Carolyn Cooper | Two languages are better than one

We keep on having the same old tired argument about whether or not Jamaican is a real-real language. It’s not a question of logic. It’s pure emotion. No matter what the linguists say, some people will never be convinced by the careful scholarship that has been produced over the last half century. As far as they’re concerned, the Jamaican language is nothing but pop-down English. And that’s dat.

Why do so many people get so angry with anyone who asserts that Jamaican is a language? It’s class prejudice and insecurity. They need to feel superior to those unfortunate people who don’t speak English. The majority of Jamaicans at home and in farin whose mother language is Jamaican are working-class. Dem no come offa no high table.

If they were lucky, they were taught English efficiently in school and are now bilingual. If they were not, dog nyam dem supper. They are part of a sub-human class of creatures who have no proper language. The convenient assumption is that dem just dunce. All dem good fa is fi do dutty work weh nobody else nuh waan do. The failure of the Jamaican school system to teach them English is never taken into account.

CHAT NUFF FOOLISHNESS

In 1965, Cambridge University Press published a revolutionary book by the Jamaican linguist Beryl Loftman Bailey – Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines transformational grammar in this way: “a system of language analysis that recognizes the relationship among the various elements of a sentence and among the possible sentences of a language and uses processes or rules (some of which are called transformations) to express these relationships”.

Dr Bailey carefully described the structure of the Jamaican language, outlining its rules of grammar. Yes! The language has rules. It has grammar. That’s how speakers construct the same kinds of sentences over and over again. And that’s why foreigners who don’t know the grammar of the language chat nuff foolishness.

One of the reasons Dr Bailey gave for writing the book was “to explode once and for all the notion that…the ‘dialect’ is NOT a language.” In spite of that loudly capitalised NOT, the explosion clearly did not go off. Fifty-four years later, the backward notion that Jamaican is not a language is still very much alive and well. Another purpose of Dr Bailey’s book was to offer data that could be used to address the problem of how to teach English in Jamaica.

The Ministry of Education is still struggling with that issue. No sustained attempt has been made to take into account the reality that many children who enter primary school speak only Jamaican. That is their home language. They don’t know English. They have to be taught the language in school. How effective are the methods that are now being used? Not very!

EDUCATED FOR MIGRATION

Even at tertiary institutions, remedial English is on the curriculum for those students who were not taught the language properly. Many of them are quite sharp. They can express their ideas clearly in Jamaican, but not in English. They need to be competently bilingual if they are going to function both inside and outside Jamaica. The ambition of many university graduates is to migrate. They don’t think they have a viable future in Jamaica.

This brings me to the common argument made against the Jamaican language. It’s limited because it’s spoken only in Jamaica. What does ‘only’ really mean for us? In 2017, the population of Jamaica was 2.89 million. Estimates of the number of Jamaicans in the diaspora range from 1.7 to three million. If we take the diaspora average of 2.3 million and add it to the number of Jamaicans living at home, this comes to 5.19 million.

Not all of these Jamaicans are competent in our local language. So let’s subtract one million. This still leaves a substantial number of speakers of the language. So why should the language of all of these speakers be dismissed as marginal? Why shouldn’t Jamaican be recognised as an official language in Jamaica? If we are serious about national development, we must recognise the fact that language is a fundamental element of individual and national identity.

Jamaica must be acknowledged as a bilingual country. Foreigners can easily hear that Jamaican is not English. They make an effort to learn it. It is the Jamaican elite who stubbornly refuse to accept the fact that Jamaican is a language. And they refuse to admit that all speakers of Jamaican are capable of learning English if they are taught properly. Every single Jamaican child can become bilingual.

The benefits of bilingualism are unquestionable. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, staff writer at the journal Science, asserts in a 2012 article published in the New York Times that, “Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.”

Instead of dissing Jamaican, we should eagerly claim our rich bilingual legacy.

 Carolyn Cooper, PhD, is a specialist on culture and development. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.