudes – Creole is at once celebrated and
denigrated;
 Kachru and Nelson (2001) call this “attitudinal schizophrenia” (p.
14)
 Creole celebrated to mark true Caribbean identity; for solidarity;
for artistic performance; for humor; for being “real”.
 Denigrated -- Steretypes linked to speaking Creole, eg. poor,
uneducated, unskilled.
 Conservative attitude attached to speaking English

 Public attitudes towards JC is changing; there’s more tolerance

for its use in public, especially among youth (Jamaican Language
Unit Survey, 2005).
 Education
Attitudes towards the use of Creole in education
have been and continue to be controversial
Many parents and Creole speakers themselves are
opposed to the use of Creole in school or as a
medium of instruction.
Typical objections to the use of
Creole in school (Siegel, 2006)
 It is a waste of time, and has no practical benefit. If the goal
of schooling is acquiring proficiency in standard English (SE),
then time spent on Creole takes away from acquisition of SE.

 Interference (in the sense of negative transfer) – Creole

might interference with the acquisition of SE.

 Creole marks students as lesser – linguistically,

socioeconomically, and educationally.

 It can further ghettoize students who are already

marginalized, thereby preventing our delaying their academic
success and job prospects.
 JC in Education
 Promote Creole as the medium of instruction (Devonish &
Carpenter, 2007).

 Accept Creole as the mother tongue and the bridge to L2

acquisition (Craig, 2006)

 Purge Creole from the classroom and promote

monolingualism in English

 Expect many other positions in between

 The Jamaican Language Education Policy (2001) adopted an

approach of transitional bilingualism.
 References
Alleyne, M. (1980). Comparative Afro-American. Ann
Arbor:Karoma Press.
Bailey, B. (year?)
Carrington, L. (2001). The status of Creole in the
Caribbean. InP. Christie (Ed.). Due respect: Papers on
English and English- related Creoles in the Caribbean in
honour of Professor RobertLe Page (pp. 24-36).
Kingston: UWI Press.
Christie, P. (2001). Forty years on. In P. Christie (Ed.).
Due respect: Papers on English and English-related
Creoles in the Caribbean in honour of Professor Robert
Le Page (pp. 1-21). Kingston: UWI Press.
 References (cont’d)
Craig, D. (1983). Teaching standard English to
nonstandard speakers: Some methodological issues.
Journal of NegroEducation, 52 (1), 65-74.
________ (2006). From vernacular to standard English:
Teaching language and literacy to Caribbean students
Miami, FL: Ian Randle Publishers.
Devonish, H. & Carpenter, K. (2007). Full bilingual
education in a creole situation: The Jamaican bilingual
primary education project. Occasional paper No. 35.
Society for Caribbean Linguistics. Trinidad and Tobago:
UWI, St. Augustine.
Hall-Alleyne (1981).
 References (cont’d)
Jamaican Language Unit, University of the West Indies. (2005).
Language attitude survey of Jamaica. Mona, Jamaica.

Kachru, B. & Nelson, C. (2001). World Englishes. In A. Burns &

C. Coffin(Eds.), Analysing English in a global context (pp. 1-
25). London andNew York: Routledge.

LePage, R., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of identity:

Creole- based approaches to language and ethnicity.
Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Ministry of Education, Jamaica. (2001). Language education

policy. Retrieved from the worldwide web on May 23, 2006
at: http://www.moec.gov.jm/policies/languagepolicy.pdf
 References (cont’d)
Shields, K. (1989). Standard English in Jamaica: A
case of competing models. English Worldwide 10
(1), 41-53.

Siegel, J. (2006). Keeping creoles and dialects out

of the classroom. Is it justified. In S. Nero (Ed.),
Dialects, Englishes, Creoles, and Education (pp. 39-
67). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers.