SOCIETY: Jamaican Talk Comes of Age

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dionne Jackson Miller

MONTEGO BAY, Aug 14 2003 (IPS) - More than 150 years after emancipation from slavery, many Caribbean nationals still struggle with the socially acceptability of the languages that evolved from the African tongues of their ancestors and the English spoken by slave owners.

Once stigmatised as a dialect used only by the uneducated and illiterate, Jamaican Creole – or patois – for instance, is now widely used and accepted in many spheres of society.

One of those credited for that change in attitude is 83-year-old writer, poet, dramatist and teacher, Louise Bennett-Coverly, affectionately called Miss Lou by all Jamaicans.

Although she moved to Canada over a decade ago for health reasons, Miss Lou is revered for having legitimised Jamaican Creole through her writings and was recently awarded the country’s third highest honour – the Order of Merit.

University professor Aggrey Brown told a public gathering recently that Bennett-Coverly was a "revolutionary" who "legitimised the language with laughter". And well-known comedian and actor Oliver Samuels says her contribution came at a critical time, not just for Jamaica, but for the region.

”I believe Miss Lou’s contribution to not only the Jamaican population, but to the West Indian people, is tremendous, because I have heard people from Trinidad, Barbados, all over the place, talking about this woman, Miss Lou,” he says.

"She came at a time when Jamaica needed a voice that represented the people," Samuels told IPS. "We were in colonialism and she spoke up about the injustices … about women."

"She was one of the first voices to speak openly about women; and she spoke about our conditions, she spoke about politics, and she was talking on behalf of us people on the plantation, people in the factories," he says.

The deeper significance of the social commentary underlying all of Bennett-Coverly’s work is a point often stressed by scholars, and the poet herself.

Miss Lou began to write poetry at school in the standard English she had learned in school, but was motivated to write her first poem in patois at 13, after hearing a market woman urging a friend on a tram car to "pread out yu’self" (spread out yourself), to prevent the nicely-dressed Louise from sitting in the section of the bus reserved for market women and their huge baskets.

Bennett-Coverly says she immediately recognised the woman’s comments as a clear case of social protest.

"This is a protest. That lady is protesting the fact that she has to sit in the last row (because) they might tear somebody’s stockings in the front with their baskets, and I started to write," she told reporters at an interview session.

That work has helped propel the evolution of how people perceive the language, says Kathryn Shields-Brodber, head of the department of languages, linguistics and philosophy at the University of the West Indies.

"Obviously, Miss Lou’s vehicle for promoting Creole was comedy, but that comedy was a cover for biting social commentary, which forced us to look not just at our lives, but at our language," she told a public function recently.

"These days there is no discrimination as far as the use of Creole is concerned for discussing serious issues. Those callers who participate on public radio in the many phone-in programmes make it clear that serious issues can be addressed in a serious way in Jamaican," she added.

Academia has fully embraced Jamaican Creole. The University of the West Indies now teaches a course in Creole grammar, and Shield-Brodber notes that in 1967 the first edition of a dictionary of Jamaican English was produced in the phonemic Cassidy/Lapage writing system, generally regarded as the standard writing system for Jamaican Creole today.

But not everybody is comfortable with Creole in the classroom. Suggestions from education experts that teaching in Creole in public schools might improve students’ performance continue to be met with criticism by people afraid that the move could retard students’ development of English language skills, but Shields-Brodber says research has shown this to be false.

"There is no factual basis for such a fear. What research has highlighted is that positive transfer will occur to any other languages learned when students have respect for and appreciate their first language and have developed literacy skills in it."

But despite the efforts of academics, Jamaican Creole is still not generally accepted as a language for formal settings, and persons speaking Creole only are highly likely to find themselves at a disadvantage.

In fact, experiments carried out by the University of the West Indies have shown that Creole-speaking customers had a much harder time getting information and being dealt with politely in places of business, says linguistics professor Hubert Devonish.

Against this background, two years ago, Devonish suggested to a Parliamentary committee that the Jamaican constitution be amended to specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of language.

The issue has not been a priority, he says.

"We are the privileged class, we are the ones who are bilingual, we can operate usually in the other language (Creole) as well as in English, and we get the best of all possible worlds, so we are not going to be that interested in campaigning for rights in that sense," he told Radio Jamaica in a recent interview.

But his parliamentary submission was taken seriously by government officials, who requested that the university set up a planning unit for the Jamaican language in the linguistics department, to promote the use of the language for communicating with the public in government agencies, he explains.

Many of these developments, experts say, can be traced back to Miss Lou’s advocacy for Jamaican Creole, kudos she accepts graciously.

"I wasn’t expecting to change everything, but I was wanting people to respect the people who talked this language," she says.