Editorial | PM should match words on patois with policy

But for Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ apparently tortured soul on the matter, the recent failed attempt by the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) to rally public support in an online petition to stir the Government into formal recognition to the island’s patois, or Jamaican dialect, would, it seems, have been unnecessary. The administration would have, without prompting, taken on building the structures to legitimise the language.

Perhaps, in the new year, Mr Holness can gain his balance and move beyond an intellectual acceptance of the linguistic merit of the Jamaican dialect and to consider how, practically, it can be used to help achieve the ends the PM has identified for Jamaica, including its citizens being better speakers of English.

Indeed, there is little doubt about the technical legitimacy of the Jamaican dialect as a language. It is a linguistic code that is the mother tongue of the vast majority of Jamaicans, large swathes of whom struggle with English, as Prime Minister Holness clearly appreciates, to which he made allusion during a recent discussion on the ongoing tension between the two languages. Or, put more accurately, it is a struggle for recognition by Jamaican patois.

“We have been defined as an English-speaking country and our failure has been in not ensuring our people speak English,” the prime minister said in an address to Jamaica’s young people, after the JLU had launched its petition. “So, it is not about, in any way, preventing the use of patois. Government policy also has to ensure our population speaks English.”

This newspaper is in support of Prime Minister Holness on both counts: on the failure of the education system to adequately prepare a nation that speaks and writes English adequately, and the importance of Jamaicans mastering the language, given English’s position as the global lingua franca, especially for commerce, science and technology.

Indeed, each year, more than 40 per cent of the Jamaican students who sit the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate test for secondary-school level certification in English fail the exam. Most who pass struggle through with lower grades. Universities in Jamaica are forced to offer remedial English courses for a not-insubstantial proportion of their students.

The problem with English, and its tension between it and patois/Jamaican dialect is obvious at the lower rung of the education systems, as was noted last year by former education minister Ronald Thwaites in an observation of some of the outcomes of the government’s Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exam for grade-six students. These exams require a greater level of creative thinking and problem-solving among students, which many found challenging.

The real issue, Mr Thwaites argued, was language – the difference in the abilities of children to handle English.

“In Jamaica, the figure between the command of standard English required in PEP and the familiarity of most students only in Jamaican creole, creates the huge difference in outcomes and explains what we are bemoaning in exam results,” Mr Thwaites said. “…The seismic shift on what and how, and in what language we teach and learn, can no longer be postponed and will require much more time for reassessment.”

People like Professor Hubert Devonish of the JLU, which is part of department of language, linguistics and philosophy at the University of the West Indies, Mona, has been making this case for decades, suggesting that not only the Jamaican dialect be given official status and also be made a language of instruction, but that there also be a shift in the approach to the teaching of English, as if it is the first language of students.

BRING STRUCTURE

In one of his recent interventions in the language debate, Mr Holness said, “There really should be an institute that seeks to bring a structure to the language (Jamaican) and to do what is necessary to make it institutionalised.” Which is what we understand, the JLU, in large part, has been about. What it would therefore now need is the imprimatur of the Government, including policies that acknowledge Jamaica as a bilingual society.

But even as Mr Holness appears to begin an embrace of this idea, he puts up a straw man, against which to take aim, such as a declaration of his “fear that the debate is going a way that is to suggest abandoning English and speak patois”. How Mr Holness could have discerned that from any serious participant in the discourse is beyond this newspaper.

What we have heard is precisely what Mr Holness has proposed, that Jamaicans “learn as many languages as possible and love your patois as well”. Accept that patois, or Jamaican dialect, is the lingua franca and is a potentially liberating tool.