Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect (review)

Through a combination of variation analysis and rich description, Patrick offers us a broad view of mesolectal urban Jamaican Creole (JC). Because descriptions of creoles have generally focused on the basilect, the creole variety most distant from its lexifier language, we often end up with a particularly one-sided understanding of the nature of the creole, which may reflect only a limited percentage of the community’s speech, thus emphasizing a significant ‘difference between creoles on the page and creoles in the ear’ (193). For example, the author points out that there is an expectation that preverbal markers are the norm when in actuality, the use of preverbal past-markers by mesolectal speakers of JC is really quite low. In this same vein, P addresses a number of important questions concerning the mesolect; for instance, is it a distinct system with its own inherent variability including features of both the basilect and acrolect?

The text opens with a lengthy historical and demographic description of Kingston, Jamaica, critical considering the author’s intent to focus on how social forces affect linguistic development. In the following chapter, P details the methods for collecting and analyzing the data and explains his unusual status as a mid-mesolectal speaker of JC, ‘a social outsider who could speak as an insider’ (69).

Ch. 4 addresses phonolexical variation in urban JC discussing both African substrate and British superstrate explanations for variation. P follows up with a detailed sociolinguistic description of the usage of two of his informants and then an elaborate accounting of general community variation. Variation in consonant cluster (CC) deletion is discussed in Ch. 5, in which interesting correlations are made between some aspects of CC deletion in mesolectal JC and nonstandard North American varieties of English by comparing his findings with seven previous studies on deletion.

In Chs. 6 and 7, P shifts to analysis of syntax, in particular analysis of the variation in use in mesolectal JC of preverbal past tense markers and the marking of past tense through inflection. The choice of past marking options is quite broad in JC mesolect which, according to P, is not particularly remarkable across languages of the world and helps to discount the notion that the mesolect is just the disordered crossroad of the basilect and the acrolect.

In the final chapter P returns to his overriding concern for the study of language variability, the recognition that languages are ‘socially defined and constituted’ and that ‘investigations of grammar which are blind to the social context necessarily distort the object of study’ (267). Stimulated by his findings, his concluding sections of the book provide some intriguing reflections on the nature of the creole continuum.

Scholars not only in creolistics but in dialectology as well as other areas of sociolinguistics will benefit from this across-the-discipline study of mesolectal JC.