Carolyn Cooper | Doing business in the Jamaican language

My last two columns on language provoked so much contention on the Gleaner’s website. In response to “Language lessons at the pharmacy”, this is what ‘Words 100’ posted: “I understand that you have retired or been retired as a teacher at UWI. If this is so, I humbly suggest you find a hobby to occupy your time and stop miseducating Jamaicans.” Mi nearly dead wid laugh. One of my hobbies is writing this weekly column. Sometimes, it really seems like work. Especially when, as a teacher of English, I feel obliged to respond to comments that reveal poor reading comprehension!

The hostile responses to the recent columns far outnumbered the positive ones. But many readers did understand what I was saying. They tried to engage with the people who were so angry with me for daring to declare that the Jamaican language should be treated with respect. In response to ‘Words 100’, ‘Roanja’ posted a disdainful comment: “Miseducating Jamaicans? The inferiority complex all you lambasting Ms Cooper suffer from is a consequence of generations of miseducation. What you are displaying is years of conditioning that everything about Jamaican culture is negative.”

How can we move the debate on language in Jamaica out of the arena of a tracing match on the Internet? Public education is essential. Many defenders of English as the sole language of business in Jamaica really don’t know wa a gwaan. I got an insightful email last Sunday from a reader who has found himself in extremely desperate circumstances. He’s homeless and trying his best to survive. All the same, he took the time to tell me his story about the use of Jamaican in the workplace:

“I work part-time as a janitor at a well-known bank. As an educator (I was a teacher of English, but that story is for another time), I find it most fascinating to hear how the bank’s employees, at all levels, communicate with each other. At least sixty to seventy per cent of the time they use mostly Jamaican patois, mixed up with some so-called standard English. They switch to standard English when they are communicating with the customers; but no sooner they start, they go back again to a mix of patois and English as the customers make more inquiries regarding their accounts etc ....”

‘TROUBLESOME’ PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEERS

Short-sighted people who insist that the Jamaican language has no place in the world of work are simply out of touch with reality. They do not seem to understand how difficult it is to do business in Jamaica if you are not competent in the local language. This is precisely why so many foreigners make a great effort to learn Jamaican. They have no investment in the fiction that Jamaican is merely a ‘broken’ version of English. They know the simple rule. If you don’t understand a word, it’s a different language.

The Peace Corps Jamaica (PCJ) is a classic example of an organisation that knows intimately the value of Jamaican as a language of business. In June, the organisation launched their celebration of 60 years in Jamaica. The PCJ learned the hard way that Jamaica is a bilingual country. David ‘Ragga’ Ingleman, who was a volunteer from 2008-2010, wrote an excellent article, “A Brief History of Language, Linguistics, and the Peace Corps in Jamaica”, that was published in the February 2019 issue of the Friends of Jamaica Peace Corps Association Newsletter.

Ingleman reported that “Jamaica One,” the first group of volunteers, “gained a notorious reputation for being one of the most troublesome contingents in the entire Peace Corps.” Ingleman quoted David Lawton’s article on “Some Problems of Teaching a Creolized Language to Peace Corps Members. . The new recruits “were totally unprepared for the linguistic demands made on them”. Ingleman noted that, “Frustratedly, in the first several months of the PCJ program, apparent superficial cultural and linguistic similarities often led Peace Corps officials in Washington to attribute Jamaica One dysfunction to personal shortcomings.”

DYSFUNCTIONAL EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

The PCJ soon realised that the issue with the “troublesome” volunteers was not “personal shortcomings”. It was their lack of knowledge of the Jamaican language. The Jamaican linguist Beryl Loftman Bailey was contracted to create a language-training programme. In 1962, her book, A language guide to Jamaica, was published by the Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM) in New York. This was the first full-length study of the grammar of the Jamaican language. Six decades later, I suspect that this book is not widely known by language teachers in Jamaican schools.

Like those Peace Corps volunteers who did not understand Jamaican, primary school students in Jamaica who do not know English, the official language of instruction, are often seen as troublesome. They are not taught English efficiently and struggle to keep up in school. It is so easy for them to be written off as educationally subnormal. But it is the educational system that is dysfunctional, not the children. Their home language is not taken seriously in the classroom.

Among the PCJ’s earliest teachers of Jamaican were Louise Bennett-Coverley, aka Miss Lou, and Barbara Gloudon. Last Sunday, I got a heart-warming email from Fabian Coverley, Miss Lou’s son, with the subject line, “Keep up the Good Work”. He subtly acknowledged his mother’s legacy: “Admire the perseverance to keep the subject matter alive (Jamaican vs English). I grew up intimately with this topic. ‘Wa go round come round’.” We keep going round and round on the issue of language. It’s time to break free from the restrictive cycle. If we are to become a truly emancipated and independent nation, we must claim both English and Jamaican as our official languages. As Miss Lou would say, two language better than one.

Carolyn Cooper, PhD, is a teacher of English language and literature and a specialist on culture and development. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and karokupa@gmail.com.