Download Free The Acrolect In Jamaica Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Acrolect In Jamaica and write the review.

An ability to speak Jamaican Standard English is the stated requirement for any managerial or frontline position in corporate Jamaica. This research looks at the phonological variation that occurs in the formal speech of this type of employee, and focuses on the specific cohort chosen to represent Jamaica in interactions with local and international clients. The variation that does emerge, shows both the presence of some features traditionally characterized as Creole and a clear avoidance of other features found in basilectal and mesolectal Jamaican. Some phonological items are prerequisites for “good English” - variables that define the user as someone who speaks English - even if other Creole variants are present. The ideologies of language and language use that Jamaican speakers hold about “good English” clearly reflect the centuries-old coexistence of English and Creole, and suggest local norms must be our starting point for discussing the acrolect.
An ability to speak Jamaican Standard English is the stated requirement for any managerial or frontline position in corporate Jamaica. This research looks at the phonological variation that occurs in the formal speech of this type of employee, and focuses on the specific cohort chosen to represent Jamaica in interactions with local and international clients. The variation that does emerge, shows both the presence of some features traditionally characterized as Creole and a clear avoidance of other features found in basilectal and mesolectal Jamaican. Some phonological items are prerequisites for "good English" - variables that define the user as someone who speaks English - even if other Creole variants are present. The ideologies of language and language use that Jamaican speakers hold about "good English" clearly reflect the centuries-old coexistence of English and Creole, and suggest local norms must be our starting point for discussing the acrolect. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
This book offers an in-depth study of the overall syntax of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole, the first since Bailey (1966). The author, a Jamaican linguist, meticulously examines distributional and interpretative properties of functional morphology in Jamaican Creole (JC) from a cartographic perspective (Cinque 1999, 2002; Rizzi 1997, 2004), thus exploring to what extent the grammar of JC provides morphological manifestations of an articulate IP, CP and DP. The data considered in this work offers new evidence in favour of these enriched structural analyses, and the instances where surface orders differ from the underlying functional skeleton are accounted for in terms of movement operations. This investigation of Jamaican syntax therefore allows us to conclude that the 'poor' inflectional morphology typical of Creole languages in general and of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole in particular does not correlate with poor structural architecture. Indeed the free morphemes discussed, as well as the word order considerations that indicate syntactic movement to designated projections, serve as arguments in favour of a rich underlying functional map.
This book presents an in-depth study of English as spoken in two major anglophone Caribbean territories, Jamaica and Trinidad. Based on data from the International Corpus of English, it focuses on variation at the morphological and syntactic level between the educated standard and more informal educated spoken usage. Dagmar Deuber combines quantitative analyses across several text categories with qualitative analyses of transcribed text passages that are grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and recent approaches to linguistic style and identity. The discussion is situated in the context of variation in the Caribbean and the wider context of world Englishes, and the sociolinguistic background of Jamaica and Trinidad is also explored. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, world Englishes, and language contact.
This volume gives a detailed overview of the varieties of English spoken in the Americas and the Caribbean, including regional, social and ethnic dialects (such as Southern US, Canadian or Chicano English) as well as Caribbean creoles from the Bahamas to Suriname. The chapters, written by widely acclaimed specialists, provide concise and comprehensive information on the phonological, morphological and syntactic characteristics of each variety discussed. The articles are followed by exercises and study questions. The exercises are geared towards students and can be used for classroom assignments as well as for self study in preparation for exams. Instructors can use the exercises, sound samples and interactive maps to enhance their classroom presentations and to highlight important language features.
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Bayreuth (Lehrstuhl für Englische Sprachwissenschaft), course: English – based Pidgin and Creole Languages (and beyond), language: English, abstract: Dealing with linguistics, one clearly realises that language is anything else but a static subject. Actually, language finds itself in constant change and is shaped by its speakers and the situation they are in. One of the many influences that form language has always been contact with new people and different languages, which for example happened when the Britains began to explore the world and brought English to the new continents. Many different new varieties and languages developed, one of them being Jamaican Creole. Far away from Great Britain it found its niche in Jamaica, where it is spoken by many as their native language. Pidgins and Creoles are a well-explored subject in linguistics. But what happens when these languages return to the home countries of one of their root – languages? One of the classic examples is London Jamaican, spoken mostly by black immigrants and their descendants in London. In this paper I am going to outline the history and sociolinguistic situation of London Jamaican and its characteristic features regarding grammar and phonology. Also, I will describe how two extremely distinct varieties, Jamaican Creole and London English, have influenced each other and how London Jamaican functions in everyday contexts. In the early 16th century European nations began exploring the world and soon secured their newly gained territories by making them their colonies. The Caribbean Islands, including Jamaica as well, were colonized by the British, Spanish, Dutch, French and others. Together with the languages of the natives and of Africans, who came to the Caribbean as slaves, there was a strong demand for a common language to make communication between these different groups possible. This led to the development of pidgin languages, i.e. the mixture of at least two different languages. Such a new ‘lingua franca’ was mainly used in contact situations and not spoken as a native language. Often, this development resumed in the process of creolisation. Pidgins were becoming native languages, developing a more complex vocabulary and grammar. Usually creoles exist alongside more prestigious standard languages, e.g. Jamaican Standard English, of which the creole forms are often considered as ‘wrong’. In Jamaica, English was the lexifier, thus most Jamaican Creole words derive from British English.
This volume brings together the work of six authors who explore various dimensions of language rights and how they intersect with social justice in the Caribbean context. Language rights advocacy has been an ongoing issue in Caribbean linguistics since at least the 1970s when the Society for Caribbean Linguistics was established and linguists started to turn their attention to the marginalised status of Creole languages in the region. This continued into the 1990s when dismal scores in secondary school English resulted in governments singling out Creole languages as the culprit and linguists had to get involved in shaping language policy for territories across the region. By 2011 the role of linguists was cemented in the language rights debate with the creation of the Charter on Language Rights in the Creole-speaking Caribbean. Using examples from Jamaica and St. Lucia, the current study examines the challenges that still persist ten years after the Charter, specifically in the areas of language advocacy, linguistic discrimination, and communicative hurdles in the courtroom.
A synchronic sociolinguistic study of Jamaican Creole (JC) as spoken in urban Kingston, this work uses variationist methods to closely investigate two key concepts of Atlantic Creole studies: the mesolect, and the creole continuum. One major concern is to describe how linguistic variation patterns with social influences. Is there a linguistic continuum? How does it correlate with social factors? The complex organization of an urbanizing Caribbean society and the highly variable nature of mesolectal speech norms and behavior present a challenge to sociolinguistic variation theory. The second chief aim is to elucidate the nature of mesolectal grammar. Creole studies have emphasized the structural integrity of basilectal varieties, leaving the status of intermediate mesolectal speech in doubt. How systematic is urban JC grammar? What patterns occur when basilectal creole constructions alternate with acrolectal English elements? Contextual constraints on choice of forms support a picture of the mesolect as a single grammar, variable yet internally-ordered, which has evolved a fine capacity to serve social functions. Drawing on a year’s fieldwork in a mixed-class neighborhood of the capital city, the author (a speaker of JC) describes the speech community’s history, demographics, and social geography, locating speakers in terms of their social class, occupation, education, age, sex, residence, and urban orientation. The later chapters examine a recorded corpus for linguistic variables that are phono-lexical (palatal glides), phonological (consonant cluster simplification), morphological (past-tense inflection), and syntactic (pre-verbal tense and aspect marking), using quantitative methods of analysis (including Varbrul). The Jamaican urban mesolect is portrayed as a coherent system showing stratified yet regular linguistic behavior, embedded in a well-defined speech community; despite the incorporation of forms and constraints from English, it is quintessentially creole in character.