Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole

5. Language Variation

5 Language Variation Bwoy, yuh no shame? Is so yuh come? After yuh tan so lang! Not even lickle language, bwoy? Not even lickle twang? An yuh sister what work ongle One week wid Merican She talk so nice now dat we have De jooce fi understan? Louise Bennett, "Bans a Killin" Limited in many ways, the data of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury JC nonetheless point to the foundations of a speech continuum in Jamaica. Extensive language variation apparently existed between basilectal Jamaican Creole at one end of the spectrum and acrolectal Jamaican English at the other. Between these extremes, both interpersonal and intrapersonal variation can be distinguished. At what stage distinct intermediate varieties developed is yet to be made clear. The Creole The earliest Jamaican speech recorded is distinct from any pidgin or, at any rate, from a pidgin as defined by Whinnom (1971: 106), who sees it as a language that can be identified on the basis of linguistic criteria and is thus recognizable as a separate structural type. Creoles, on the other hand, can more easily be defined by reference to history than by structural criteria. Still, it is possible to distinguish between early and later JC by structural features as well as through sociohistorical factors. The language preserved in early Jamaican records has arisen out ofcon79 80 Early Jamaican Creole tact between linguistically diverse peoples-a contact that occurred first under conditions of trade and in the collection centers of West Africa and later under the economic system of plantation industry in the Caribbean. In this multilingual situation, contact was at once horizontal (between slaves) and vertical (between masters and slaves). European communities bore little cultural resemblance to West African ones. Important concepts of the prestige languages were therefore carried into JC in a lexicon that was largely British (given the disruption ofWest African traditions and the debatable extent of such disruption). Sustained interaction among large groups of socially diverse peoples provided the conditions essential to the long-term development of JC, especially as the proportion of Europeans to Africans in seventeenth-century Jamaica was larger than in later years. We have seen that the development and spread ofJC was not limited to transmission from one generation to the next, since continued importations brought Africans who learned the established creole, bringing to it their own linguistic backgrounds. Because these may have included African languages quite different from those of the early colonial period (as well as new varieties of GCCE), the developing creole would have been relearned subject to interference from the linguistic background of new groups. While it is true to say that social and racial prejudice in Jamaica defined the development of the creole and associated it with caste, the situation was complicated by a number offactors. For example, English presented a diversity of social and regional varieties and it was the sum of these that made up the prestige tongue. At the same time, a far wider social and racial range of speakers than is normally acknowledged was apparently competent in the creole. In this case, an early JC speech community may not only have linked working-class blacks in a sort of "group solidarity" (Miihlhausler 1974: 44) but would have included widely disparate age groups, social classes, and economic levels. Eventual isolation from British English fostered conservatism, especially in the rural creole, even while the continuing presence of acrolectal Jamaican speech exerted strong acculturative and decreolizing influences. The divergence between standard speech in Britain and in Jamaica (largely phonological) was neither absolute nor final, for SE has continued to influence acrolectal Jamaican English through small, elite groups. Although the nature and components of the original contacts changed, it was a stable creole that survived in oral communication. Rather than testifying to the acceptance of JC as a literary language, the written records that follow merely document certain varieties of this oral language. Fundamental restructuring of the languages that contributed to JC belongs to its prehistory, and linguists have speculated about it. A common Language Variation 81 view is that pidginization began with optimalization of rules. Next, creolization introduced new rules. Miihlhausler (1974: 136) distinguishes simplification from descriptive simplicity in that the former expands the domain of grammatical rules. In any case, the end result is a language in which functional components of the grammar may be stressed more usefully than categorical components. As Miihlhausler points out, the linguist can...