Editorial | Justice Sykes rules for Patois

Bryan Sykes’ aim may be to improve efficiency and quality of justice in the island’s courts, but he has, at the same time, struck an important blow for the recognition of Jamaican Patois as a formal language and for it to be treated as such. Given his own, though circumlocutory, acceptance of the legitimacy of Patois, Prime Minister Andrew Holness should now guide government policy to a formal embrace of the fact, including acting on Justice Sykes’ proposal.

Bryan Sykes is Jamaica’s chief justice, making him, effectively, the top man in the judiciary, in charge of the island’s courts, which not only have a large backlog of cases, but where it is often claimed that some persons are often not afforded the best-quality justice. That usually means Jamaicans who are poor and undereducated and don’t communicate well in English. They primarily speak Patois, or ‘Jamaican’, the lingua franca of the vast majority of the population.

Speaking at a technology conference, the chief justice called for some enterprising Jamaican techie or entrepreneur to develop a “voice-to-text Patois translation” tool for use in the courts.

“… Once you get the voice-to-text Patois (transcription) … particularly in the parish courts … (where) most of our litigants are Patois speakers … that will go a far way,” Justice Sykes said. He went further to emphasise that the technology is “greatly needed in our courts”.

The chief justice didn’t go into the details of his expectations, but we suspect that his wish is for technology that not only transcribes Patois speech into Patois text, but at the same time, translates that text into English, the official language of the courts. Indeed, the head of the Jamaican Language Unit at The University of the West Indies, Mona, Joseph Farquharson, explained that court reporters sometimes don’t transcribe faithfully what a Patois speaker says in court.

What may happen is that a summary of the statement is translated to English, which, being done on the spot, and by non-experts, may lack detail and nuance. Due process, in the circumstance, may suffer.

The important point about Justices Sykes’ intervention, and his proposal for rectifying the problem, is not only his commitment to the ideals of justice, but that he doesn’t presume that all Jamaicans speak English. Policymakers’, thus far, unbreakable investment in this false presumption is a major flaw in the education system and a barrier to teaching and learning. In a system where the language of instruction is English, it places most students at a decided disadvantage.

Indeed, each year, of the Jamaican students, the grade-11 cohort and ‘independent’ entrants who write the Caribbean Examination Council’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exam, nearly 40 per cent fail to get a passing grade. Students struggle because rather than teaching English as a foreign/second language, a natural affinity is assumed. This weakness is carried over to other subjects, contributing to the underperformance of students in Jamaica’s schools.

GOVERNMENT POLICY

There have been significant studies that have demonstrated that students who have early instruction in Patois, or have it used side-by-side with English, perform much better in school. Unfortunately, proponents of Patois recognition as an official language, with all that entails, have been cast as nationalists and intellectual Luddites who wish to displace English and remove Jamaica from global markets and technology.

We agree with Prime Minister Andrew Holness that there has to be a government policy to ensure that Jamaicans speak English as part of the country’s integration into the global economy. The easiest route to this is the acceptance that English isn’t the mother tongue, or lingua franca, of most of us. Jamaican, or Patios, is.

Further, the idea that “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” ought not to be a willy-nilly notion. Such an institution already exists at Mona. What the Jamaican language now requires is the imprimatur of government policy.