Jamaica has been a troubled place for centuries. From the horrors of slavery and colonialism to the rampant crime and poverty of the present day, it hasn’t been an easy historical ride. But along the way a rich and beautiful culture has grown. One element of that culture is the language of Jamaican Creole, something that deserves much more study than it has already received. With an eye to the future in the field of linguistics, Barbara Lalla and the Jamaican YA novelist Jean D’Costa collaborated on Language in Exile; Three Hundred Yesrs of Jamaican Creole.
Languages don’t emerge out of nothingness. Every language grows out of some pre-existing system of communication. Language is deeply rooted in human necessity and the need for communication. Keeping this in mind, it is easy to see how the island of Jamaica functioned as a crucible for the creation of new forms of linguistic expression. After Columbus arrived in Cuba, he moved on to Jamaica, probably landing at what is now Montego Bay. In his wake came a tsunami of colonialists from Europe, primarily Spanish and Portuguese. Later on it was the Dutch and the French. Eventually came the British Empire which dominated the island until independence in the 1960s. These colonialists built sugarcane plantations and imported slaves for manual labor from the Gold Coast of Africa. While many of the slaves spoke languages from the Kongo-Bantu language group, they were ethnically distinct and spoke mutually unintelligible languages. Since communication is necessary for running a business, even more so for a large scale farming operation like a sugar estate, a pidgin English formed which was supplemented by neologisms and words brought over by the Africans.
This book is primarily a study of etymology. The authors analyze Jamaican Creole syntax, phonetics, and semantics in an attempt to locate linguistic patterns in their languages of origin. This study is framed on a spectrum encompassing Jamaican Creole, called the “basilect”, at one end and the prestige variety of Jamaican Standard English, called the “acrolect”, at the other end. Most Jamaicans speak a combination of the two extremes; this is called the “mesolect”. By extending this continuum, Jamaican Standard English would actually be a mesolect of Standard British English (a.k.a. Received Pronunciation, King’s/Queen’s English, or BBC English). Using this scale helps to flesh out which elements of Jamaican Creole come from the top-down power structure of the colonialists and which ones come from African roots and other languages.
Despite the obvious influence of Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG), this is not a thoroughly study of linguistic structures. It actually uses TGG to parse structures in order to trace them back to their origins. As such, Jamaican Creole’s origins are bifurcated into two broad categories: that of British English and that of African-origin languages with stray bits of other languages added in. Thus, Arawak, Spanish, and Portuguese elements do show up in Jamaican Creole, the authors claim their contributions are too small to have a major impact on the broader development of the language. Since British English is the source language of the basilect Jamaican Creole, elements of British Standard English dominate. This would make sense since the slaves, being fluent in mutually incomprehensible languages, were unable to speak to each other or the colonialists, and had to rely on pidgin English as a lingua franca for communication. This pidgin morphed into a creole language and fluency in the mesolect largely depended on the amount of social contact a person had with the colonial speakers of British English. House servants would likely be more fluent in British Standard English than field workers who speak on limited terms with a “buckra” or plantation manager. The slaves would speak the basilect Jamaican Creole among themselves. It is through these differing interactions that a new variety of English came to be.
The subject of Jamaican Creole’s origins in British English is more complex than you might at first imagine. The colonialists were mostly of lower class or working class status in the UK. They entered the colonial trade for the sake of class mobility. Therefore the English they brought to Jamaica was a variety of mesolects dependent on regional linguistic patterns. The majority of colonialists came from both sides of the border between Northern England and Scotland; this means that Scots English had an influence on the lexicon and phonetics of Jamaican Creole. Other colonialists were Irish, Welsh, or Cornish and this had some influence on the creole as well. Some archaic lexical items from the British Isles are still used in Jamaican English to this day long after they fell out of use in their regions of origin.
A large portion of this book is on the etymological roots of Jamaican Creole in West African languages. Since so little has been studied or written about this linguistic category, it is a more difficult subject to tackle. But separating West African elements from European elements isn’t so difficult. If such elements don’t correspond to anything found in a European language of the time period in question, it likely either came from a native Caribbean or West African language. This book mostly focuses on the lexicon of Jamaican Creole and its relation to West Africa, but it does touch on phonology and syntax to some extent. Some interesting discussion surrounds the influence of Gold Coast Creole English and the origins of the mysterious pronoun “unu” in Jamaican Creole.
Gold Coast Creole English developed because English colonialists set up trading posts on the west coast of Africa. Part of their trade was in slaves and so the creole became a lingua franca for the purpose of enterprise.
In the latter case, “unu” is used in Jamaica as a second person plural pronoun in place of “you” in Standard English. For example, “you (people) must go gome” would be realized in the surface structure as “unu mus home” in Jamaican Creole. The origin of “unu” hasn’t been setttled yet, but most likely it came from West Africa, although, to the best of my knowledge, no equivalent in a West African language, or any other language, has ever been found. This raises an interesting question about Received English as well since the singular “you” is used as both a second person singular and plural pronoun. Some speakers of American Standard English inflect the plural “you” to make “you all” or y’all” and working class people in New Jersey might say “youze” to clarify any confusion when addressing a group of people. That second person plural pronoun appears to be a linguistic problem causing semantic surface structure problems that get solved in various ways. “Unu” complicates Jamaican Creole further because Jamaican Creole uses the same pronouns for nominative and accusative cases. Therefore in Jamaican Creole you can say “We drive him to the store” but also “Him drive we to the store”. Why is this so? This is the kind of problem that keeps linguists awake at night. It’s also the reason we never get invited to parties.
There is one interesting chapter about the source materials used in researching this subject. Until recently, Jamaican Creole has been an oral language only. It wasn’t until the 1960s that people began to write it. But the written record does include some samples and scraps. Mostly they are written by colonialist writers who used eye dialect to inject a sense of realism into their texts. Some of these are ephemera like songs or nursery rhymes. Sometimes there is as little as a line or a passage of dialogue in a story or journal. Often these bits ot Creole are written with the intention of demonstrating the inferiority of the slaves. So one problem with these source materials is a socio-linguistic one in that they are not written by the people who spoke it and the intended purpose of the writing is inherently pejorative. Another problem is that since Jamaican Creole was an oral language in the past, there is no standardized spelling for it. The colonialists who wrote in the creole eye dialect depended on their own phonetics to transcribe sounds and this differed from writer to writer. It also differed according to the linguistic background of the writer so that speakers of different English mesolects heard Jamaican Creole through varied phonetic systems. The spelling of Jamaican Creole is therefore irregular which means deductions as to how Jamaican Creole sounded in the past can only be approximated or sometimes entirely wrong. This makes if further more difficult to study phonetic morphology as phonemes from various languages combined to form new phonemes and new phonetic environments that influence how Jamaican Creole is spoken today.
After the technical chapters in the first half of the book, the second half is a compilation of written source materials included so the reader can apply the linguistic analysis to actual written language. It takes some discipline to follow this section because some of the source material is disturbing due to the socio-linguistic problems mentioned before. Reading the speech of slaves describing their living conditions, and sometimes the torture they suffered for disobedience, is distressing, sometimes even disturbing. On the other hand, there are lighter passages including some entertaining tales of Anancy, the trickster archetype of Jamaican folklore. And once you’ve learned the parameter sets of Jamaican Creole syntax, phonetics, and semantics, it actually isn’t as difficult to understand as you might intitially think. Or “as ye’ fi tink a’ fus”.
This book is academic and written using highly technical language. If you don’t have a background in linguistics most of it will go right over your head. If you do have a background in linguistics, it will be clear what the authors’ intentions are. This isn’t a study that arrives at any strong conclusions. What it does instead is identify unanswered questions about the etymology and morphology or Jamaican Creole and opens up avenues for future research in this subject. It is strictly a scientific book and non-specialists would be advised to look elsewhere to read up on Jamaican language. And non-specialists absolutely should do that because creole languages are a fascinating to study and often easy to catch onto for speakers of Standard English.
Language in Exile isn’t a book that provides answers. It is a book that points the linguistic scholar towards the future for the sake of seeking out answers farther down the road. This isn’t a book for everybody. But one final thought is this: psychologists since Freud have argued that birth is a traumatic experience. Because of slavery and colonialism, Jamaica is a nation that was born in trauma. That trauma is necessary for life to begin though. At least one beautiful thing came out of Jamaica’s traumatic birth and that is the language spoken by its people and all that goes with it.
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