London Jamaican

Language System in Interaction

Mark Sebba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317897163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

London Jamaican provides the reader with a new perspective on African descent in London. Based on research carried out in the early 1980s, the author examines the linguistic background of the community, with special emphasis on young people of the first and second British-born generations.

1 Introduction: Creole Comes to Britain

The Caribbean community in Britain is not a new arrival. Some British cities such as London, Cardiff, and Liverpool have long-established black communities¹. Caribbeans who have come to Britain from abroad have probably always brought with them their own distinctively Caribbean varieties of language; yet it is only in the last two or three decades that educators and policy makers – and to some extent, the general public – have taken an interest in ‘Black English’ (also called Creole or Patois) in Britain.

Regrettably, much of this interest has had a negative focus. In education, the language of West Indians was (and to some extent still is) perceived as a problem (see Edwards 1979, 1982; Dalphinis 1991; and Chapter 9 of this book). During the 1960s and 1970s interest in the language of Caribbeans in British schools led eventually to the publication of specialised teaching materials and the implementation of policies in the light of two Commissions of Inquiry (Bullock 1975; Rampton 1981).

In spite of this, the quantity of research on Caribbean language in Britain is not large. Furthermore, since there are now well-established Caribbean communities in a dozen or so English cities, each with a slightly different population distribution and distinct needs, any attempt to discuss the language behaviour of Caribbeans in Britain will need to consider each community separately. This book is mainly about research carried out in London – home of Britain’s largest Caribbean community, though not necessarily typical of all the Caribbean communities in Britain.

The linguistic roots of the British Caribbean community obviously lie in the Caribbean. So before going on to explain the origins of the London-based research, I shall give some background to the language situation in the Caribbean.

‘Creole’ and ‘Standard English’ in the Caribbean

The Caribbean – even if we restrict our focus of interest to the formerly British parts – is not linguistically homogeneous. However, the ex-British Caribbean territories share enough of their social and linguistic history to allow us to call them, for some purposes, a single language community.

In each territory, Standard English is an official language and a language of education, at least in the current phase of that territory’s history. In fact, the length of time that Standard English has had this status differs widely from place to place: over three hundred years in Jamaica, less than two hundred in Dominica. In all cases, however, Standard English has been present for long enough to have had a substantial impact on the language practices of the communities in question.

In the parts of the Caribbean under consideration, at the same time as Standard English is used in the official and public domains, a local Creole language is the language of everyday interaction for the majority of the population. Creoles have been a focus of interest for linguists for over a century, because of their distinctive history. In linguistics, ‘creole’ is a technical term referring to a class of languages which originate through contact between two or more already existing languages. Creoles generally arise through a prior pidgin stage. Regular or prolonged contact between two groups who speak mutually unintelligible languages may result in the formation of a pidgin – a language which is nobody’s native language but serves as a means of communication for a limited range of purposes related to the contact situation. Usually, pidgins derive most of their vocabulary from one language (the lexifier), while their grammar is derived from the various ‘input’ languages (including the lexifier) on the one hand, and on the other, from universal tendencies of human beings to simplify their native languages in order to make them more intelligible to foreigners.²

In the West African slave trade, a pidgin form of English (i.e. a pidgin with English as lexifier) was used for communication between the English slavers and their African counterparts, as well as among those Africans involved in the trade who did not have any other language in common. Pidgins with other European lexifiers (Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch) also developed as a result of this trade. These pidgin languages were also learnt by the slaves themselves, before, during or after their passage across the Atlantic to the Americas. The slaves themselves needed the pidgin as a lingua franca, not just for communication with their captors, but to communicate among themselves; a typical cargo would bring together slaves from many language groups, and on arrival in the American ports, they were deliberately split up to reduce the likelihood of conspiracies.

The transition from a pidgin to a Creole language takes place when the pidgin becomes a native language for some of its speakers. This will occur once a pidgin-speaking community is sufficiently settled for children to be born, and to grow up hearing the pidgin spoken all around them. In the case of the Caribbean slave communities, this probably took only a short time: for example, we know that the emergence of Sranan Tongo, an Eng-lish-lexified Creole spoken in the coastal region of Surinam, can be dated with reasonable accuracy to a period between the arrival of the first English slave-owning planters in the middle of the seventeenth century, and their expulsion by the Dutch: a total of less than thirty years. Once established as the most widely spoken language in the community, the Creole would soon supersede African languages for most functions except, perhaps, religious ones. Today, although there is a definite legacy of African languages in many parts of the Caribbean, the languages themselves are no longer spoken there.

The origins of the Caribbean Creole languages in slavery and plantation labour have ensured that they have never enjoyed high status in their own communities – notwithstanding various local attempts over the last century, mainly by intellectuals without government support, to raise their status. The existence of a diglossic relationship (Ferguson 1959; Fishman 1965, 1967) – a strict division in terms of function and status – between Standard English (the ‘high’ variety) and the local Creole language (the ‘low’ variety), is the norm in most places where a Creole is used.

The above description hides a significant division among the ex-British Caribbean territories, for while in most of these a Cre-olised variety of English is spoken, there are several – Dominica and St Lucia being the best known – where a Creolised variety of French, a language known as Kwéyòl, is the vernacular. A French-lexified Creole is, or has been in common use in several other territories as well – Trinidad, Grenada and St Vincent among them. Thus although the sociolinguistic profile ‘High: Standard English/Low: Creole’ holds good throughout the ex-British Caribbean almost without exception, we need to make a distinction between those places where the majority speak a Creole with English-derived vocabulary, and those where most or some of the populace speak a Creole with French-derived vocabulary.

In much of this book, the Creolised varieties of French will be left out of the discussion. This is not because they lack interest, or are unrepresented in Britain: neither of these is true. However, in numerical terms their communities in Britain are small, so that their linguistic influence on the Afro-Caribbean community construed as a whole is weak. That is one reason: another is that substantial ethnographic research on speakers of French Creole in Britain has up until now been virtually non-existent, so that there is little to report.

London Jamaican ‘discovered’

By the 1970s, the ‘West Indian language problem’ had been probed and discussed by educators and policy makers, but still rather little actual research had been done on the language of the Caribbeans. Caribbeans were settled in many parts of Britain; in London, they were a substantial proportion of the population in several boroughs.³ Probably Brixton is the most famous of the London ‘Caribbean’ areas, but there are several others with a substantial Afro-Caribbean population, such as Lewisham, Dept-ford, New Cross, Leyton and Harlesden.

In schools in these areas and other parts of London, children whose native language was a Caribbean Creole had been in evidence since the 1950s. Now, however, a new phenomenon was noticed. In 1980 Rosen and Burgess wrote in their book, Languages and Dialects of London School Children:

At the centre of the complexity introduced in London classrooms by the presence of overseas dialects of English, lies what we have called London/Jamaican – a magnetic, political, social and peer group dialect for Eastern as well as Western Caribbean pupils and to some extent for West African and even white London speakers too. The central point is that the range of different patois spoken reflects both the complexity of the linguistic situation in the Caribbean and also the modifications to these being made by children growing up within the overseas speech communities in London. (Rosen and Burgess 1980: 58)

Attempting to find out about the extent to which Creole was used by London schoolchildren, Rosen and Burgess asked teachers to specify whether pupils spoke ‘(a) Standard, (b) a full regional Creole, or (c) a London/regional mix’ (1980: 58). The authors say that they are ‘aware that all such information must be interpreted as indicative rather than hard and fast’ (p. 58): such caution is certainly necessary. Very few teachers are qualified to make assessments on the basis of linguistic criteria, and Rosen and Burgess’s categories were in themselves vague enough to be interpreted differently by different teachers. Because we know that most British-born Caribbeans use a language mixing mode for informal interactions, using elements of both Creole and British English, the odds are in favour of any one child being put into the ‘London/regional mix’ category. This is just what Rosen and Burgess’s figures show for the Jamaican pupils they studied. Of 507, 52 were reported to speak ‘a full Creole’, 11 ‘standard’, 444 (88 per cent) ‘London/overseas dialect’. Their figures for the Eastern Caribbean are less clear cut (also predictable as Barbadian Creole is itself less distant from Standard English than Jamaican), but do show a tendency for teachers to categorise them as ‘mixed’ speakers. This kind of gross categorisation really tells us nothing about how the language varieties are ‘mixed’ – neither the kind of mixing nor the proportions.

Unfortunately, the moment of London Jamaican’s emergence passed undocumented either by historians or linguists, but anecdotal evidence points to its being a phenomenon which developed in the early 1970s. Some even go so far as to link its emergence to the coming of reggae music to Britain, circa 1970, and the first reggae film widely seen in Britain, Perry Henzell’s (1972) The Harder They Come starring Jimmy Cliff. It is likely that the phenomenon of white Creole use owes much to the popularisation of Jamaican musical styles, but the role of music in promoting Creole among the Caribbean population is harder to assess (see next section).⁴

The Jamaican and British varieties of Jamaican Creole are in a dynamic relationship. According to Dalphinis (1991: 49), ‘Contact between Britain and the Caribbean is extensive, and growing’. There is a considerable movement of young blacks between the West Indies and Britain. Many have spent as much as several years there being raised by grandparents. Others have spent long summer holidays there. Even where individuals have not been to the West Indies themselves, they often live in a household with an older person of the same generation (e.g. an older sibling) who either was born there or has spent some time there. The Caribbean (particularly Jamaican) influence on the British Creole is thus continually being renewed. In addition there is now some use of Creole varieties in the British media: in films such as The Harder They Come, Babylon (directed by Franco Rosso, Great Britain, 1980) and Countryman, (directed by Dick Jobson, Great Britain, 1982). The advent of Channel 4 in 1982 provided a space for more minority-orientated programmes than previously: Caribbean accents and occasional use of Creole have been regular features of situation comedies such as No Problem in the early 1980s and Desmonds in the late 1980s to early 1990s.

Creole-language culture in Britain: Rastafari, Reggae and Toasting

There can be no doubt that Creole, in particular Jamaican Creole, derives much of its attraction for the youth from its association with certain forms of culture. Three of these in particular – Rastafarianism, variously defined as a ‘religion’ or as a ‘movement’ (Gilroy 1987: 187), reggae, and toasting – can be seen as significant not only in providing a centre of attraction towards Creole-based culture for black (and some white) youth at various times, but also in providing access to and models of Jamaican Creole through social networks and relatively high media profiles.

Rastafar

Rastafarianism has many followers in London. Rastafarian speech is probably best described as a variety of Jamaican Creole with special lexis and morphology. To date there are no published linguistic descriptions of language in any Rastafarian community, apart from descriptions by Pollard (1980, 1983, 1984a, 1984b). Ryan (1980) is an unpublished description of linguistic aspects of a Rastafarian community in the West Midlands. A study by Bones (1986a) is the work of a non-linguist with a social sciences background. As a Rastafarian, he has an insider’s knowledge of the language, though many of his claims would not be accepted by linguists: for example, ‘as a language Afro-Lingua [Rastafarian Creole] does not need grammar and rules because it relies on improvisation, quickwittedness and skill at manipulating words’ (1986a: 49). Bones stresses the importance of language in the Rastafarian religious culture: ‘according to Rasta doctrine and reasoning, a language must have great significance in terms of its words, sounds and “powah”, which means “power” … the “powah” is what gives Rasta strength and makes him formidable’ (1986a: 48–9). Bones thus describes the effect of Rastafarian speech on Jamaican attitudes: ‘Those Jamaicans who were not Rastas were somewhat ashamed of Patois. They spoke it only because they were unable to do “better”. But the Rastas felt that the language was the African people’s own, that they should be proud of it and should set about improving it’ (1986a: 44). Hence, ‘the Rastafarians of Britain are genuinely proud of Afro-Lingua. The young black people of Britain who are into black consciousness and cultural awareness are keen to speak Afro-Lingua because it reinforces their awareness and gives them hope where otherwise there would be despair’ (1986a: 44–5).

Although some of the distinctive lexis of the London variety of Jamaican Creole may have its origins in Rasta speech, there is no clear evidence that Rastafarian influence on the structure of the Creole goes any further than that. However, the positive attitudes of Rastafarians towards Creole – in contrast to the negative attitudes of the Caribbean establishment, the majority of older generation Caribbeans in Britain, and the white British establishment – may well have had the effect of promoting the use of Creole among black (and to some extent, white) youth. In the absence of any research findings, it is impossible to be sure about this, let alone quantify it.

Among Afro-Caribbean adolescents in the early 1980s the Rasta image was a popular one, especially for boys, many of whom dressed as Rastas and affected Rasta styles of speech. Probably only a minority of these carried the commitment through into adulthood, though as Gilroy writes (1987: 187), ‘by looking at the broad and diverse use to which the language and symbols of Rastafari have been put, it is possible to conceive it as a movement in which the lines dividing different levels of commitment are necessarily flexible’. At the time this study was carried out, the influence of Rastafari (and with it, reggae) was already in decline, victim of political changes in the Caribbean and the United State...