J. L. D I L L A R D United States Agency for International Development Cameroon

English in the West Indies, or the West Indies in English? The English of the West Indies, like the other languages of the area, shows many resemblances to the language patterns of Negroes in other parts of the New World. There have been many controversies over this matter, with many linguists, especially dialect geographers, inclined to deny West African influ­ ence upon anything inside continental North America except for Gullah (Georgia and South Carolina sea islands) and the French Creole of Louisiana. Others, like Lorenzo Turner,1 who conclusively disproved the widely held belief that Gullah was an amalgam of archaic features from the British Isles, have substantiated the thesis of the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits2 that the culture, including the language, of Negroes from Suriname to Michi­ gan retains many traces of African patterns. And, since the recent death of the Haitian philologist Jules Faine, no one has seriously denied resemblances among the Caribbean dialects. Analysis and classification of the English of the area has raised many prob­ lems. Taki Taki, formerly called Negro English, is quite different from the English one is likely to encounter in Kingston, Jamaica. Many well-informed Creolists, like Douglas Taylor of Dominica, now use terminology like Creolese for Jamaica, St. Thomas, and Antigua, and reserve Creole for Taki Taki and the French "patois" best known from Haiti. Even this additional terminology 1

Lorenzo Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1949). 2 Melville Jean Herskovits and Frances Herskovits, Suriname Folk-Lore ("Columbia Uni­ versity Contributions to Anthropology," Vol. XXVII; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1936). 312

English in the West Indies HARVARD EDUCATIONAL REVIEW

leaves Papiamento, from the southerly Dutch islands, not completely account­ ed for. But no one is denying West African influence upon Creole, Creolese, or even Papiamento. Research by linguists such as Frederic G. Cassidy show many African etymologies;3 and even Caribbean Spanish, under observation by people like Manuel Alvarez Nazario and Lydia Cabrera, is beginning to reveal strong traces of African influence. With Negroes in the United States once more ready to point with pride to African origins, a wholesale re-evalu­ ation of the continent's cultural contributions, including language forms, may be said to be in progress. T o decide how much of the language, as with the rest of the culture, of the West Indian group derives from European sources is extremely complex; yet probably no one would deny completely European influence. T o the is­ landers themselves, exaggeration is often more acceptable than measured eval­ uation of influence from what are still the prestige languages and cultures. Those in the English-influenced area, for example, are pathetically eager to have their language considered as "bad English" rather than as something outside English. My friend Henry George, a taxi driver of St. John, Antigua, was forever offering apologies such as "We call dem flowers Ol' Maids; don't know if dat's de right name or not." Even in their own islands, West Indian forms, despite recent counter movements, may have little prestige. Particularly about the English-influenced area of the Caribbean, linguists themselves are far from agreed as to whether the local dialects shall be con­ sidered as Creole or somehow the same language as Standard English. The problem is accentuated by the fact that Standard English is well established and powerful in the West Indies, but many people have not yet fully mastered it and there are many deviant dialects and functional varieties. No matter how much the Islander may love the language which he learned from his mother, he is likely to have a better standard of living if he masters a prestige language or dialect. This is clearly an economic and sociological phenomenon rather than a question of weakness in the West Indian language; even the Puerto Rican independentista, proud of the European traditions of Spanish, is sometimes forced to earn his living in the economically more advantageous English. Acculturation has a readily observable effect upon language change in the Caribbean, with changes very rapid in some areas. A conservative linguist like Ralph B. Long of the University of Puerto Rico will say that certain dialects in question are English because the speakers emotionally link them with English, and recently even those who take terms like Linguistic Science more seriously have begun associating Creolese with Standard English. The reason is that the speaker of Creolese, when operating 2 Frederic G. Cassidy, Jamaica Talk (London: Macmillan, 1961).

313

linguistically at his maximum of formality, approaches very closely to the "Standard" language; and the newest and strongest school of linguistic analy­ sis has found it necessary to begin a grammatical analysis at the highest level of formality. Other West Indians do not closely approach Standard English. But any English teacher who reads this will be quick to remark that many native speakers of the English language do not have perfect mastery of the highest degree of formality either. While readily abdicating the more serious functions of linguistic analysis to those who work upon the types of maximal formality, the researcher who is interested in local forms still finds a great deal to do. The transformationalist's identification of "well-informed utter­ ances" and the level of maximum formality may give a kind of support to the dialect speaker's self-consciousness about the forms peculiar to him and to his people, but it does not explain how those forms came about. The specific rules for deriving local forms in the Caribbean will be interesting and important sidelights to language study, even if they do not have the overwhelming im­ portance of transformational studies conducted at M. I. T . Whatever status is accorded to the local variants, we may now feel assured that they are not attributable to such matters as ignorance, physiological dif­ ferences, or social backwardness. Few linguists have made completely satis­ factory statements about what they can be attributed to. When, in discussing local forms such as the Jamaica dialect's tendency to pile up verbs, Cassidy4 cites as a model Shakespeare's Come kiss me, sweet and twenty. One is still free to cite the comparable tendency of Taki Taki, which presum­ ably had no Shakespeare to follow. If the populations of Caribbean islands happened to fix upon a rather uncommon device in the English of Renais­ sance poets for one of its favorite structural devices, the problem of why they did so may still remain a field for legitimate inquiry. Undoubtedly, there is a tendency of West African languages to do the same thing. Even when there is no possible doubt that materials of greater-than-sentence length have a European origin, it seems possible to find a West Indian way of manipulating them. Whatever may or may not be exclusively West Indian about such a form as the Anansi story, it seems to mix very nicely with such materials as the Garden of Eden story. A possible operating thesis is that the resulting materials are handled in a manner which is more West Indian than anything else, and that there is an analogy by which the come kiss construction becomes more West Indian than Shakespearian. The undeniably English con­ cluding formula 4 Ibid.

314

English in the West Indies HARVARD EDUCATIONAL REVIEW

Be Bow bended My story's ended, is subject—in the Caribbean, where it is one of several pet concluding devices, in a variety of languages, which undergo similar processes of variation5—first to a Creolese grammatical treatment; it becomes De bow ended (De bow ben') My story ended (My story en'). It later goes through regular changes like I step on a bow De bow ben' My story en', to the rhyming I step on a pin De pin ben' My story en'. The narrator steps on varying objects, always within the Negro communities, from the Caribbean north to Michigan until even roller skates are being stepped upon. Clearly, these are no haphazard variations but take place accord­ ing to quite regular patterns.6 Even if no element of African etymology ever finds its way into the formula, and even if we are absolutely certain that the original formula was European, we can still say that the method of making the changes is New World Negro. One very convenient term for this process is calquing, essentially the filling of a pre-existent form with new material.7 At many points it becomes difficult to determine whether the subject under discussion is linguistics or anthropology, although the reader of this journal is more likely to be concerned with whether he is receiving accurate informa­ tion than with whether the exact boundary lines of one discipline are being adhered to. For example, quasi-literary genres such as Calypso, the dozens, blues lyrics and other forms have recently been shown to be essentially New World growths with African roots, and each of these is associated with a type of English which has been stigmatized as sub-standard. Whether these forms can survive against the English of the schools remains to be seen, but in the meantime we must credit the local varieties with being excellent vehicles for these types of expression. 5 Herskovits, op cit., pp. 145-146, has a marvelously compact exposition of this matter. My own essays in Caribbean Studies, Vol. II (October, 1962). 16-25 and Vol. III (1963), go into further detail and labor the point somewhat. 6 My articles, cited earlier, attempt to establish this regularity. 7 The term, with a slightly different emphasis, is used of the Creoles, by Uriel Weinreich, "On the Compatibility of Genetic Relationship and Convergent Development," Word, Vol. XIV (August and December, 1958), 377.

315

This article has been reprinted with permission of the Harvard Educational Review (ISSN 0017-8055) for personal use only. Posting on a public website or on a listserv is not allowed. Any other use, print or electronic, will require written permission from the Review. You may subscribe to HER at www.harvardeducationalreview.org. HER is published quarterly by the Harvard Education Publishing Group, 8 Story Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, tel. 617-4953432. Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.