From Bush Talk to Nation Language: Language Attitudes in Jamaica Before and After Independence

Abstract

This essay deals with changing language attitudes towards Jamaican Creole, from colonial times to the present day. The main hypothesis is that Jamaican Creole should be viewed more positively as a marker of national and cultural identity since Jamaica gained political independence in 1962. The textual evidence presented ranges from eighteenthcentury travel writing to present-day newspaper reports and letters to the editor, supplemented by language attitude studies.Historical BackgroundJamaica was first colonized by the Spanish in the early-sixteenth century, but in 1655 a British fleet under Cromwell's orders attacked the Spanish settlement. The Spaniards were taken by surprise and had to flee from the island; only a small number of men and several hundred slaves remained, waging a kind of guerrilla war on the English which finally failed in 1660.1After the conquest, the English government immediately made plans to settle the colony, and in 1656 the first contingent of about 1500 settlers arrived from Nevis. Settlers from other parts of the Caribbean followed suit, bringing their slaves with them. By the end of the seventeenth century, the slaves already outnumbered the white settlers. As sugar soon became the main crop in Jamaica, the number of slaves increased steadily until they made up about 92 percent of the total population in 1734.2 This economic and demographic change also led to a great linguistic change: namely, the creolization of English. Slaves speaking different and often mutually unintelligible African languages had to communicate with each other and with their white overseers, who spoke different varieties of regional English. Naturally, given their living conditions on the plantations, the slaves had very little contact with speakers of English. Hence, a radically restructured form of English emerged over the next generations, a creole, with a phoneme system altered to accommodate native speakers of West African languages, a lexicon containing mostly English words, and a drastically changed grammatical system, relying on particles rather than inflections.3 This can be illustrated by a brief sample sentence taken from Jamaican Creole:Di pikni dem tel im se a Klaris mash di pat.The children told her that it was Clarice who broke the pot.Note the following features: In the subject of the main clause, the particle dem is used to indicate a plural; the lexeme pikni 'children' is ultimately of Portuguese origin. The verbs tel and mash are not inflected, but refer to an event in the past. The personal pronoun im translates into English he, him, she, and her. The English verb say has become a complementizer similar in function to English that. The subject of the subordinate is stressed by the use of the highlighter a {a Klaris). The equivalent of the relative clause who broke the pot does not require a relative pronoun in Jamaican Creole. The meaning of Standard English mash has been extended to any kind of destruction.Although it may appear at first glance that creolization means only a great simplification or an imperfect mastery of a 'target language', linguistic analysis has shown this not to be the case. A creole is by no means a kind of 'broken English' but a full-fledged language with grammatical distinctions not found in English - for example, article use based on whether the referent is known to both interlocutors or not.4 As language of the slaves, however, Jamaican Creole was held in very low esteem.With the emancipation of the slaves in 1838, most freed slaves became smallholders in the hill country, craftsmen, and traders. Emancipation did not improve the living conditions of the black population very much, and, since tiie governor refused to act on a petition, Paul Bogle and others organized the Morant Bay Rising in 1865, which was brutally suppressed by the governor and his armed forces. As a consequence, Jamaica became a British Crown Colony in 1866 to stabilize the political and economic hold on the island. …