Langue, musique et crise de la nation jamaïcaine

Cet article s’intéresse à l’évolution de pratiques linguistiques rivales dans les musiques populaires jamaïcaines, des années 1950 à nos jours. Deux langues coexistent et rivalisent en effet en Jamaïque : l’anglais, héritage linguistique de l’époque coloniale, et langue officielle de l’État jamaïcain postcolonial, dispute sa place dans les paroles des chansons avec la langue jamaïcaine (le créole jamaïcain, ou Patois). Ce dernier est la langue maternelle de la vaste majorité de la population, et constitue de facto la langue nationale. Cet article analyse la façon dont cet affrontement se déroule, et le type de langue qui en vient à être associé avec les différents genres musicaux jamaïcains. Son analyse culmine avec l’examen du rôle que la langue jamaïcaine a fini par jouer, par l’intermédiaire de la musique, dans le défi le plus important que l’État jamaïcain a dû affronter depuis l’indépendance : la confrontation militaire qui se déroula à Kingston Ouest/Tivoli Gardens en mai 2010 pour l’arrestation et l’extradition de Christopher « Dudus » Coke.The paper examines the evolution of language use in popular Jamaican music over six decades, between the two coexisting and simultaneously competing languages of Jamaica. English, a colonial linguistic inheritance, the official language of the post-colonial Jamaican state, competes for a place in music lyrics with the Jamaican Language (Jamaican Creole, Patwa). This is the native language of the mass of the population and the de facto national language. The paper discusses how this battle plays out in terms of which language varieties are predominantly associated with which Jamaican popular music genres. It culminates in examining the role which the Jamaican Language came to play, via its use in music, in the most significant challenge to the existence of the Jamaican state since independence, the military confrontation in West Kingston/Tivoli Gardens events of May 2010, around the arrest and extradition of Christopher “Dudus” Coke

Droits linguistiques comme pré-conditions pour l\u27intercompréhension des langues cultures dans l\u27espace créolophone

Hubert St-Laurent Devonish réagit d\u27abord sur les réalités linguistiques caribéennes. Il met l\u27accent sur la lutte existant entre les langues indigènes de la Caraïbe et les langues officielles. Il fait également part du projet de création du concept de langue du territoire

MATHEMATICAL AND EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF ENGLISH/CREOLE LANGUAGE VARIATIO

As far back as the 19th century when the Trinidadian scholar, J.J. Thomas (1869), wrote The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar, interest in the ‘rules’ or grammars of the different language varieties on the Creole-English continuum and in the ‘rules’ or mechanisms of interaction among varieties has been driven by a range of political, cultural, psychological and pragmatic factors, as well as by scientific imperatives. A core issue in the analysis of language mixing concerns the number of Creole/English language varieties that are deemed ‘acceptable’ in a speech community. For example, if each linguistic feature (e.g., a word or phoneme) in an utterance (e.g., a sentence) with n features can be expressed as a ‘Creole’ variant or an ‘English’ variant, and if there are no linguistic ‘rules’ or constraints on the co-occurrence among variants, then there should be a very large number, 2n, to be exact, of acceptable utterances or varieties. But this is not the case – many fewer than 2n varieties are judged as acceptable, suggesting the operation of certain constraints on language mixing. Implicational scaling has been one of the most productive approaches to the study of these linguistic constraints ever since its initial application by DeCamp (1971) to the Jamaican Creole continuum (as documented in a recent comprehensive chapter by Rickford, 2004). This model assumes that linguistic features can be ordered on the Creole-English continuum such that, if a speaker typically uses the ‘Creole’ variant of a given feature (e.g., nyam rather than eat, or dem rather than them), then the speaker will typically use the ‘Creole’ variant of all features that are less Creole on the continuum than the given feature. This model predicts a surprising regularity relating the number, An, of observable language varieties to the number, n, of linguistic features or variables characterizing a language variety, namely, An = n + 1. In recent empirical and theoretical work, the present authors take a different approach that provides a fuller account than implicational scaling of some aspects of the variability in language data. We model the probability, P, that an ‘acceptable’ sentence of length n can be extended by the addition of one variant (English or Creole) to form an acceptable sentence of length n + 1. We prove that An = n + 1 when the function, P, is linear and the ‘compatibility’ (to be defined precisely in the model) between English and Creole is neither too low nor too high. Further, computer simulations show that, when P is nonlinear and the compatibility is not too high, the number, An, of language varieties tends to 2 as n becomes very large. These results add to our understanding of language mixing, at least by offering a rigorous derivation of a family of data regularities, including the (n + 1)-rule. Whether other model-derived regularities will be discovered in future empirical studies remains to be seen. In the meantime, we need to better interpret the ‘linearity’ and ‘compatibility’ parameters of the model in linguistic or socio-psychological terms so as to increase the policy-relevance of our researc

Supplemental Table 1: Data from Using features of a Creole language to reconstruct population history and cultural evolution: tracing the English origins of Sranan

Creole languages are formed in conditions where speakers from distinct languages are brought together without a shared first language, typically under the domination of speakers from one of the languages and particularly in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism. One such Creole in Suriname, Sranan, developed around the mid-seventeenth century, primarily out of contact between varieties of English from England, spoken by the dominant group, and multiple West African languages. The vast majority of the basic words in Sranan come from the language of the dominant group, English. Here, we compare linguistic features of modern-day Sranan with those of English as spoken in 313 localities across England. By way of testing proposed hypotheses for the origin of English words in Sranan, we find that 80% of the studied features of Sranan can be explained by similarity to regional dialect features at two distinct input locations within England, a cluster of locations near the port of Bristol and another cluster near Essex in eastern England. Our new hypothesis is supported by the geographical distribution of specific regional dialect features, such as post-vocalic rhoticity and word-initial ‘h’, and by phylogenetic analysis of these features, which shows evidence favouring input from at least two English dialects in the formation of Sranan. In addition to explicating the dialect features most prominent in the <i>linguistic</i> evolution of Sranan, our historical analyses also provide supporting evidence for two distinct hypotheses about the likely <i>geographical</i> origins of the English speakers whose language was an input to Sranan. The emergence as a likely input to Sranan of the speech forms of a cluster near Bristol is consistent with historical records, indicating that most of the indentured servants going to the Americas between 1654 and 1666 were from Bristol and nearby counties, and that of the cluster near Essex is consistent with documents showing that many of the governors and important planters came from the southeast of England (including London) (Smith 1987 <i>The Genesis of the Creole Languages of Surinam</i>; Smith 2009 In <i>The handbook of pidgin and creole studies</i>, pp. 98–129).This article is part of the theme issue ‘Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution’

Figure S1 from Using features of a Creole language to reconstruct population history and cultural evolution: tracing the English origins of Sranan

Phylogenies constructed from language Strickland from localities in England and Sranan. (A) Tree constructed from 86 localities in England and Sranan, with three migration events allowed. (B) Tree constructed from 126 localities in England and Sranan, with three migration events allowed