It's Not Always English First
Kingston, Jamaica-It's the language issue many Jamaicans don't want to talk about. Although most Caribbean students are from English-speaking countries, many speak standard English as a second language and Creole as their first language. "We have two languages, and this is throughout the whole Caribbean," said Prof. Errol Miller, director of the Institute of Education at the University of the West Indies. "For the vast majority of Jamaicans, Creole is their native language," said Hubert Devonish, professor of linguistics and head of the university's department of language linguistics and philosophy. Scholars use "Creole" to describe the language based on two or more root languages that serves as native speech. Some use it interchangeably with "patois," which refers to provincial dialects. But because English is the language of business and upward mobility, "Jamaicans pretend they are speakers of English," said Devonish and are reluctant to admit their bilingual status. Immigrant parents register their children in New York City as English speaking, and so they are not entitled to English-as-a-second-language resources. Many students come from working-class families in Jamaica where standard English-a legacy of British colonialism-is not spoken, and so they cannot understand their teachers and cannot make themselves understood, according to Basil Bryan, Jamaica's consul general in New York. The Creole used in Jamaica is based on the English lexicon, but it contains elements of West African culture. It is sometimes described as broken English. For example, "Where are you going?" would be "A wey yu a go?" in Jamaican Creole. "Words in English can have different meanings, depending on the body movements or how one culture accepts the same word," Bryan said. In Creole, for example, the word "foot," may be used to refer to the leg or thigh or both. |