Jamaican English or Jamaican Standard English is a dialect of E

VERY GOOD, ANNARITA. YOU DEDICATED A LOT OF TIME, I SEE, AND ARE BECOMING AN EXPERT ON JAMAICAN ENGLISH ;-)). HAVE YOU CONSIDERED GOING THERE FOR YOUR HOLIDAYS?

In these papers I’ll try to analyze the Jamaican VARIETY OF English variety through ON six linguistic levels: phonemic, morphemic, lexemic, syntactic, textual and (normative) pragmatic.

Little historical introductory note. The history of English in the West Indies is different from other former colonies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. There, English was spoken from the start predominantly by settlers from the British Isles, who passed it on to their descendants and others largely through the normal processes of language transmission: infants learned it from their elders and adults learned it through fairly close daily contact with native speakers. The massive importation of slaves from Africa brought about a restructuring of English that resulted in Creole, a distinct language system with words derived from English (that is the official language) but with phonology, semantics, and morphosyntax influenced by African languages and other forces.^¹ At the beginning, from extended contact between different groups of people with no language in common, give a results a pidgin language EVOLVED and when a pidgin language is attested and it is handed down from generation to generation, it becomes a creole language. After it became established as the first language of entire communities, this creolised English was transmitted like any other language. Over the years because of language contact phenomena, Creole influenced and was influenced by the standard and regional varieties of English brought from Britain.^² [THERE IS, OF COURSE, MUCH DEBATE OVER THE LINGUISTIC STATUS OF PIDGINS AND CREOLES, BUT YOUR ACCOUNT, TAKEN FROM HOLM, IS A GOOD CONSENSUS VIEW.]

Jamaican Standard English is the official language of Jamaica, it is the language of education, high culture, the mass media, government and official/formal communications (upper class). Jamaican shares its position of most used language with Patois (Patwa)^³, a creole language that combines English and some African languages.

Patois is spoken in rural areas and is used increasingly in urban areas; it is used everyday for informal situation. Most people speak Patois at home and most younger Jamaicans use it on internet chat sites. At last FINALLY, Patois is the language of local popular music. Most Jamaicans can speak or understand Patois, but it is not a written language and has no standardized spelling,; it is a real dialect.

Although there isn’t a clear distinction between English and Patois, (it is a continuum), people can’t JAMAICAN SPEAKERS DO NOT confuse the two languages, neither to IN speakING nor to writING, and can shift between them without difficulty (code-switching).

Jamaican Patois is what linguists call Jamaican Creole while "Patois" or Patwa is a French term referring to regional languages of France, which include some Creole languages, but in Jamaica it refers to Jamaican Creole.

Besides people that WHO join to the Rastafarian movement AND use Rastafari vocabulary or Iyaric^⁴, it JAMAICAN ENGLISH is part of a created dialect of English. Most of African people OF AFRICAN DESCENT remember their past of AS slaves through this vocabulary because most of African dialects were HAVE BEEN lost.

Patois has a lot of particular semantic and morphologicAL features (a bit difficult to analyse) so I’ll take into account the main features of Jamaican Standard English, because it has a lot of similitude with RESEMBLES British English and Irish English.

The pronunciation of Jamaican Standard English is SOMEWHAT like the Irish pronunciation, the Irish “accent”- in particular the accent of County Cork (in Ireland) - WHICH influences Jamaican English accent today, probably because of a remnant REMINISCENCE of former colonial ties to Ireland and to a lesser extent, America^⁵.

Jamaican Standard pronunciation differs from Jamaican Patois pronunciation, in fact people WHO speak Patois aren’t immediately intelligible, because they pronounce words all joined and they cut the words ELIDE CONSIDERABLY.

One of main features of Jamaican English is the pronunciation of the diphthongs, for example the diphthong /au/ in Jamaican correspondS to /ou/ (hous “house”), then the diphthongs in “fair” and “fear” or in “bear” and “beer” take place OCCUR both in Jamaican Standard and Jamaican Patois becoming homophones. (Standard speakers typically pronounce both closer to "air", while Creole speakers render them as "ear"). The short /a/ sound (man, hat) is very open, similar to its Irish versions REALIZATION^⁶.

As regards the vowels we can notice some interesting aspectS. The mid central vowels of English, unstressed /ə/, became /a/ in Jamaican, for example /bita/ “bitter”.

The low English vowels /æ, ɑ, ɔ/ are different as in /hat/ “hat, hot” and /haat/ “heart”, also the high front vowels /i/ and /I/ have a clear opposition in /siit/ “seat” vs /sit/ “sit”, this may depend more on vowel length than vowel quality [BOTH, ACTUALLY]. At last regarding the high back vowels, the distinction between /u/ in “pool” and / ʊ/ in “pull” IS MAINTAINED (Holm, 1994, pp.365-368).

As regards the consonants, in Jamaican THEY are pronounced like AS in Standard English, there some little ONLY A FEW differences, for example English / ʒ/ of pleasure vs /dʒ/ of Jamaican pleja (Holm, 1994, pp. 368-372).

Another feature that regards the consonants is the semi-rhoticity, i.e. the dropping of the "-r" in words like "water" (at the end of unstressed syllables) and "market" (before a consonant); but not in words like "car" or "dare" (stressed syllables at the end of the word)^⁷.

Jamaican spelling isn’t more MUCH different from British spelling,; there aren’t particular NO features to WORTHY OF mention. There are only some examples. [THERE HAVE NOT BEEN ANY ORTHOGRAPHIC CONTAMINATIONS DUE TO CONFLICTING WRITTEN FORMS BECAUSE, AS YOU SAY, JAMAICAN ENGLISH IS SPOKEN, NOT WRITTEN. JAMAICANS OF THE MIDDLE AND UPPER CLASSES -- THOSE WHO KNOW HOW TO WRITE -- HAVE BEEN SCHOOLED IN STANDARD BRITISH ENGLISH.]

Jamaican English shares much more MOST of its lexicon with English. People tend to use British vocabulary, but there is an obvious American influence also in the lexicon AS WELL given its THE proximity OF THE UNITED STATES to Jamaica [ACTUALLY, WITH MODERN MASS MEDIA, PROXIMITY IS OF SECONDARY IMPORTANCE: SEE THE INFLUENCE OF AMERICAN ENGLISH ON AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH, FOR EXAMPLE], so the borrowing process and creating new words started to HAVE giveN an enriched lexis. Thre are several other kinds of semantic shifts, including metaphor, for example when a Jamaican has to express an opinion about a movie or an event he uses words borrowed to FROM religious speech (“That movie is a Word” ).

An interesting use of mixed British and American vocabulary is with automobiles, where the American term “trunk” is almost universally used instead of the British term “boot”,; the British word “sleeping policeman” is used instead of the American word “Speed Bump”, while the engine covering is always referred to by the British term "bonnet". This is probably because the American term, “hood”, is used in Jamaica as a vulgar slang for penis.

Naturally, Jamaican Standard also uses many local words borrowed from Jamaican Patois, such as “duppy” for “ghost”; “haggler” for “informal vendor”; and of course lots of words referring to local produce and food items – “ackee”, “callaloo”, “guinep”, and “bammy”^⁸.

Jamaican Standard English is grammatically similar to British Standard English. Syntax is the linguistic level that has had small changes. However, the proximity [SEE PREVIOUS COMMENT ON PROXIMITY] of Jamaica to the United States has increased the influence of American English, also due to close economic ties and A high percentage of migration DEGREE OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM (much more THROUGH American cultural/entertainment products such as movies, cable television and popular music). As a result, structures like "I don't have" or "you don't need" are almost universally preferred over "I haven't got" or "you needn't"^⁹.

At the textual level there are no significant features in Jamaican English. We can only notice that Jamaicans use the connectors and COMMON in written language but more less in spoken language.

At the pragmatic level we notice the specific use of language to establish relationshipS, to express surprise, approval and so on, for example when Jamaicans meet their friends, they often use “hey man”, “iry man” and “ya”.

Jamaicans choose from the varieties available to them according to the situation. A Creole-dominant speaker will choose a higher variety for formal occasions like official business or a wedding speech, and a lower one for relating to friends; a Jamaican Standard English speaker chooses to use the lower variety when shopping at the market or for humoristic purposes than at her workplace or public places. Code-switching can also be metaphoric.

1 Holm, John A., 1994 “English in the Caribbean”, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume V (pp. 328-381), English in Britain and Overseas: Origins and Development, Edited by Robert Burchfield, University of Oxford. [Well, as a source this is indeed an improvement over Wikipedia!]