Jamaicans debate dialect's rightful place

Some assign patois high value; others dismiss it as a vernacular

 BY MATTHEW J. ROSENBERG
 Associated Press

 KINGSTON, Jamaica -- Was reggae icon Bob Marley singing entirely in English when he recorded his classic Trenchtown Rock?

 Linguists say no -- the Jamaican singer was using patois, a mixture of English and West African tongues spoken by slaves who were brought to this Caribbean island by European colonizers.

 Now, nearly 40 years after Jamaica won independence from Britain, some people argue that patois should be granted official status along with English.

 LEANING ON MARLEY

 ``Politicians love to quote Bob Marley's `free yourself from mental slavery' line all the time,'' said Carolyn Cooper, a literature professor at the University of the West Indies. "Ignoring patois is mental slavery, the worst kind. It's old colonial racism and classism.''

 In English, you might tell a waiter, ``Bring me some shrimp.'' In patois, it becomes, Kya a janga com gimmi.

 Proponents of using patois argue that since many Jamaicans have difficulty understanding English, it is shameful to conduct the business of official Jamaica, as
 Parliament does, in a foreign tongue.

 Anglophiles call patois "lazy English'' and dismiss it as a vernacular.

 ``What intellectuals like to call another language is pure laziness,'' said Morris Cargill, a white Jamaican newspaper columnist, who died last year. ``You can't read
 Dickens or Jane Austen in patois.''

 Nobody debates that point.

 But patois supporters say the language differs from English in its phonetic and grammatical system.

 Most of the words in Jamaican patois, like other English Caribbean patois, are English words filtered through a distinct phonetic system with fewer vowels and different consonant sounds.

 Patois is written phonetically to approximate these differences.

 Thus, in patois, the English ``girl'' becomes gyal.

 AFRICAN CONNECTION

 A small number of patois words, between 5 percent and 10 percent, are of African origin, among them nyam, to eat, or duppy, ghost.

 But the greatest divergence from English is in the grammar, which has origins in the languages of West Africa. For this reason, English and patois speakers often cannot understand each other, even though most of the words have English origins.

 A clear example of West African grammar in Jamaican patois is the way verbs are formed in the past tense.

 Instead of using a suffix such as ``ed,'' as in ``walked,'' a patois speaker puts a modifying construction such as did a before a verb. The English ``I walked'' becomes me did a walk in patois. The same is done in Haitian Creole by adding ``te'' before a verb to indicate past tense.

 Linguists call this ``tense marking,'' and ``it is a common feature of West African languages,'' DeGraff said.

 Nearly all Jamaicans, regardless of class, speak patois.

 Those who speak English fluently, mostly people from the middle and upper classes, tend to use patois for emphasis when angry, to affect a down-to-earth persona or to talk to someone of a lower class.

 Schools where patois-speaking children are thrust into a primarily English environment are also a concern for critics of English as the only official language.

 ``What good is it to teach a child an alphabet for a language he doesn't speak, that his teacher probably doesn't speak, and then make him read books in that foreign
 language?'' said Hubert Devonish, a linguistics professor at the University of the West Indies.

 Devonish's solution is to use patois to teach English. ``We've already got a dictionary, a system for writing it,'' he said.

 But some are skeptical.

 ``These kids are going to end up learning only patois,'' said Maryanne Wilson, a 35-year-old mother of two school-age children. ``Then what? My kids are going to apply to school in America and write their applications essays in patois?''

                                    © 2001