Language and Jamaican Literature
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Velma Pollard [1]
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[1] University of the West Indiesat Mona, Jamaica
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- Localización: Altre Modernità: Rivista di studi letterari e culturali, ISSN-e 2035-7680, Nº. 22, 2019 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Disrespected Literatures: Histories and Reversal of Linguistic Oppression), págs. 149-162
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Disrespected literatures are written in disrespected languages. Languages are usually disrespected when the status of the people who speak them is low. In post- plantation societies the respected language is the European language brought by the people who colonised the country. The disrespected language is usually a creole born in the plantation environment where overseers speaking European languages and enslaved people speaking West African languages were forced to interact. In Jamaica the respected official language is English and the disrespected popular language is Jamaica Creole. The languages are lexically related and so give the impression of being closer than they are. In fact, Jamaican Creole is still regarded as “broken English” by people who have not paid attention to the linguistic analyses which indicate a strong structural relationship to certain West African languages. These two languages, the official and the popular have accommodated each other in the Jamaican environment with speaker and situation determining use. A fascinating feature of this accommodation is the ability of the individual to switch from one language to the other within the same speech event. This paper hopes to illustrate how I and other Jamaican writers have infused the formal/official language in which most of us write, with the popular language and so have enriched the fabric that is the language in which Jamaican literature is written.
