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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.
The study of linguistic variation in the Caribbean has been central to the emergence of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics as an academic field. It has yielded influential theory, such as the (post-)creole continuum or the 'Acts of Identity' models, that has shaped sociolinguistics far beyond creole settings. This volume collects current work in the field and focuses on methodological and theoretical innovations that continue, expand, and update the dialog between Caribbean variation studies and general sociolinguistics.
This volume presents an in-depth analysis of language variation in Jamaican radio newscasts and talk shows. It explores the interaction of global and local varieties of English with regard to newscasters’ and talk show hosts’ language use and listeners’ attitudes. The book illustrates the benefits of an integrated approach to mass media: the analysis takes into account radio talk and the perception of the audience, it is context-sensitive, paying close attention to variation within and between genres, and it combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to demonstrate the complexity of language in the media. The book contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of World Englishes in the 21st century and endonormative stabilization processes in linguistically heterogeneous postcolonial speech communities, and shows how mass media both challenge and reproduce sociolinguistic stratification. This volume will be relevant for researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, language attitudes, and language in the media.
This book investigates variation in the classroom speech of 7-year-old children who are learning Standard Jamaican English as a second language variety in rural Jamaica. For sociolinguists and second language/dialect researchers interested in the acquisition and use of sociolinguistic variables, an important challenge is how to efficiently account for language learning mechanisms and use. To date, this book is the first to offer an interdisciplinary look into phonological and phonetic variation observed in primary school in Jamaica, that is from the perspective of classic variationist and quantitative sociolinguistics and a usage-based model. Both frameworks function as explanatory for the children s learning of phono-stylistic variation, which they encounter in their immediate linguistic environment, i.e. most often through their teachers speech. This book is intended for sociolinguists interested in child language variation, linguists working on formal aspects of the languages of the Caribbean, applied linguists concerned with the teaching and learning of second language phonology, and any researchers interested in applying variationist and quantitative methods to classroom second language learning."
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.
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.
Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,1, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Anglistik), course: Sociolinguistics, language: English, abstract: Introduction: Jamaica, the independent insular state inside the "Commonwealth of Nations" in the Caribbean, is a nation fraught with different cultures, traditions and languages. This diversity is mainly reflected in the speech system of the island. But individual linguistic variations and inferences between different language systems of one speech community have been ignored for a long time and have more been seen as accidental and piecemeal. Now the relationship between language systems, connected with each other, became an important feature of the linguistic partial discipline of sociolinguistics. Foremost the Caribbean Language situation (also other settlements' languages) became more interesting for linguists, because of the Creole languages. Creole languages are stable Languages, originating from a mixture of various languages, having begun as a pidgin. Developed by former slaves and their colonial rulers to communicate, it established itself as native and primary language of the next generation. The Jamaican Creole, also known as "patois," is a Creole language with British English roots. However, it is far from being consistent and serves as an example for the combination of different speech systems. But how exactly does this system work- is there an intermixture so that speech- and system constrains have been annulled? Or are these systems, despite narrow speech contact and reciprocal influence, clearly separated as, for example, in diglossic speech communities? What are the rules of linguistic variations and how has the system been established in Jamaica? The aim of this paper is to investigate different types of models for the relationship between a Creole language and a standard language in order to have a look at the specific language situa
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, 14 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Throughout the last centuries the English language spread all over the world first and foremost due to the colonial politic of its motherland: Great Britain. Especially in the Caribbean the British empire had a lot of colonies in the past - one, in fact the biggest one, of these was Jamaica. Being one of the world's many English-speaking countries it is worth studying especially from a linguistic point of view because it is one of the few Caribbean countries in which a standard English and an English-based creole have been employed almost since its colonization. To get a precise picture of what English is like in Jamaica one has to consider the history of the Jamaican languages as well as the present situation. As a standard variety and a creole coexist in Jamaica, one has to look at both of them in isolation and at how they influence each other. Therefore it will not only be of interest to examine the function and some of the linguistic features of Jamaican English and the Jamaican creole but also the post-creole continuum. First of all, a look at the history will make clear how the English language developed in Jamaica. The following chapters will deal with Standard Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole in particular and, finally, the examination of the post-creole continuum will make the consequences of the mutual influence of these two languages clear. David L. Lawton's text "English in the Caribbean" and the book Linguistic Variation in Jamaica: A Corpus-Based Study of Radio and Newspaper Usage by Andrea Sand will form a useful basis for the study of the English language in Jamaica and will be completed by other subject-relevant literature. The aim of this term paper is to provide an insight into the linguistic diversity in Jamaica and thus to i
The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English (WAVE) presents grammatical variation in spontaneous spoken English, mapping 235 features in 48 varieties of English (traditional dialects, high-contact mother tongue Englishes, and indiginized second-language Englishes) and 26 English-based Pidgins and Creoles in eight Anglophone world regions (Africa, Asia, Australia, British Isles, the Caribbean, North America, the Pacific, and the South Atlantic). The analyses of the 74 varieties are based on descriptive materials, naturalistic corpus data, and native speaker knowledge.