Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole

Introduction

Introduction The questions most fascinating to creolists are those that ask exactly how and when such languages as Jamaican Creole or Cameroon Pidgin or Gullah came into existence. All too often, the questions must be asked in the absence of historical data adequate to determine either the precise timing of the process of creolization or the way in which the speakers of contributing languages shaped the unique language forms now classified as creoles. The study of Jamaican Creole has benefited from pioneering research that laid the foundations not only for JC studies but for work in other Caribbean creoles (LePage and DeCamp 1960; Cassidy 1961; Cassidy and LePage 1980; and Bailey 1966). Creole linguistics today reaches into many branches of language theory and research, and significant recent studies have opened up new possibilities for answering how and when the new language was born. The work of Bickerton (1975, 1981) on the genesis and structure of creoles, of Rickford (1987) on nineteenth-century Guyanese Creole, of Niles (1980) on the connections between Barbadian English and the nonstandard, rural dialects of Early Modern English, as well as Mervyn Alleyne's comparative study (1980) of Afro-American creoles , has shed new light on the likely beginnings of JC and required new approaches to the data. For example, Niles's comparative study of Barbadian English and EModE dialects has a double significance for JC. First, Barbados provided a significant proportion of the first settlers of English colonial Jamaica. Second, the same kinds of poor whites (but not necessarily from the same areas) came to both islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Further work on the varieties of EModE as well as the contribution of African languages other than the Kwa group is of utmost importance in view of the nature of the data collected here and the implications of linguistic and historical research now available. The range and nature of linguistic studies that have expanded and 2 Early Jamaican Creole shaped present approaches to creole languages are impossible to summarize here. Certain important historical and sociolinguistic aspects ofJamaican Creole have been raised by LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1985). The connections of JC to other Atlantic creoles are brought out by Hancock's work on Krio, Guinea Coast Creole English, and the seventeenth-century speech of sailors (1976, 1986a, 1986b, 1987). The question of trade languages involved in the slave trade arises in Dalby (1970/71) and leads to other matters of a more historical nature. Survivals haunt the historian of events as well as the historian of languages . The work of Joseph G. Moore (1983), Maureen Warner Lewis (1979), and Kenneth Bilby (1983) on African survivals complements that of Barbara Kopytoff (1978) and Monica Schuler (1980). And the attempts by historians such as B. W. Higman, Michael Craton, Carey Robinson, and Philip E. Curtin to reconstruct the world of the slave plantation have important insights to offer to linguists. The data in this volume provide brief insights into language contact at an early period, as well as into the social rules of language behavior in a stratified creole society. The documents surviving from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offer rich evidence for work on JC phonology but yield less for the study of syntax, revealing a grammatical system closely akin to that of twentieth-century JC. Every text given here points to the crucial relationship of African languages and English dialects as the major sources ofJC. The Angolan and Twi songs that the physician Sir Hans Sloane recorded in 1687-1689 emphasize Jamaican multilingualism of the period. Sloane reports no difficulty in treating (and, presumably, in questioning) his many patients on the plantations he visited, even though many of these people were Africans . Sloane knew a little of their ethnic origins and tried to describe their music, dance, child-rearing customs, and beliefs. Yet he offers no translation for the two songs. It remained for a twentieth-century Ghanaian to recognize the Kromanti song as a play song learned by very young children. Behind each text some similar mystery may lie. Much more work must be done on the exact details ofcommunity structure, of patterns of habitation and fertility, immigration, ethnicity, and on the structure of languages and dialects that influenced the formation ofJC. While some questions can never be answered, they must nonetheless be raised. We cannot know for certain what languages were spoken by the Maroons, who form the link between Spanish Jamaica and English Jamaica . We can only guess at...