Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole

1. The Colonial Crucible

1 The Colonial Crucible Lord, I have been washed from shore to shore, as a tree in the ocean. The branches of my fingers, the roots of my feet, could grip nothing; but now, God, they have found ground. Makak's last speech, Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain Language usage in today's Jamaica represents a history of contact among many different types of speakers drawn from many ethnic, linguistic, and social backgrounds. Save for the first known inhabitants-extinct by about 1620-all were exiles or the children of exiles. Map 1 sets out the sources of Jamaican population between 1500 and 1700, showing the times at which different groups arrived. Dominant among those immigrants who made up the community of speakers in early colonial Jamaica were speakers of West African languages and speakers of various dialects of Early Modern English. Although other groups have left their impress on language usage in Jamaica, none has played as notable a role as these two. Among the African languages, the role of the Kwa group has been amply demonstrated; more research remains to be carried out on the contribution of the Manding and Kru languages to the Atlantic creoles in generaP and Jamaican Creole in particular. The languages of the Congo region and other areas have yet to be assessed for their role in this colony of immigrants. The exact influences brought in from the British Isles by sailors, soldiers , indentured servants, convicts, and settlers have also to be more fully studied in terms of immigration patterns. Early Modern English came to the Caribbean in the form of regional and nonstandard dialects, highly conservative for the most part. These seventeenth-century dialects of English (and ofScottish and Irish speech also) were taken to the islands first occupied by the British: St. Christopher and Nevis (1623), Barbados 6 The Colonial Crucible 7 (1625-1627), Montserrat (1632), and Jamaica (1655).2 Speakers from these islands as well as lower-class whites from the British Isles provided the models for the English language in Jamaica. Jamaica before the English Invasion of 1655 Most discussion regarding the growth of Jamaican Creole begins with the arrival of the English expeditionary forces to the south coast ofJamaica in 1655. The legacy ofJamaica's Arawak and Spanish past seems to reside merely in place names, but the Maroons..,-Africans who asserted their freedom from both Spanish and English domination after 1655-constitute a link to that world in which Amerindian, African, and Hispanic speakers lived for well over a century. In this broader sense, Spanish colonial life in Jamaica may be relevant to the conditions under which JC began to form. Sloane (1707-25: l.xlvi) speaks of a small number of Africans and Amerindians who remained in Jamaica after the departure of the Spanish. This group included farmers and hunters who eventually passed on some of their knowledge of crops and forestry to the English and new Africans. Although no direct claim can be made for the formative influence of the languages used in Jamaica prior to the arrival of the English invaders in 1655, the question ofSpanish and Arawak influence must still be raised despite obvious difficulties. The original inhabitants ofJamaica were Arawaks, who had lived on the island for about seven centuries before the coming of Europeans. Columbus 's arrival in 1494 opened the way for Spanish settlement, which began in 1509. Estimates of the Arawak population at this point vary widely, and its decline is not easily traced. The archaeologist Howard R. Randolph (1969: 34-35) suggests a figure of600,000 for the year 1500 while Franklin Knight and Margaret Crahan (1979: 7) propose 20,000. Such are the uncertainties that attend efforts to reconstruct the early colonial life ofJamaica . More important than raw numbers are the settlement patterns of the Arawaks and their vulnerability to Spanish conquest. Settled along the hills overlooking the coastal plains, the Arawaks became the first slave labor force of the Spanish (see Map 2). Within one hundred years very few survived. No distinctive Arawak culture remained in Jamaica after the sixteenth century, but Arawak influence on the emerging colonial culture suggests itself in loan words, place names, foodstuffs, and other material borrowings. In the unfamiliar environment of the Americas, both Europeans and [later] Africans must have borrowed freely in the uneven exchange neces- • ..::: "001) .., :z % D I .. co co ..> .. en ARAWAK REMAINS .,. iii: SPANISH AND...