Jamaican Creole
Jamaican Creole has its origins in the languages introduced to the
Caribbean and West Indes during the years of colonisation and slavery.
It was traditionally the subject of derision due to its roots in
oppressed cultures, but more recently opinion towards it has changed
for the better, with linguists championing it for its unique
syntactical and phonological properties and for its continuing social,
historical and political significance. There is a huge amount of
interest in this area of linguistics and this essay attempts to provide
some insight into the symptoms of Jamaican Creole with recourse to the
wealth of research already conducted.
In this case the origin of Jamaican Creole (JC) may begun to be
investigated through consideration of the meaning implicit behind the
words ‘superstrate’ and ‘substrate’. A dictionary definition of the
term gives the former as: ‘the language of a later invading people that
is imposed on an indigenous population and contributes features to
their language’. It gives the latter as: ‘an indigenous language that
contributes features to the language of an invading people who impose
their language on the indigenous population.’ Thus we have the
two terms ‘invading people’ and ‘indigenous population’ and they are
useful in establishing the colonial context in which JC first came
about. The definitions in this instance are imperfect ones however, as
it ought to be noted that the indigenous population of Jamaica, or
Xaymaca as these people named it, had been exterminated and displaced
in the mid 1600s with the arrival of the ‘conquistadores’ of Europe.
Therefore the language referred to as ‘substrate’ in this instance is
actually an amalgamation of imported tongues; those spoken by the
multitudes of slaves transferred across from Africa. As Donald Winford
informs us, the contact languages known as ‘creoles’ ‘were created by
slaves and other subordinated groups who fashioned materials from the
colonial languages and their own mother tongues into new media of
communication’ (2003, p. 304). It is important to be aware that
although Creole was created by slaves - cobbled together purely as a
means of basic communication - what we now refer to as JC has developed
into a mother-tongue (L1) in its own right, absorbing new linguistic
and phonological features as second and third generations have grown up
speaking it. Winford goes on to state, ‘the newcomers, both European
and African, came together in a social, cultural and linguistic vacuum,
into which each group introduced some of its cultural traditions’ (p.
310). It is easy to forget that culture is always present, it is not
merely a relic of the past preserved in museums, and it is important to
bear this in mind when speaking about JC in the present day.
Perhaps the most unusual syntactical and grammatical difference between
Creole and superstrate languages is the formers use of pre-verbal
markers to establish tense, mood and aspect, commonly known as TMA.
Using Winford’s table as a reference (p. 325) it is possible to explore
instances of this through analysis of written dialogue. For instance,
JC uses ‘(b)en’ before a verb if describing something which happened in
the past: mi en nuo se im wudn kom = “I knew that he would not come” .
It uses ‘wi’ to express the future: mi wi go de Sonde = “I’ll go there
on Sunday” . Creole does the same thing – places markers before the
verb - where Standard English would use past and present participles
with their inflectional endings: (/di gyal dem de guo / the girls are
going) (Le Page, P. 141). It is worth at this point noting a
phonological anomaly that is widespread in the Creoles, whereby the
voiced fricative ‘th’ is substituted by ‘d’, as in the example above:
them becomes dem. It is interesting that pre-verbal markers in JC also
appear to be optional, as Peter L. Patrick in his study on the urban
manifestation of the tongue confirms: ‘the expression of past-reference
in JC is not obligatory, i.e., there are grammatical utterances that
are systematically ambiguous as to time reference.’ (1999, p. 169).
This is evident in the practice of storytelling, a much valued source
area for all linguists. Memorized stories offer a preserved oral record
of the speech-patterns of the past, and this is no less true for
creoles. Once it has been established that a tale is set in the past JC
allows for it to then be told in the present tense, creating a greater
sense of immediacy for the listener. The second half of R. B. Le Page’s
book Creole Language Studies is devoted to transcripts of Anancy
stories recited by an elderly speaker of basilectal JC. Within these
pages the detail and action of events is largely expressed in the
present tense, after a cursory nod by the narrator to the fact that he
is indeed talking about something that happened in the past.
‘nou, der iz a ‘neks ‘touri, ‘bout, ‘nat di ‘siem uol ‘wich, but a ‘uol
‘wich ‘al di siem. Nou ‘der ‘waz a ‘yon ‘man, ‘wants. Fi-‘him ‘mada
‘waz a ‘blain ‘wuman, ‘fren wid a ‘neks ‘wuman, wich ‘shii, iz ‘def.
‘suo dis ‘yon ‘fla ‘iz a uol ‘wich.
Now there is a next story, about not the same old woman but about a old
witch all the same. Now there was a young man once. His mother, his
mother was a blind woman. And that blind woman was friends with a next
woman which she is deaf. So this young fellow is a old witch.
Though in this instance there is no record of pre-verbal markers,
instead versions of the copula are used: ‘waz’ and ‘iz’, and the same
end is achieved: we can see how Rowe begins speaking in the past before
seamlessly sliding into the present tense.
There is certainly a tendency on the part of scholars in the field
towards believing that ‘a fixed (T-M-A) ordering of pre-verbal markers
were definitive of creoles’ (Winford, p. 326). The Creolist and
ethnologist Beryl Loftman Bailey informs us that many English-based
Creoles, such as Sranan from South America, Gullah from the islands off
South Carolina and Krio from Africa’s Sierra Leone, are similar to
French Creoles, ‘as well as the Louisiana Creole in New Orleans (...)
the Hispanic-based Creole of Curacao’ and the ‘Dutch-based Creole of
the Virgin Islands’ (1966, p. 6). However Bailey also states ‘although
these languages all bear resemblances which can hardly be coincidental,
their syntax cannot be said to be Portuguese, nor Dutch, nor English,
nor French on the one hand, nor West African on the other’ (p. 6).
Perhaps she was expecting to be able to draw clear linguistic
relationships between the superstrate and its respective Creole
fifedom, but such a reductionist attempt to explain the origins of
Creole is not something to be proud of and should not in fact be
attempted. It is a type of neo-colonialism that the languages of
Western Europe should claim authorship of so fluid and collaborative a
language-group as Creole.
For one thing Creole is still developing and enveloping. In Patrick’s
study on the urbanization of JC he contextualises it as having many
varieties within itself; discussing the phonological and lexical
differences between the old and the young, the poor and the affluent,
the urban and the rural.
After Emancipation in 1838, movement away from plantation life into
isolated interior villages removed one source of contact with standard
varieties and contributed to the maintenance and vitality of basilectal
and mesolectal Jamaican Creole. (p. 128)
From a lexical point of view all the Creoles certainly have an appetite
for assimilating new words. They frequently possess compound adjectives
that are both descriptive and metaphorical as Baugh writes in A History
of the English Language. He draws a link between ‘strong-eye’ and the
Twi phrase n’ani ye den meaning ‘self-willed’, and also connects
kakanabu meaning ‘foolishness’ to the Cockney figure of speech, a
‘cock-and-bull’ story. It seems that JC does not go in for favouritism,
absorbing and preserving lexical items from both superstrate and
substrate sources. This ability to assimilate freely from numerous
sources is monitored however by what Baugh calls a ‘hierarchy of
linguistic features’ which are ‘associated with various points on the
continuum’ (2002, p. 333). These various points refer to the strains of
Creole, ranging from the radical basilectal through the mesolect to the
acrolect (the most standard form). Patrick points out that the use of
TMA particles, as discussed above, vary not only across creoles but
also largely within the generations (p. 169), and this is likely to be
true of the lexis as well. As Le Page asserts,
Most Jamaicans are bidialectal; domestic servants, for example, will
speak one language to their employers and a different one among
themselves. If the occasion is relatively formal or if the speaker
rises to middle-class status, different structural features appear,
including phonemic contrasts such as rat-rot, face-fierce, and
bud-bird, lacking in informal lower-class speech. (p. 135)
This is recognisable in other dialectal regions of the world, for
instance in the Scots dialect spoken in the Scottish Highlands and the
ease in which a Scots speaker can switch into Standard English. And it
is also a common practice in most languages to consider who you are
addressing before you open your mouth. Le Page’s comments suggest the
awareness within creole speaking communities of the significance of
their words. Certainly language has been an important tool in
establishing identity for modern Jamaicans, as can be seen in the bold
creole poetry of Louise Bennett and Benjamin Zephaniah. In doing so it
discredits this idea of the ‘impoverishment’ of creole, as posited by
Baugh (p. 332).
It is intriguing to note that ‘English has shown a marked tendency to
go outside its own linguistic resources and borrow from other
languages’ (Baugh, p. 12) as it would appear that JC shows a remarkably
similar tendency. Even though many lexical items from English have been
absorbed into JC there are anomalies in the grammar that reveal large
areas where the languages seem incompatible. An example is in ‘serial
verb construction (which) seems to analyse the section expressed in the
English verb by breaking it down into its sequential parts.’ (Fields,
1995, p. 103). It is interesting to note that it is JC that requires
greater detail and explanation of a verb, unsatisfied to leave
ambiguity:
Two well known examples from Jamaican Creole are carry go and bring
come, sometimes used together as carry go bring come. It almost seems
as though the influence from the African substrate dictates that a verb
should only express one action (Fields, 1995, p.103).
This reveals a desire for clarity within the collective psyche of JC
speakers which is odd given their laziness in establishing the
time-reference of a given situation. Baugh provides us with a good
example of this need for precision in the English sentence “John went
to Honolulu to see Mary” which ‘does not specify whether John actually
saw Mary.’ (Baugh, 2002, p. 333). In Creole the difference
between the completed action – ‘John bin go Honolulu go see Mary’ – and
the incomplete action – ‘John bin go Honolulu for see Mary’ - must be
established. Therefore, where JC does not parallel English, for
instance in the latter’s insistence on inflection, it has requisites of
its own which Standard English lacks. Le Page supports this apparent
inconsistency present along the Creole continuum, as he says, ‘Jamaican
idolects range (...) from the speech of the English expatriates to the
‘bush talk’ of the isolated villages’ (p. 135).
Baugh describes pidgin as a ‘simplified language used for communication
between speakers of different languages, typically (...) for trading
purposes’ and goes on to distinguish it from Creole:
If the simplified language is then learned as a first language by a new
generation of speakers and its structures and vocabulary are expanded
to serve the needs of its community of speakers, it is known as a
creole (123).
Therefore the Creoles that are spoken today across the globe are all
offshoots of a mother-tongue that encompasses and includes, given the
fact that its speakers live far and wide; on coastlines, in cities and
in rural settings. All are still being influenced linguistically by
their social and geographical situation. We can compare this to the
situation of the children and grandchildren of immigrants to the UK,
who not only speak fluent Standard English but also a version of their
parents and grandparents native tongues. The difference between an
immigrant from southern Asia – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh for
instance - is that they come speaking what Baugh would describe as an
already ‘established language’ (p. 333). They then bring up their
children using their L1, at the same time that the child is learning
the system of speech of their country of birth: another L1. Bilingual
from birth these children are at a distinct advantage when it comes to
accessing the subtleties of intonation and meaning in their two
mother-tongues, something which older language learners rarely achieve
fully. Creole is a powerful example of this as first generation
speakers - for instance those enslaved people made to work on the
plantations - spoke a limited pidgin, adequate for offering information
and obeying orders and lacking in grammatical complexity and lexical
variety.
Generative grammarians, such as Noamh Chomsky:
have aimed to explain how language can be acquired at all, given the
poverty of the stimulus. “How can we know so much on the basis of so
little experience?” they ask. The answer is that a knowledge of
linguistic universals is part of the innate structure of the human
brain (Baugh, p. 334)
It is children who will change the world, as is oft remarked, and this
is no less true when it comes to the growth of language. The creators
of Creole were the second and third generations of Jamaicans who
fashioned it from the pidgin of their parents and presumably from the
linguistic influences all around them, in the form of substrates and
superstrates. The languages of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have not
had to scramble from birth as limited trade languages into
comprehensive and fluid tongues in their own right, which is what all
Creoles have had to do. While Jamaican Creole may have grown from a
pidgin, it did precisely that: it grew, just as its first native
speakers grew. The following generations of Jamaicans spoke this
language and it necessarily had to undergo change, expansion and
adaptation in order to meet their needs. From its basic form as a mode
of communication between traders and displaced peoples, JC has become a
language group in its own right, with its generous continuum of Creole
variants and its continual growth in the modern age.
It is now generally accepted by linguists in the field that the
‘“creole hypothesis” – the idea of a continuum of Creole forms - has a
lot to do with the formation of “street speech”’, which is present in
western metropolises and spoken by third generation JC speakers (Baugh,
p. 383). He comments on the controversy during the 1960s ‘on the extent
to which linguistic features could be traced either to British English
or to creole origins.’ There was a rush to try to “discover” where JC
had come from. It was ‘recognised that the migrations of African
Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North during the
past century brought a dialect with distinctly Southern features to New
York, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities’. These dialects naturally
mingled and merged and ‘continued to be learnt by successive
generations’.
Baugh also goes on to state, ‘The occurrence of English forms and
constraints in JC is partial but not random, conventionalised rather
than improvised’ (p. 150) arguing the case for the intention behind
Creole, and promoting the idea that it belongs to its speakers. There
is a traditional view of Creole as a language that has been forced into
being, and often falls short of allowing it autonomy. Yet an analysis
into just one of its many varieties discredits this. JC has acquired a
name for itself and recognition that it is its own tongue, formed from
others but unlike any that has come before it. Its grammar breaks
rules; it does not conform to its supposed superstrate parent language,
but uses its own systems of establishing tense, mood and aspect. It
also does not step in time to its substrate influences. As Holm states,
not all Creoles exhibit the same markers, ‘There is no marker in JC
which is exclusively associated with habitual aspect. It thus differs
from other CE varieties like Guyanese, which uses doz primarily but
also a.’ (2007, p. 131). It changes depending on its situation:
‘Progressive aspect markers are preverbal (...) Da and de are
characteristic of western Jamaica (De Camp 1971), and are also more
rural’ (2007, p. 130). Like a disobedient child it rampages
around, paying attention to some rules and disregarding others.
Linguists can no longer speculate without evidence that JC variation
and the mesolect are grammarless, the spontaneous result of
contemporary code-switching or fossilized learning of English, though
these undoubtedly played a role earlier (p. 150).
It is almost as though Creolisation survived as a form of protest
against colonisation and brutality. By retaining an imperfect
linguistic system and building new grammatical and syntactical rules
upon it, speakers of Creole maintained their own world, preserved older
tongues that were threatened with extinction and adapted others that
were being forced upon them. In this way it can be argued that, while
JC is certainly a speech form in its own right it is also on the Creole
continuum. It is a development from pidgin, it bears similarities with
its variants – for instance in the universal appearance of TMA and SVO
- and therefore it is still part of a collective voice that refuses to
behave like any of the languages from which it has sprung.
Bibliography
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