American Voices How Dialects Differ from coast to coast_07 pptx

In the Anglophone Caribbean, West Indian Creole has the status of thelocal vernacular, or the language of the masses, co-existing with a form of English similar to British English, its E

Miriam Meyerhoff 169

of its grammar Clear examples of this can be seen in the way Pidginexpresses time and manner relations with verbs.1 A particularly strikingdifference is how the two languages use the base form of the verb InPidgin, the base form may be used to refer to present events, genericevents, or even past events Here is a good example of the last option from

a story told to the linguist Viveka Velupillai by a man from Maui:

Dis spri wen jamp intu dis wan gai, fal awntu da graun eriting

This spirit had jumped into this one guy, he [=the guy] fell onto the groundand everything

Here, Pidgin uses the base verb fal (fall) where Standard English would

use the form marked for past tense

The example also shows a unique feature of the way Pidgin marks the

manner of an event Velupillai found that wen forms (like wen jamp) are

used when the event being discussed has some limit that’s crucial to what’s

being discussed In other words, the meaning of wen V forms is different

from any single verb inflection or helping verb in Standard English.Another feature of the verb phrase that is considered highly stereo-

typical of Pidgin (both by Locals and outsiders) is the use of stei ‘stay’ as a helping or auxiliary verb Stei, too, means something very different from

any single verbal form in Standard English Moreover, its meaning varies

depending on what form of the verb it combines with When stei occurs with the base form, as in hi stei wak araun ‘he walks around’, the meaning

overlaps with the habitual and the continuous in Standard English But

when it combines with the -in(g) form of the verb, as in da sista stio stei

stanin bai da fon bu ‘the girl is still standing at the phone booth’ or hi stei reikin da livs ‘he was raking the leaves’ there is a superficial similarity to

the Standard English progressive But the resemblance ends there The

way stei V-in forms are used in discourse shows that Pidgin stei V-in

requires a greater focus on some idea of “now” than the progressive does

some places on the left, There’s more than one way to skin a cat However

Pidgin doesn’t need a dummy subject here and instead you get sentences

like, At lis, —— get kompetishin ‘At least, [there] was a competition’ As the example with fal awntu da graun showed, Pidgin also allows speakers

170 Topics from the Tropics

to leave out the subject when it refers to a person, and the constraints onwhen you can and can’t do this are rather different from the constraints inStandard English (where it is really only acceptable with the same subject

across coordination, e.g Yves Klein liked blue a lot and —— painted

mesmerizing work in it).

Finally, negation is expressed according to different rules As with the

dummy there subjects, Pidgin negation manages without the material required in Standard English, specifically, the auxiliary verb do Pidgin can simply negate a verb by prefixing it with no (or neva in the past) So standard English We didn’t like to play with him anymore, is wi neva laik

plei wit him no moa in Pidgin.

This rough sketch gives you some sense of what Pidgin is like as alanguage, but as I draw it to a close I find myself wrestling with somedissatisfaction I feel like I have ended up further away from the reality

of Pidgin than I was with the anecdote at the start A real problem withbrief outlines like this is that they give a pretty disembodied picture of

a living and changing language The ideal palliative to this, of course,would be for every reader to go to Hawai’i and find out first-handwhat English is like there But since for most people that’s not an option,perhaps the best way to really savor how Pidgin sounds and differs fromStandard US English is by reading some of the Local writers – search outnames like Lois-Ann Yamanaka, R Zamora Linmark, Darrell Lum, andLee Tonouchi

Some of them make concessions to their wider audience and tailor thesyntax of their Pidgin accordingly, but even so, this literature will openyour eyes to a Hawai’i that transcends the mass-marketed fantasies ofswaying palms on beaches, swaying hips on hula dancers, and endlesssunny days reflected in sunny smiles To be sure, there are aspects of that

in Hawai’i, but it is also a place where real people live real lives, quietlyand defiantly defining themselves as different from the rest of the UnitedStates It is also a place where an entrenched history of multilingualismand the oppression of the indigenous language Hawaiian mean that lan-guage openly functions as both a resource and a commodity

But the best reason for reading the Local literature is that not only does

it give you an idea of what Pidgin actually is, it also gives you an idea ofthe more evanescent aspects of language use that are impossible to cover

in an article like this – What do people talk story about in Hawai’i? Whatattitudes to others come out in everyday discourse? How do you teaseyour little brother? How do you fight with your parents or school mates?How do you make love to the person you want to grow old with?

My thanks to both of them.

Further Reading

Tonouchi, Lee (2001) Da Word Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge (Fiction).

Tonouchi, Lee, Normie Salvador, and Carrie Takahata (eds.) Hybolics (Literary

magazine.)

Velupillai, Viveka (2002) The Tense-Mood-Aspect System of Hawaii Creole English.

Munich: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften (This book

is written for a linguistics audience.)

Yamanaka, Lois-Ann (1997) Blu’s Hanging New York: Avon (Fiction.)

Yamanaka, Lois-Ann (1999) Heads by Harry New York: Avon (Fiction.) Zamora Linmark, R (1996) Rolling the R’s New York: Kaya (Fiction.)

There is also a vibrant Local recording industry You can get a lot of comedy

in Pidgin and a lot of music in Hawaiian (some singing is also in Pidgin).Music by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, Hapa, and Sudden Rush are reasonablywidely available Classic comedy is by Rap Reiplinger Somewhere betweenthe two is Bu La’ia On the Internet: www.aloha-hawaii.com/pidgin/pidgin.html;www.extreme-hawaii.com/pidgin/vocab; www.une.edu.au/langnet/hce.htm

172 Speaking Strictly Roots

27

Speaking Strictly Roots

(West Indies)

Renee Blake

27 Women preparing crayfish, Jamaica © by Tony Arruza/Corbis.

Global appreciation of music originating from the West Indies has tributed greatly to the world’s familiarity with Caribbean English Thisrecognition began in the 1950s, with Harry Belafonte and his calypso hit

con-“The Banana Boat Song” and extended in the 1970s with the explosion ofBob Marley’s reggae tunes onto the pop scene In 2001, the best-selling

CD in the US was the mellifluous “Hotshot,” by the Jamaican Americanartist Shaggy, who refers to his artistic style, in which he combines his

motion picture hit Cool Runnings, which endeared the Jamaican bobsled

team to American audiences

The West Indies are comprised of highly oral societies Many oral tions are found on the islands with ritualized speech styles and linguisticperformances, be it at the church pulpit, in literary dialogue, everydayconversation and songs or at entertainment venues A combination ofcreativity, eloquent diction, originality, quick wit, and elaborate grammar

tradi-Angel (by Shaggy with Rayvon)

Now, dis one dedicated to all a you dem who out dere,An’ wan’ fi say nice tings to dem girls

Treat (h)er like diamonds an’ pearls

Dedicated to all de girls aroun’ de worl’

An’ dis is Rayvon an’ Shaggy wid de combination whi(ch) cyan’ missFlip dis one ’pon yah musical disk, well

Chorus

Girl, you’re my angel, you’re my darling angel

Closer than my peeps you are to me, baby [Tell (h)er]

Shorty, you’re my angel, you’re my darling angelGirl you’re my frien’ when I’m in need, ladyLife is one big party when you’re still youngBut who’s gonna have yah back when it’s all doneIt’s all good when yah little, you have p(y)ure funCan’t be a fool, son, what about de long runLookin’ back Shorty always a mentionSay me not givin’ (h)er much attentionShe was dere through my incarceration

I wanna show de nation my appreciation

174 Speaking Strictly Roots

rewards speakers with “But yah talkin’ gud,” “Oh gawd nah mon, soundin’sweet,” “Tell it!” or “Teach!” and “Sweet talking” (i.e., using flatteringwords to persuade or pacify) Extemporaneous oratory is steeped in folk-loric tradition as it exploits the local vernacular language This is evident

in the Shaggy hit, “Angel.”

Caribbean English: A Little History

While the predominant present-day stereotype of West Indians in the USmay be one of laid-back, fun-loving people, this view hides the multipledimensions that exist within the people and their language The disquiet-ing history of the Caribbean is reflected in the languages spoken by theinheritors of a colonial past Five hundred years ago Columbus arrived atCaribbean shores, most of them populated with societies of Carib andArawak Indians His encounters marked the beginning of Europeanexploitation of indigenous, enslaved, and indentured peoples Followingthe Spanish conquistadors were the British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese

in the sixteenth century

Under colonization, the social and political structures of the Caribbeanevolved around the plantation system, in which a sharp stratification existedbetween the owners or administrators of the land and those exploited towork it The plantation was the breeding-ground for the process of creoliza-tion, i.e., the mixing of a variety of people, their cultures and languages.Creoles arise among individuals and groups who do not share commontongues and yet need to communicate Out of the framework of coloniza-tion in the West Indies an amalgamation arose of the language spoken bythe colonialists with those who were colonized While a creole may soundlike the European language from which it derived, it also contains manylinguistic elements from the original languages of the subordinate popu-lations As a creole becomes the mother tongue or native linguistic sys-tem for succeeding generations, it stabilizes into a full-fledged language

In the Anglophone Caribbean, West Indian Creole has the status of thelocal vernacular, or the language of the masses, co-existing with a form

of English similar to British English, its European lexifier language Asnational identities emerge in a post-colonial West Indies, the vernacularvariety, also referred to as “dialect,” “patois,” “slang,” or “broken English”,gains in linguistic, cultural and political currency although StandardEnglish carries institutional prestige

Renee Blake 175

Features of Creole English

As a group, the creoles spoken in the West Indies are referred to asCaribbean English Creole (CEC) While there is variation found amongthe CECs, they share many linguistic features The most salient differencebetween the Standard English spoken in the Caribbean and standard BritishEnglish or American English is the sound system The distinctive Caribbeanaccent gives the impression of having a singsong sort of rhythm or intona-tion, which results from each syllable receiving approximately the sameamount of time and stress These languages, produced with syllable timing,stand in contrast to American and British varieties of English, which areproduced with stress timing In stress timing, stress is prominent in differentplaces and each syllable does not receive an equal amount of time.Three vowels in the CEC sound system help outsiders to distinguish aCaribbean accent – the sound in the standard American English pronun-

ciation of the vowel in box, the sound in the pronunciation of a in scale, and the sound in phone CEC, like some varieties of British English, does not have the sound found in the American English pronunciation of man;

in CEC, man is pronounced so that it has the same vowel as Tom Furthermore, in many of the CECs, the a and o sounds are pronounced in

their “pure” state rather than in combination with another vowel in the

same syllable (making a diphthong) In CEC, for instance, the a in cake is

pronounced as a pure vowel, not as the diphthong found in non-WestIndian Englishes In some CECs, if a diphthong is present, it is in reverse

to the non-West Indian varieties Thus, in some varieties of Jamaican

CEC, the a in cake would be pronounced as eeuh rather than a, and the o

of vote as uo rather than o.

The most prominent consonant trait is the production of the voiced th sound in that and the voiceless th sound in thing as d and t, respectively.

In “Angel,” we see many examples of the voiced th as d in words like

dis (this), dere (there), dem (them), and de (the) Another consonantal

feature is the pronunciation of ing as in in words like lookin’ and givin’.

Consonant clusters at the ends of words are also reduced to one consonant;

in “Angel” this is apparent in an’ (and), aroun’ (around), and worl’ (world) Another noticeable feature of the CEC varieties is the y sound after k and

g, e.g., kyan (can), gyarden (garden) A feature specific to Jamaican Creole

is the loss of h, such that you can get it for hit.

Prominent grammatical features include generalization of the nominal system where the same form of the pronoun can be used for the

pro-176 Speaking Strictly Roots

subject, object and possessive, as seen in the “Angel” lyric “Me not givin’(h)er attention.” In this same sentence, there is another key feature of

CEC, the uninflected verb, or absence of the verb be Unmarking is also extended to past tense (we eat ‘we ate’), as well as to third person singular verbs (she like it so ‘she likes it so’) In CEC, dem is used instead of a plural

marking on a noun, even in cases where it may not be marked in English(“Dis one dedicated to all a you dem who out dere”) Finally, CEC has anelaborate verbal system and uses particles to mark the verb (“Lookin’ backShorty always a mention”)

While much of the CEC vocabulary is attributed to English, other ences are present depending upon the colonial history of a given island

influ-On all of the islands, there are imprints on the lexicon from West African

languages like Yoruba and Twi, including eye-water ‘tears’, susu tive savings plan’, and obeah ‘sorcery’ Other influences can be found on

‘coopera-various islands from French, Spanish, and Indic, as well as often

over-looked Amerindian survivals (such as canoe, papaya, and mauby) Across the CECs a variety of words are used for the same referent (e.g., a susu

in Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent, and Trinidad is a box in Guyana, a pardner in Jamaica, and a syndicate in Belize).

West Indians in the US

Since the 1900s, New York City has been the magnet for the majority ofWest Indians coming to the US in search of a “better life.” Today, WestIndians as a whole are the largest immigrant group in the city, comprisingapproximately eight percent of the population With the largest groupscoming from Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados and Trinidad, there is a growingpan-Caribbean influence on US politics and economic structure, as well asits cultural and linguistic constitution West Indian communities are largelytransnational in nature, with continuous movement between the US andnative Caribbean homelands As a result, there has been a strong Americanimpact on the “home” societies

The West Indies and the United States share colonial trajectories.Therefore, it should be no surprise that overlap exists between CaribbeanEnglish Creole and African American Vernacular English Nonetheless,just as there are sociocultural distinctions between blacks in the Caribbeanand blacks in the US, there are also linguistic differences The superficialsimilarities between CEC and English may lead educators to place West

Renee Blake 177

Indian immigrant schoolchildren in mainstream classes While childrenwho are highly educated and adept at standard English (albeit with Creolepronunciation) excel in mainstream classes, most are CEC speakers needingsome degree of educational assistance This is an area of growing concernfor educators in the US – sensitivity is needed as these students believethat they are speakers of something close to standard English

If past and present are any indication, the trend toward mass WestIndian migration to this country will continue for years to come It is clearthat contact between West Indians and others in the US fosters multi-directional influences We may also safely assume that such exchangeswill continue to add colorful details to the nation’s language mosaic

Further Reading

Allsopp, Richard (1996) Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage Oxford: Oxford

University Press

Foner, Nancy (ed.) (2001) Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York.

Berkeley: University of California Press

Henke, Holger (2001) The West Indian Americans Westport, CT: Greenwood

Press

Kasinitz, Philip (1992) Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of

Race Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Roberts, Peter A (1988) West Indians and Their Language Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press

Winer, Lise, and Lona Jack (1997) East Caribbean Creole in New York In

O Garcia and J A Fishman (eds.), The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New

York City Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 301–40.

178 Gullah Gullah Islands

28

Gullah Gullah Islands

(Sea Island, SC, GA)

Tracey L Weldon

28 South Carolina river basin © by Index Stock/Alamy.

Anyone who has traveled to the coast and Sea Islands of South Carolinaand Georgia is likely to have heard the distinctive sounds of Gullahbeing spoken by African Americans native to the area While it is difficult

to capture the true rhythm and sounds of Gullah on paper, the lowing excerpt from the tale “Ber Rabbit and the Lord,” as recounted

fol-by a resident of Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina, is illustrative of itscharacter

Tracey L Weldon 179

Ber Rabbit jump on Ber Gator head When Ber Gator get cross to othershore, Ber Rabbit knock the Ber Gator in e head and knock all he teeth out,and carry em to the Lord

As this passage from Patricia Jones-Jackson’s When Roots Die illustrates,

the vocabulary of Gullah is primarily English (described in linguisticcircles as “English-based”) but its distinctive nature derives from theAfrican languages that contributed to its development

Creoles are language varieties that emerge among speakers who do notshare a common language The term is also applied to these varieties asthey develop into the native tongues of later generations of speakers Asthe only English-based creole spoken in the United States today, Gullah(also known as Geechee or Sea Island Creole) traces its roots back to thedays of slavery Gullah developed during the Atlantic slave trade era amongAfricans who spoke a variety of mutually unintelligible languages Theyhad to communicate not only with each other but also with their ownerswho spoke English Thus Gullah, like the English-based creoles of theCaribbean, grew out of contact between English and a number of WestAfrican languages spoken during this era The structure of Gullah reflectsthese multiple influences

Gullah Features

In the Ber Rabbit example cited above, one can observe some of the tinctive grammatical features that are characteristic of the variety Onesuch feature is the variable marking of tense on verbs Though taken out

dis-of context, this excerpt describes an event that occurred in the past ever, past time reference is not marked on the verbs themselves in thispassage Instead, past time reference is established at the beginning of the

How-tale by the adverbial expression once upon a time Gullah speakers also

occasionally indicate past time reference through the variable use of the

preverbal marker been The sentences in table 28.1 illustrate the use of this

preverbal marker and others used for marking time distinctions in Gullah

As well as its verbal system, the pronominal system of Gullah alsoexhibits some distinctive characteristics In the passage above, the use of

the pronoun e for his in the sentence Ber Rabbit knock the Ber Gator in e

head represents one such feature In Gullah, the pronoun e may be used

in instances in which English would require the subject pronoun he, she,

180 Gullah Gullah Islands

or it, or the possessive pronoun his, her, or its In addition, one might find the use of the pronoun um used in Gullah where English would have the object pronoun him, her, or it.

Other grammatical features that characterize Gullah include the verb

say, which may be used to introduce a quotation, as in (H)e tell me, say, “I ain’t got no car right now.” And the word for may be used in place of to in

Gullah to form infinitival expressions, as in He come for get the car washed.

Many of these distinctive features may be attributed either directly orindirectly to influences from the West African languages that contributed

to Gullah’s development Such influences are also found in the vocabulary

of Gullah, with words such as buckra ‘white man’, gumbo ‘okra’, and tote

‘carry’

Gullah’s Origins

Linguists have attempted to reconstruct the course of events that led tothe formation of Gullah A number of competing theories have emergedfrom these efforts Early descriptions of Gullah were non-linguistic, andoften racist, accounts that attributed the distinctive features of the variety

to laziness or to physical or mental limitations on the part of its speakers.Dialectologists, who primarily study regional dialects, later debunked thesemyths by showing the systematic nature of the variety and arguing thatGullah was an English dialect whose distinctive features were retentionsfrom earlier varieties of British English This theory was later challenged

by Lorenzo Dow Turner, whose book Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect led

several scholars to argue that the Gullah system was primarily African

In the 1960s and early 1970s, a theory developed that linked the origins

of all Atlantic creoles to a putative sixteenth-century Portuguese-based

Table 28.1 The use of preverbal markers for marking time distinctions in Gullah

Time reference Gullah English

Continuous I da work(ing) I am working Completed I done work I have worked Habitual I does work I usually work

An alternative theory suggests that Gullah emerged independently inthe Carolina region between 1720 and 1750, as the growth of the riceindustry, institutionalized segregation, and an African majority on theplantations created the need for communication in the form of a creole.

In this case, Gullah would have been preceded in its development not by apidgin, as proposed by earlier scholars, but by Africans in the colonyspeaking closer approximations to English This theory is based on theobservation that Africans would have had greater access to English duringthe early years of the colony’s development, when Europeans formed amajority It is not clear whether the variety of Gullah spoken in Georgiaemerged under similar but independent conditions or whether the creolewas directly transported to the Georgia coast by slaves relocated fromSouth Carolina

Gullah Today

Following the end of the plantation era, the distinctiveness of Gullah waspreserved for many years by the isolation of the Sea Islands and limitedtravel to and from the mainland Those who believed that a Gullah-like creole was fairly widespread on the plantations of the Southeast

182 Gullah Gullah Islands

hypothesized that mainland varieties of the creole became more like following the breakdown of the plantation system as blacks and whitesbegan to interact with one another on a more regular basis This process,known as decreolization, has been said by some to have resulted in what isnow recognized on the mainland as African American English In thissense, Gullah is believed to represent not only a modern-day descendant

English-of the early plantation creole, but also a key element in the search forclues about the history and development of mainland African AmericanEnglish

Today, however, the building of bridges and the growth of the tourismindustry have resulted in a significant increase in mobility to and fromthe Sea Islands, which many believe has also contributed to the merging

of Gullah with mainland dialects It has led many, in fact, to argue thatGullah is in the process of dying In addition, negative stereotypes andmisconceptions about the variety have discouraged some locals fromspeaking Gullah or passing it on to their children for fear that they will

be ridiculed by outsiders Still Gullah serves an important function inthe communities where it is spoken as a marker of culture, history, andidentity And while outsiders may not always be aware of the extent towhich Gullah is used, it appears that both young and old Gullah speakersare at least subconsciously aware of its importance in their communities.This awareness alone may be enough to preserve the dialect for manyyears to come

References and Further Reading

Jones-Jackson, Patricia (1987) When Roots Die: Endangered Traditions on the Sea

Islands Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Mufwene, Salikoko (1993) Gullah’s development: Myth and sociohistoricalevidence In Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino (eds.),

Language Variety in the South Revisited Tuscaloosa and London: University of

Alabama Press, 113–22

Nichols, Patricia C (1983) “Linguistic options and choices for black women inthe rural south.” In Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramerae, and Nancy Henley (eds.),

Language, Gender, and Society Cambridge: Newbury House Publishers, 54–69.

Turner, Lorenzo D (1949) Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect Chicago: University

of Chicago

Wood, Peter H (1974) Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from

1670 through the Stono Rebellion New York: Knopf.

Walt Wolfram, Becky Childs, et al 183

29

Islands of Diversity (Bahamas)

Walt Wolfram, Becky Childs,

Jeffrey Reaser, and Benjamin Torbert

29 Governor’s Island, Bahamas © by Harry Thomas.

While Caribbean English is certainly one of the most readily identifiableEnglish accents in the world, there is also great diversity based on culturalbackground, regional location, and language contact history No set ofislands represents this variation better than the Commonwealth of theBahamas

The Bahamas consist of more than 700 sprawling islands They extendfrom Grand Bahama in the north, located about 60 miles off the Floridacoast, to Inagua to the south, located approximately 50 miles from Cuba andHaiti The 30 inhabited islands are home to almost 300,000 permanent resid-ents Many Afro-Bahamians, who comprise 85 percent of the population,