Jamaican Labrish (English Expressiveness)

About this poem

This bilingual poem examines, with a sense of linguistic humor and a measure of seriousness the cultural relativism of linguistic fluency, while at the same time demonstrating the vitality of a creole language (in this case Jamaican Creole, commonly known as patois/patwa) that is perceived traditionally as being nonstandard, informal, and secondary to a language ( in this case, “Standard English “) determined to be, and acknowledged as an official language and hence the “norm” of both oral and literary (written) communication. It is important to state that familiarity with the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) will aid the reader in the pronunciation and decoding of the Jamaican language which has still not fully adapted a formal system of spelling. The reader may also observe that while English and the Jamaican language may have similar subject -verb- object constructions, the Jamaican language occasionally departs from this format, thereby displaying its strong semantic West African influences, particularly in the use of the copula (the English equating verb “to be” which has far wider semantic connotations in the Jamaican language. Similarly, whereas English typically applies the suffix markers /-s/; /-es/;/en/ as an indication of pluralization, the Jamaican language employs the particle “dem” as an affix to nouns to provide the same result. But again, this particle is also used as a plural marker of what is recognized in English as the plural form of the definite article, “the.” Other linguistic differences could be pointed out, but those that have been mentioned will suffice for the reading and understanding of this poem. The reader will also notice that in writing a Creole language, the lowercase is typically used instead of the uppercase, especially at the beginning of a sentence. In this sense, creole languages function similarly to the use of lower case in Semitic languages. Please notice also that metaphorical usage of language is employed to amplify the semantic differences of the two languages. more »