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Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 27 No. 4 July 2004 pp. 641–659

Jamaican Creole: In the process of

becoming

Beverley Bryan

Abstract
Questions of attitudes and identity are foregrounded in this discussion of
Jamaican Creole [JC] as a language of the diaspora. It is presented as a
language that challenges the standardizing impulses of modernity, resisting
homogeneity in a variable and multi-layered process of change. The article
follows the evolutionary path of the language through Africa and the Carib-
bean to London and America and shows how its speakers see, use and
connect through a vernacular that mirrors and embodies the social forces,
experienced. The key sites are Jamaica, largely, and urban London. Through
a review of the literature, documentary analysis, interviews and classroom
observations this essay examines the ways in which Jamaican Creole could
be said to exemplify the diasporic predicament and the ways in which it has
managed to gain dominance in a) Caribbean society, b) the wider movement
of the Caribbean diaspora.

Keywords: Jamaican Creole; language of the diaspora; identity; attitudes to

Jamaican Creole; Jamaican Creole in London; Jamaican Creole and teachers;
Jamaican Creole and schools.

Introduction
Language, as a defining feature of culture, is subject to and a force for
reflecting and transforming interactional spaces, the context. The
languages of the Caribbean are extremely complex and not easily char-
acterized, although we can start with Morgan’s (1994) introduction to the
psychological and ideological complexity of Creole situations to begin to
understand from whence they came:
. . . these societies experience a perpetual contention involving issues
of identity and ideology. That is to say, creole situations are by defini-
tion dialogic with their history and roles in the modern world. (Morgan
1994, p. 1)

© 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd

ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online
DOI: 10.1080/01491987042000216753
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642 Beverley Bryan

Creole languages of the Caribbean were born out of extreme social,
economic and cultural ruptures, which produced modes of interaction and
internal linguistic dynamics that have been characterized as social and
linguistic violence (Arends, Muysken and Singler 1994). The languages can
be seen as metaphors for the Caribbean diaspora: in one sense, sites of
struggle for dominance by varying conduits of forces and voices; in another
sense, the reflections of our conjoined histories. These possibilities are
reflected in the language used in Jamaica from the earliest times, to the
language that continues to have resonance for Jamaicans worldwide. It is
a phenomenon that is infinitely ‘processual – continually changing as the
fissures and pieces connect and re-connect in a continual movement
toward ‘becoming’. That becoming relates not only to the structure of the
language but also to the way its speakers see, use and construct themselves
through the vernacular voice. So questions of attitudes and identity are,
inevitably, foregrounded as central to this discussion about language.
Through a review of the literature, documentary analysis, interviews and
classroom observations this article will examine the ways in which
Jamaican Creole could be said to exemplify the diasporic predicament and
the ways in which it has managed to gain dominance in a) Caribbean
society b) the wider movement of the Caribbean diaspora.

Jamaican Creole: In the process of becoming

Jamaican Creole [JC] developed out of contact situations of domination
(English) and conquest (West African languages), under the exigencies
of European expansionism and international commerce. The nature of
that language is considered so provisional that even its genesis and
classification is contended, with positions suggesting that its origin is the
result of biologically based child language acquisition or conversely the
natural outcome of language contact (Muysken and Smith 1986). The
debates continue today (Field 2002). The reasons for the controversies
that have surrounded Creole Studies and scholarship are not hard to
find, in that being unwritten, these languages do not provide the kind of
reliable documentation that traditional linguists usually require. Addi-
tionally, Creoles are by their nature heterogeneous and, as new and
living diaspora languages, subject to change and much variation. Suffice
to say, here, that the slaves of the Middle Passage brought to the New
World the languages of West Africa. Under the explosive pressure of the
plantation economy with its unique social and economic arrangements,
these languages were mixed with dialects from varying classes and
speech communities of the British Isles. Such social interaction was
critical in producing, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
(D’Costa and Lalla 1989), a distinct language that bears some resem-
blance to its major progenitors, as well as to languages formed in similar
conditions in other parts of the world (Sebba 1997).
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Jamaican Creole 643

According to Alleyne (1989), the syntax and phonology of Jamaican
Creole have emerged from the contact of West African and European
languages. The syntax of Creole includes such features as: the unmarked
verb; absence of subject-verb concord, Pat sing; zero copula, mi sick ‘I
am sick; serial verbs, go see, come tell; and the same form being used for
some adjectives and verbs dem mad mi ‘They made me mad’, big-op
‘enlarge (lit.) extol/cheer’, small-op ‘make small (lit.) compress’. Other
noteworthy syntactical features are: pluralization using the particle dem
‘them’ as di man dem for ‘the men’; the conflation of active and passive
voice di fuud sel aaf ‘The food that was being sold is finished’; and front-
focusing a taak wi a taak bout Jan/ It’s John we’re talking about/’We are/
were talking about John’. Distinctive sounds include the shift from /v/ to
/b/ in beks ‘vex’ and hebi ‘heavy’, while in the area of vocabulary,
Jamaican Creole uses the English lexicon but often in new ways: box
‘slap’, favour ‘resemble’, mancow ‘bull’ and eyewater ‘tears’.
Creole’s use in Jamaica is not fixed and this has been captured in early
research on the language of school children (Craig 1971), where spon-
taneous utterances and attempts at Standard English replacements
yielded such variations for ‘It’s my book’, as: a mi buk dat; iz mi buk; iz
mai buk (Craig 1971, p. 372).
One way to describe Creole’s variety of forms is as a gradual shading
between structures that seem more African, more creolized, to those that
approximate more closely to English. In between there are intermediate
varieties, reflecting the minimal shifts in the structures being used: im a
nyam im dinna; im a iit im dinna; im iiting im dinna; him is eating him
dinna; he is eating his dinner. (Hall-Alleyne 1981, p. 32).
Such is the fluidity that it is often difficult to draw a boundary between
Creole and English. And even the descriptions of this variation remain
contested. Winford (1994) would continue to find some use for the term
‘continuum’ to characterize the range of use and structures. Alleyne
(1989), however, maintains some distance from ‘continuum’, ‘creole’ and
the related terms of ‘basilect’, ‘mesolect’ and ‘acrolect’, except as conven-
ient and familiar labels for certain kinds of ‘poorly defined and
described’ linguistic representations. It is of interest to him, also, that so
many resist using the term ‘Jamaican’, when ‘English’ retains its currency,
even though it could be said that both languages have followed
comparable evolutionary paths. For Alleyne, maintaining those differ-
ences confirms the notion of languages like Jamaican as corrupt and
deviant, outside of the normal (European) development of language
contact and change (Alleyne 1994: 9). Re-naming the language as
Jamaican rather than Jamaican Creole [JC] invests it with new meanings:
a language like any other, with a number of varieties, coming out of a
complex sociolinguistic history.
The structure of the language briefly described above, reflects that
convergence of economic forces and echoes the synthesis of those
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644 Beverley Bryan

historically yoked cultures. The most significant of those cultures was the
African, so controversies on Creole origins notwithstanding, first and
foremost, for our discussion of the historical context will be the African
continuities within Jamaican Creole, which has been promoted most
consistently by Alleyne (1980, 1989). The main source, for Alleyne, was
Twi, one of the many languages brought to Jamaica, but the only one of
which managed to survive substantially some of the processes of
language decay and death. The continuities can be found within the
phonology, syntax and morphology of Jamaican, as Alleyne names it.
With respect to phonology, there is the retention of Twi sound patterns
in nyam, ‘eat’, backra (from mbakara ‘master’); the insertion of a vowel
into consonant clusters ending with nasal consonants sn, sm: sinake
‘snake’, sumall ‘small’; and the remnants of tone: it kyaang iit ‘it can be
eaten/it cannot be eaten’.

Figure 1. A change in tone reflects a change in meaning: (Cassidy 1971, p. 30)

In syntax, there are serial verbs carry go bring come and the use of the
particle dem for pluralization which is similar to the Twi use of nom in
oyere/oyere nom for ‘wife/wives’ (Bryan 1998a). African lexicon is present
in words such as sénsé ‘a type of fowl with ruffled feathers’, Anansesem ‘a
story from West Africa’, afu ‘a type of yam’, jooka ‘to pierce’ etc.

Identity issues
As indicated in the discussion of the structure of language, the African
connection is presented as strong, according to one particular strand of
thinking in Creole Linguistics exemplified by Alleyne. However, the
meaning of that language to its users is not fixed, and will shift and
change in accordance with the ideological mirror used to reflect subjec-
tivity. Phenomenological readings of identity could be one way we
consider the African presence if we look at the position taken by Le Page
and Tabouret-Keller (1985) working in Creole settings. Here identity is
seen as the confirmation of self, a projection of ‘his [sic] inner universe’.
To speak in one tongue is an ‘act of identity’ a proclamation of the most
profound kind of identification that could be described as a kind of
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Jamaican Creole 645

ethnic positioning: asserting, affirming, inviting and bonding. For me,
‘bonding’ strengthens the ethnic dimension and suggests that the term,
‘ethnicity’ is very important to understand, in relation to identity. Much
of the work began with Fishman and so one of his definitions might be
a useful reference point. Fishman (1977) saw ethnicity as having three
dimensions delineated as paternity, patrimony and phenomenology.
Paternity relates to our heritage and sense of connectedness and conti-
nuity with events and contexts of the past. Patrimony conveys the legacy
of collectivity, defined by patterns of dress, music and pedagogy.
Phenomenology is the connecting term, as it is related to subjective
attitudes, to the meaning people attach to paternity and patrimony.
The orientation here, to ethnicity, however, also expresses the idea of
collective consciousness, which can be related to race, culture and histor-
ical experience: related to but only mediated by them. Here ethnicity is
primarily psychological, a phenomenon of the mind, internalized; a
psychic reality but with its reference points in the material world of race,
space (provenance), economics and culture. For Fishman (1977),
however, language was a crucial aspect:
Language is the recorder of paternity, the expresser of patrimony and
the carrier of phenomenology. Any vehicle carrying such precious
freight must come to be viewed as equally precious in and of itself.
(Fishman 1977, p. 25)
A strong case is being made for the central position of language as the
conduit for revealing ethnicity/identity, a dialectic role considering the
function of ethnic affiliations in communities, to ensure language main-
tenance. Jamaican Creole, a language that has performed those bonding
and affirming functions in diasporic communities, can exemplify this
case.
Post-modernist theorizing destabilizes much of this traditional
thinking on ethnicity, suggesting a more fragmented and unstable
concept. This would allow recognition that identity is, first and foremost,
socially constructed and therefore open to interrogation and re-defini-
tion. In this line of thinking, Jamaican Creole represents a language that
challenges the standardizing impulses of modernity, resisting homogene-
ity in a variable and multi-layered process of change. This could be said
to be what is happening to the way Jamaican Creole speakers use and
construct themselves through their language.
Part of that process, as I have indicated, could be conceived as the
‘African-ness’ of the language. Those reiterations of past experiences and
cultures, inherited in Jamaican, are expressed in the privileging of the
voice in a specific way, which relates to performance and the strength of
the oral tradition. We can see its presence in the traditional sayings and
stories of the folk culture; we can hear it in popular culture where the
modern day wordsmiths (the DJs) can ‘fire lyrics’ that are lauded in the
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646 Beverley Bryan

dance hall. African influences pervade in song, proverb, story and the
ancestral-voiced oral form of literature. Toni Morrison explains a similar
effect on her writing from an African-American vernacular:
To make the story appear oral, meandering, effortless, spoken . . . In
the books I have written, the chorus has changed but there has always
been a chorus . . . it seems to me interesting to evaluate Black litera-
ture on what the writer does with the presence of the ancestor. (Morri-
son 1989, p. 341).
The ‘African-ness’ is the sense of a collective voice carrying the spirit of
the past, distilling history and offering a continued connection and
conversation with the ancestors.
Brathwaite, in seeking to capture the nature of that ‘submerged,
surrealist experience and sensibility’, introduced the term ‘nation
language’, and testified to its oral, collective ‘immanent’ power by
reference to the poetry of Claude Mackay, Louise Bennett, Oku
Onura, Michael Smith Bongo Jerry and all the sound poets. This makes
sense of Morgan’s: ‘We talk in English but think in African. We actually
speak English with an African accent’ (Morgan 1994, p. 130). It rein-
forces the dialogic comparison of the echoes of the past, as the
consciousness invested in the ‘word’ has been transported and trans-
formed by the Middle Passage.
Continuities, however, may come from many directions and the
English lexicon is a dominant feature that provides the standard by
which the Creole has been judged in the past. Languages, like Jamai-
can, are often labelled according to their colonial antecedents, so the
‘superstrate’ influence would make them either ‘Anglo-phone’,
‘Franco-phone’ etc lexicon Creoles. The context of domination affected
how these languages were seen: as voices from poor and marginalized
societies. (D’Costa. and Lalla 1989) capture some of the remnants of
that language in the earliest texts available from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, but their sources show that most of these early
writers regarded the ‘talkee talkee’ vernacular with contempt as ‘a
jargon of a language’. Officially too, the Circular Despatch of 1847
looked to English: ‘. . . as the most important agent of civilisation, for
the coloured population of the colonies’ (from Circular Despatch,
Augier and Gordon 1962, p. 182).
The Inspectors of Schools, during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, provide a good sense of the times. Their Reports suggest that
they encountered nothing, which could be called a language. The
inspectors speak of ‘coarse provincialisms’; ‘broken English’; ‘a degen-
erate form of English’, ‘forms of speech [from] the home and on the
street’ which have to be ‘assailed’ with vigour and the ‘strict adherence’
to rules.
However, all languages are subject to change, not least those emerging
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Jamaican Creole 647

from this situation of flux where voices collide and compete for domi-
nance. And so attitudes towards, and use of these languages, are not
static. Social, cultural and economic forces are a part of the process of
becoming and have affected the language’s status and development over
time.

The changes: Linguistic and social

Some changes in thinking came with the 1968 Creole conference at the
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (Hymes 1971). This was an
important event because, as DeCamp’s statement from the conference
noted, the dominant and continuing official view at the time was that:
‘The creole is inseparably associated with poverty, ignorance and lack of
moral character’ (DeCamp 1971a, p. 26).
Inevitably, the absence of an unequivocal and venerable tradition has
had a profoundly negative effect on attitudes to these languages. Alleyne
(1994) later recorded that the low and problematic status had affected
the research agenda:
. . . creoles have been ranked with baby talk, child language, foreigner
talk, and with other instances of nonnatural language that do not serve
normal societal communicative needs nor the full cognitive needs of
the human species. (Alleyne 1994, p. 8)
However, the very presence of such as Labov and Hymes at the 1968
conference suggested a general recognition of the wider significance of
the social aspects of these linguistic descriptions offered by local creolists
such as Bailey, Alleyne, and DeCamp. The latter in seeking to character-
ize the language environment used the continuum as the explanatory
model of Jamaican language use. He introduced his own quaint, anach-
ronistic terminology, which Alleyne (1980) was later to characterize as
‘outmoded and inappropriate’:
Rather, there is a linguistic continuum, a continuous spectrum of
speech varieties ranging from the “bush talk” or “broken language” of
Quashie to the educated standard of Philip Sherlock and Norman
Manley . . . Each Jamaican speaker commands a span of this contin-
uum, the breadth of the span depending on the breadth of his social
contacts. (DeCamp 1971b, p. 350)
DeCamp recognizes language change but characterizes the language
situation as post-creole with Jamaican Creole gradually merging with the
standard or superstrate in response to the changing social situation.
Creole’s ‘processual’ nature is thus described as a move to decreoliza-
tion. According to DeCamp, the two conditions necessary for such decre-
olization are that English must be the ‘dominant official language’ and
that the class boundaries must be sufficiently eroded to offer a level of
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648 Beverley Bryan

social mobility, the pursuit of which would exert pressure on the vernac-
ular. Despite such groundbreaking work at the conference, the emerging
theme was still Creole’s continuing marginalization. Creole was seen, not
only as the least prestigious language, but also fitting into a particular
theory of language, which meant that it was the kind of language most
vulnerable to social and linguistic pressures.
Continuing research now takes issue with DeCamp’s characterization
(Winford 1993). It is clear that JC has not withered away and so although
the continuum concept continues to have a descriptive power, DeCamp’s
(1971b) attempt to use it to suggest the direction of language change for
Jamaica is not accepted. Jamaican Creole has instead become a stronger
and more vibrant language, used in many more domains. A number of
factors have ensured that DeCamp’s prediction has not materialized.

Lack of native speakers

Shields (1989), in her characterization of the Jamaican language environ-
ment, points to the demographic fact of a decreasing number of native
speakers of English. Shields’ research was based on audiotapes of radio
and television newscasts, print media reports and opinion columns. The
thrust of this work by Shields suggests a breakdown of the local diglossic
situation, where English was used in formal situations and Jamaican
Creole reserved for informal use. It reflects the sociolinguistic fact of
changing attitudes to English at the level of popular use, and the loosening
of ties with the mother tongue of the ‘mother country’. Jamaican Creole is
used unselfconsciously at all stages of Jamaican life while English is heard
increasingly infrequently. This tendency is confirmed by later findings,
which show the increased exposure and validation of Jamaican Creole in
the media, with the proliferation of accessible radio talk shows (Shields
1992; Shields-Brodber 2002). Additionally, newscasts now routinely
feature Jamaican Creole speakers who have traditionally been silenced
through the paraphrase and summary of the official speakers of Standard
English. Shields takes issue with the unidirectionality of continuum theo-
ries, suggesting that a nativized English standard is emerging, which is, in
fact, taking on Creole features. Language choice is active with ‘bi-direc-
tional focusing’. There are, consequently, two standards operating in the
country, with one model taking the form of established English, while the
other is developing new creolized structures. The logical conclusion of
Shields’ work must be a refutation of DeCamp’s (1971b) prediction of the
inevitable progress towards the adoption of English.

Jamaican Creole speakers as teachers

The inevitable implication flowing from Shield’s work is the increase in
teachers, the usual arbiters of a standard, who are Jamaican Creole
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Jamaican Creole 649

speakers. This has, in fact been in existence for some time. School inspec-
tors, in the early twentieth century, were sometimes disappointed by the
language behaviour of the teachers:
In visiting schools I have felt vexed to hear a teacher who ought to
know better speak to the little children in the lower Standards in the
same broken English they are familiar with in their homes (Education
Department 1916, p. 343).
. . . it is feared that some teachers are prone to drop into the
vernacular in attempting to make their meaning clear to their pupils.
Such phrases as “Don’t it?” are too frequently heard. (Education
Department 1912, p. 339)
Bryan (1997) investigated the amount of English a Jamaican primary
school child heard, and found that Jamaican Creole was used, not only
in homes and playgrounds, but formed the bulk of classroom discourse
as well, in pedagogic situations where bilingual techniques were not
widely used.

Black pride and independence

Political changes in Jamaica have also affected the status of Jamaican
Creole, its use and ultimately the process of decreolization. Pollard
(1992, 1994) also refutes the unidirectionality of Jamaican Creole by
pointing to the development of Dread Talk [DT], the language of the
Rastafari movement from the 1970s. At one time DT was the esoteric
language of the poor and ‘downpressed’, who took, in particular, the
lexicon of JC and re-made it for their own purposes in poetry, song and
social commentary. With its creative use of verbal camouflage, subsump-
tion of meanings and word play, DT strongly displays the dialogic imper-
ative of Jamaican Creole. It, also, is evolving, becoming, moving away
from being the purview of an oppositional group towards being ‘natural-
ized’ in middle and working-class speech as an institutional part of
society, accepted by many: ‘The language no longer walks hand in hand
with the beard, the short drop strut and the sometimes visionary eyes of
the traditional Rasta man’ (Pollard 1983, p. 56).
Nine years after this paper, Pollard (1992) could write of how Rasta
vocabulary had become part of mesolectal Jamaican Creole, a strong
cultural determinant asserting a certain self-pride. Jamaican Creole will
not wither away.
Other cultural forms have also asserted the dominance of the
Jamaican Creole voice as a badge of identity. We can note the continuing
popularity of performance dub poetry, the use of pun and creative
wordplay in dance hall lyrics, at the basilectal end of the continuum
(Cooper 1993). Although dance hall is popular, the questioning and
redefinition continues with the ongoing debate about ‘slackness’ and
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650 Beverley Bryan

‘cultural lyrics’, the latter being usually interpreted as Rasta philosophy.
As it stands today, there is a resurgence of Rastafarian culture in
Jamaica’s most popular and dynamic music form through such inter-
national artistes as Capleton, Junior Reid, Tony Rebel, Burning Spear
and Luciano. These artistes are quite different, yet they share the voice/
the African spirit of the (nation) language, with the social commentary
or chorus from the people. This projection of the voice of the folk might
also be reflected in the development and spread of the theatre genre
known as ‘the roots play’. This is a highly stylised farce, made for prima-
rily working-class audiences, using a self-confident Jamaican Creole. In
spite of economic constraints these productions are commercially viable,
even in the rural areas of Jamaica.
Generally, the research noted earlier suggests that Jamaicans are iden-
tifying strongly with the language and see it as expressing their identity
and sense of the self. In some senses it is the factor that supersedes race,
culture and sometimes class.

The institutional response

Even though we have characterized JC as a vibrant language within the
confines of a sociolinguistic milieu and within the consciousness of
individual Jamaicans (Bryan 1994), the fact that we cannot make the
case for the institutional success of the vernacular language reveals the
ambiguity, which remains in language attitudes. Attempts to institu-
tionalize JC as the official medium of instruction have met with little
success (Devonish 1986). He acknowledges the negative view of the
mother tongue but believes that the only way monolingual Creole
speakers can have access to the decision-making process of governance,
is for the Creoles, of such countries as Jamaica and Guyana, to become
the official languages in the region. Yet this is roundly rejected, with
some arguing that the opposite might be achieved. Therein lies the
contradiction, where the public, political status of Jamaican Creole is
increasing while the quantum leap towards pedagogic respectability
remains at best ambivalent.
Much of this popular debate about the role of English and Jamaican
Creole in a language education programme has, for many years, been
carried out in one of the local newspapers, The Gleaner. It is of consid-
erable significance that this debate continues, in cycles year after year,
with writers passionately re-visiting the issues, after a lull of a few
months. ‘Let us leave Patois where it belongs and concern ourselves with
the urgency of our declining capability in the official language of Jamaica,
which is English’ (The Gleaner, 11/6/1987).
Such seemingly hostile positions can be changed, as we can see in
another article four years later by the same correspondent:
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Jamaican Creole 651

The relationship between patois and Standard English is not necessar-
ily antagonistic and can indeed be complementary . . . Even the most
cultured persons, even those who dream their dreams in Standard
English, will occasionally find that to resort to patois is the best and
perhaps the only medium for expressing a mood – be it jest or annoy-
ance. (The Sunday Gleaner, 6/1/1991)
Nevertheless the antagonistic urge remains: ‘. . . . .the proper use of
the English Language is an integral part of the socialisation process
. . . promotion of patois is a backward step’. (Letter of the Day’,
The Gleaner, April 24 1997). The site of struggle and tension
remains, as competing and conflicting voices consider Jamaican
Creole’s place.

Teachers and students in Jamaican classrooms

Jamaican teachers, especially teachers of English, are at the centre of the
language debate, as they inhabit spaces where discourses are formed and
reformed through classroom interaction. My own study in this area inves-
tigated teachers’ thinking on, and delivery of, English to students who
have a Jamaican Creole background, in two very different but histori-
cally related environments, namely Jamaica and urban London (1998b).
The study consisted of eighteen individual participants and one focus
group from four schools in Jamaica, and seventeen participants from five
schools and one language centre in London. The principles of critical
ethnography were applied, and the methods of interviews and observa-
tions used, to allow the investigation to examine the views and practices
of the participants, and how they were constructed by sociolinguistic
forces. With the Jamaican teachers and students I interviewed, language
issues were contested but they seemed to be soluble. Two languages were
recognized, as Shields (1989) indicated and the three teachers below
confirm:
(1) Basically, I think our country is a two-language country. We have the
Creole and we have the Standard English.
(2) . . . because of background . . . mine would be the English because
that was what was spoken in my home . . . my family was very strong
on that as teachers.
(3) My first language is, I think, the Creole but not perhaps to the extent
of theirs because when I was growing up my parents were always. . . .
I couldn’t really speak it to them. It wasn’t the accepted thing in my
house . . . so I was really restricted with it.
Here we see that teachers exemplify all the contradictions and contro-
versies around the two languages. In what they see as a bilingual country,
the sense of an inferior language that is ‘bad English’ was being
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652 Beverley Bryan

overcome in questioning and re-definition; the stigma had been rejected
in the social and cultural practices of the people. Jamaican Creole was
more and more being used as a self-confident expression of national
identity and recognized as a part of the people’s historic connection with
the ancestral voice. Yet that connection remains uncertain and equivocal,
something continually under negotiation and subject to change. English,
which can be ‘shed like a skin’ is ‘a special coat’, that provides ‘access to
education, access to knowledge . . . access to the money market’. Yet
without prompting, the teachers will talk about Jamaican Creole in terms
of love, wonder and occasionally embarrassment. These are affirmations
that come from struggle, denial and change; they shift with time, circum-
stance (history).
For teachers, as participants within a post-colonial school system, there
is ambivalence about a language, which is owned by the individual, but
disowned by the social structures that control and decide the official
discourse. What makes the space negotiable in the Jamaican school
setting is that both the teachers and students speak Jamaican Creole. The
teachers can identify with the students, because they have also experi-
enced the linguistic struggles that the children in the classroom face:
I have a bias. To me patois comes naturally. I have to learn English;
it’s a second language like Spanish.
With their sense of the economic and cultural capital of English, they
stressed the necessity to code-switch and move between English and
Jamaican Creole. The net result of such joint accommodations in the
classroom is what I have termed as the consent-to-be-governed, charac-
terized by such linguistic forms of behaviour that I refer to as ‘markers
of agreement’ – such as code-switching and translation (Bryan 2001). I
am suggesting that these linguistic markers of agreement are specific
ways of speaking and interacting in classrooms that are used by the
teacher to foster an understanding of how schools work. It is these acts,
which allow the understanding of identity to be less provisional and
equivocal than what might possibly obtain in other settings.
The language also has an official route into the school through the
literature and culture of Jamaica. It now forms a large part of the content
of the school curriculum, whether it be through proverbs or dialect
poetry, Caribbean stories or the emphasis on drama included in the
national curriculum of Jamaica; the literature texts used for the post-16
examination Caribbean Examinations Council [CXC]; and in the content
of the equivalent to A level English Caribbean Advanced Proficiency
Examination [CAPE]. The Language and Communication in Society
module used by CAPE facilitates detailed and critical research on
language varieties across the region. At the moment this appears quite
uncontested but an attempt to use English texts that treat Jamaican
Creole as equal partners in communication at the Grade 7–9 level has
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Jamaican Creole 653

met with less success with these ostensibly bilingual literacy texts being
ignored in some cases by both teachers and students. A full investigation
of this project needs to be done to understand the contradictory response
at the level of institution and classroom. For example, what part did the
fact that these books were intended for less able readers play? My own
observation of the same kind of student responding to Jamaican Creole
in popular music is of something very different. They will come alive in
discussing the social commentary offered by DJ lyrics and engage in
translation activities comparing structures in both languages. Contexts
and frameworks are important in deciding the nature of the discourse.
The use of voice through popular music is a real departure in a country
where hitherto the music of the masses was viewed as beyond the aural
range of civilized society. It is an important start in the assertion of an
independent identity. In the London environment, the role of Jamaican
Creole has implications markedly different from those signified in post-
colonial settings.

Research on Jamaican Creole speakers in London

Little work has been done to chart the migration of Jamaican Creole to
London and its evolution within the context of other socio-economic and
linguistic realities. Sociological reports written in the 1950s and 1960s
played down the issue of language, except as a small communication
problem, because it was felt there, as it was in the Caribbean at the time,
that Caribbean people spoke an imperfect kind of English (Patterson
1965). Needless to say, linguistic inquiry into the background of such
communities has been scarce or simply pathological, looking for the ways
in which language background has featured in the matrix of under-
achievement factors. So much so, that Edwards (1979) was led to inves-
tigate the “language issue”, to undo several misconceptions on such
matters as the non-standardness of JC and the related cognitive deficit
of its speakers.
More recent investigations have added to the characterization of the
linguistic environment in the United Kingdom as a whole. The language
of the once-immigrant population has changed over time as part of a
natural language contact process, and also as a result of the demographic
changes instituted by immigration policies. Since the mid-1970s, the
majority of children starting school have been British born rather than
migrants and they now have children of their own in school. The speech
of the children of that Jamaican diaspora, up to the third generation,
blends with the local languages of the English working class and newer
migrant populations. In numerical terms, Jamaica is the dominant Carib-
bean group and the language of its people remains the most influential
on the British Creole landscape. The diversity that has emerged in the
school has now been marked by Rosen and Burgess (1980); Le Page and
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654 Beverley Bryan

Tabouret-Keller(1985); Edwards (1986); Sebba (1986, 1993); Sutcliffe
(1992) and Rampton (1995)
Although most of these studies focus on London communities of
young people in schools and youth centres, a number of them investi-
gated the use of a form of Jamaican Creole in other black communities.
Edwards (1986) investigated the use of ‘Patois’ in Dudley in the West
Midlands. She found considerable variation, but also evidence of a high
level of competence in some form of JC, where there were strong peer-
group influences. Edwards also noted the evidence of a positive attitude
towards the language, and this feature was confirmed by Sutcliffe’s
(1992) work, focusing on the same black community. He refers to the
language as British Jamaican Creole [BJC] and indicates that BJC
remains strong in that Midland community. The language that Sutcliffe
describes is one that has moved away, from the variety he identified as
rural Jamaican speech, towards structures that are more urban. The
changes in JC, as a result of migration, are here being noted and are
significant to the theme of this article.
Work in London began with a strong emphasis on the importance of
valuing the language that children bring to school. Rosen and Burgess’
(1980) investigation into the language background of 4,600 London
schoolchildren locates fifty-five languages and twenty-four overseas-
based dialects in the classrooms. They avoid defining terms such as
‘dialects’, but make use of concepts such as ‘continuum’, suggesting a
vitality and fluidity as the JC and London continua collide. The question
of the relationship between language, culture and identity is fore-
grounded in an examination of the choices offered by such heterogene-
ity.
That heterogeneity was also reflected in how some young black
Londoners saw themselves:
Home, my mother says, is in Jamaica but my father says that home is
where we are now. My brother Carlton says home is in Africa. But he
can’t say if he means in the past or in the future. My sisters, they say
they are English so that home is no problem for them. How can they
all say these different things? (Garrison 1979, p. 7)
This is a complex rendition of identity that has resonance for those living
through the diaspora experience or in settings where diasporas intersect.
The multiplicity of ethnicities offered in this one family is explicable only
through historical analysis of how economic and political factors have
fashioned a fluctuating sense of belonging. The language choices
required and produced are complex and have themselves changed for
those who are now the inheritors of JC, the language of their community
exhibited in new forms.
Sebba (1986), again working with adolescents, identifies two varieties
used by children of Jamaican descent, which he defined as Afro-Caribbean
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Jamaican Creole 655

London English and then a newly discovered London Jamaican. The
former is described as approximating quite closely to the local Cockney
English, but with distinct syntactic, lexical and phonetic features (e.g. seh
‘that’, Anyhow seh ‘Anyhow that’, Shi tink seh . . . She thinks/believes that
. . .’) as significant examples of borrowing from JC. The London English of
Caribbean youths is also investigated, to discover its relationship to JC.
Again, the questions of language and culture and identity seem almost
inevitable, woven as they are into the structure of the language of black
youth.
The second variety identified by Sebba is London Jamaican, perceived
first and foremost, as a social and cultural acquisition, a language of
identity acquired in adolescence rather than as a mother tongue. Sebba
(1993) questions the use of the term ‘continuum’ in a context where the
same level of class differences does not exist among potential JC speak-
ers, looking instead at research which suggests code-switching and the
mixing of varieties on an individual basis. His research revealed that JC
remained strong, not as a full separate language, but as structural support
for London Jamaican. The use of pronounced basilectal features suggests
the stubborn significance of the language to young black Londoners, not
so much as a reaffirmation of cultural roots in Africa, even though there
is resurgence of this movement, but more as a badge of identity in a
tough, urban, street-wise culture.
Other research of that period has shown the continuing spread of
Jamaican Creole to white adolescent friendship networks. Hewitt’s
(1986) investigation examined the central role played by language in
adolescent negotiation of race and ethnic difference. It was significant in
marking the use of JC features by white adolescents, and the black
response to that appropriation. This response was divided between those
who saw white involvement as an attempt at parody, and those who gave
it qualified approval if produced by respected individuals in an Afro-
centric context. What was clear for Hewitt also was the way in which JC
had been integrated into what he called a community vernacular, the
common property of all young people. With a few ‘minimal shifts’, this
kind of language parallels Sebba’s Afro-Caribbean London English,
perhaps less politically charged, but suggesting the range of variation,
meanings and owners. As acknowledged, there are considerable differ-
ences in the extent to which adolescents see aspects of JC as ‘ethnically
marked’. How ‘ethnic’ is ‘wicked’ or ‘man’?
In Rampton (1995) we see the impact of settlers who are more recent
than Caribbean migrants, but who have now also made the generational
shift from the traditional culture of their country of origin to a multi-
cultural setting. Rampton concentrated on the communication networks
dominated by South Asian youths, but also included JC ‘inheritors’.
Through the use of interviews and observation, he showed JC ‘crossings’,
by South Asian youths, in situations where ‘normal social order was
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656 Beverley Bryan

loosened’ and the speaker needed to lend power to his position.
Jamaican Creole represented a cool and tough stance in response to
authority, although it was sometimes used in casual repartee. Rampton
found that there was less disapproval of out-group JC use than Hewitt
reported – perhaps because the JC ‘inheritors’ also used Panjabi. These
‘acts of identity’ are seen as ‘socially defined and interactionally negoti-
ated, varying according to the groups and their relationship with each
other.
Sewell’s (1997) focus is on the wider project of examining the construc-
tion of black male identity from within the school system. Language use
is construed as a part of the formation of self and the signalling of
identity. Sewell saw boys adapting the linguistic tokens of their parent’s
language to maintain a culture of resistance. It was noted that the
language of the students was very different from the JC understood by
the Jamaican teacher the boys encountered in the school. For Sewell’s
male students, hybridity is taken-for-granted, as ‘the post-modern
creative urge’ in this diaspora culture is to appropriate and destabilize
the dominant discourse with new, unexpected and sometimes destructive
meanings. Part of that re-making is the language of their (fore) parents,
shaping it in a way that signals rather than reflects identity.

JC in London classrooms
In my comparative study of Jamaican and urban London schools, I was
particularly interested in how teachers and students in the London
setting interacted with those ways of being, especially as expressed
through their ‘inherited’ language. Several of the teachers referred to the
use of language by black boys as a way of defining their difference: for
example, to exclude white teachers from their particular version of the
classroom discourse to construct alternative sites of power (Bryan,
1998b). However, for many young black people, the sense of place Garri-
son’s (1979) respondent sought had still not been found: identity issues
had not been resolved. They mirrored Scafe’s (1989) students who were
ambivalent towards the visceral language of the Jamaican poet Michael
Smith that they encountered in the classroom. Scafe’s descriptions of the
teaching of that literature lesson illuminated the weight of history that
confronts second- and third-generation children, who often do not have
the cultural resources to deal with the anger, embarrassment and pain
engendered when they actually encounter JC in the classroom. What the
language will be, do and mean is still being contested.
The meaning becomes even more contested in the multilingual envi-
ronment where Eritrean, Cambodian and Panjabi meet. Jamaican Creole
is seen by the students as the language of opposition, a discourse appro-
priated by adolescents to communicate resistance to particular class-
room processes. When a Cambodian boy says: ‘He have a mashop eye’.
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Jamaican Creole 657

And a possible Jamaican Creole ‘inheritor’ says to his Indian teacher:
‘Shut up styar! Taak to im styar, not just me’, something quite different
is being done with the language here (Bryan 1998b). Linguistic items,
rather than a whole language, are being used to signal group norms and
new sites of power and authority. The word is being invested with the
weight and meaning of many previous generations. The language is being
used to signify a black oppositional style rather than to affirm identity.
In this instance, teachers and students have no shared voice and there is
no sense of a joint ownership of Jamaican Creole; rather it is a weapon
used to disturb accepted ways of meaning. In this sense it has carried
with it the weight of that violence which marked its beginning.

The next turn

What has been shown is that Jamaican Creole remains a language in the
making, as is the nature of Creole formations, coming out of these
changing hybrid situations that remain the source of contention. Brutal
necessity brought the language into being as the voice of the subjugated,
so the notion of social and linguistic violence is apposite, as there are
corresponding effects on social attitudes and on linguistic structure.
These correspondences combine to produce considerable variation in
forms, and an ambivalent, if shifting, attitude towards the spectrum of
varieties available. The process of migration maintained the ambivalent
attitudes, with the language incorporating symbolic significance for its
users and ‘inheritors’. The fact and possibility of language change contin-
ues in the diaspora, and as if to emphasize the recursive nature of this
project, I want to note one instance of Jamaican Creole’s cyclical turn in
the language’s migration to America (Richardson 2000). It is reflected
here in global youth culture, which is recognized as being African-
American youth culture. So consider the appropriation of the lexicon of
Creole by hip-hop artistes cited in Richardson: Babylon ‘people or insti-
tutions oppressing Black people’, bus ‘release’, baldheads ‘a non-Rasta-
farian’, babymother ‘the unmarried mother of a man’s child’, tief off
‘sneak’ (the Fugees) big up ‘enlarge (lit.) extol/cheer’, Jah ‘ God’, lick
dem ‘strike them’ (A Tribe Called Quest).
They are bringing the language, re-constructed, through another route
back to the London settings. The process continues and Jamaican Creole
is still becoming.

Acknowledgements
The production of this article was made possible by a research fellowship
from the University of the West Indies, Mona. I gratefully acknowledge
this support.
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658 Beverley Bryan

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BEVERLEY BRYAN is Senior Lecturer in Language Education at the

University of the West Indies, Mona.
ADDRESS: Department of Educational Studies, University of the West
Indies, Mona, Jamaica, W.I.
Email: <beverley.bryan@uwimona.edu.jm>