Codeswitching on the Web

Transcription

<DOCINFO AUTHOR ""TITLE "Codeswitching on the Web: English and Jamaican Creole in e-mail communication"SUBJECT "Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, Volume 147"KEYWORDS ""SIZE HEIGHT "240"WIDTH "160"VOFFSET "4">
Pragmatics & Beyond
Editor
Andreas H. Jucker
University of Zurich, English Department
Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland
e-mail: [email protected]
Associate Editors
Jacob L. Mey
University of Southern Denmark
Herman Parret
Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp
Jef Verschueren
Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp
Editorial Board
Shoshana Blum-Kulka
Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
University of Lyon 2
Jean Caron
Claudia de Lemos
Université de Poitiers
University of Campinas, Brazil
Robyn Carston
Marina Sbisà
University College London
University of Trieste
Bruce Fraser
Emanuel Schegloff
Boston University
University of California at Los Angeles
Thorstein Fretheim
Deborah Schiffrin
University of Trondheim
Georgetown University
John Heritage
Paul O. Takahara
University of California at Los Angeles
Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
Susan Herring
Sandra Thompson
University of Texas at Arlington
University of California at Santa Barbara
Masako K. Hiraga
Teun A. Van Dijk
St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University
Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
David Holdcroft
Richard J. Watts
University of Leeds
University of Berne
Sachiko Ide
Japan Women’s University
Volume 147
Codeswitching on the Web:
English and Jamaican Creole in e-mail communication
by Lars Hinrichs
English and Jamaican Creole
in e-mail communication
Lars Hinrichs
University of Freiburg
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam/Philadelphia
8
TM
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hinrichs, Lars.
Codeswitching on the web : English and Jamaican Creole in e-mail
communication / Lars Hinrichs.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 147)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
1. Code-switching (Linguistics) 2. Creole dialects, English--Jamaica-Social aspects. 3. English language--Social aspects--Jamaica. 4. Electronic
mail messages. I. Title.
P115.3.H557 2006
306.44--dc22
isbn 90 272 5390 0 (Hb; alk. paper)
2006045893
© 2006 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
chapter 1
Introduction
1.1
An oral language in a written medium 1
1.2
Outline of the study 5
1.3
Background 6
1.3.1 Jamaican sociolinguistics 6
1.3.1.1 Research on codes and their functions in Jamaica 6
1.3.1.2 Changing CS behavior in Jamaica 13
1.3.1.3 English and Patois in the Jamaican diaspora 14
1.3.2 Defining e-mail as a text type 16
1.3.2.1 Fascination with the “hybridity” of CMC language 19
1.4
The data: compilation and structure of the corpus 21
1.4.1 The primary corpus 23
1.4.2 The secondary corpus 25
1.5
Methodology 28
chapter 2
The creole continuum and CMC
2.1
Is the creole continuum reflected in Jamaican CMC? 33
2.2
Has a new variety of Jamaican English evolved in CMC? 40
chapter 3
How the situation determines code choice – a “simple,
almost one-to-one relationship”?
3.1
Introduction 43
3.2
Situational codeswitching in the corpus 44
chapter 4
Giving contextualization cues
How writers provide context information through code choice
4.1
‘Metaphorical codeswitching’ in Gumperz’s model 61
vii
ix
1
33
43
61
vi
4.2
4.3
‘We’ and ‘they’ – sequential aspects of switching for
contextualization cues 70
Summary 82
chapter 5
Codeswitching and identity: How writers describe themselves
through code choice
5.1
Recent theoretical developments in sociolinguistics
and discourse studies 85
5.2
Acts of Identity: Convergence as identification,
divergence as distinction 90
5.3
Social personae as resources in identity construction 102
5.3.1 Performativity in discourse 102
5.3.2 The data: identity work employing CS 107
5.3.3 Summary 126
5.4
CS in narrative 127
chapter 6
Summary of the analysis and discussion
133
chapter 7
Conclusions
7.1
The changing functions of an old language in a new medium 139
7.2
Comparing Creole use in the Jamaican diaspora and in CMC 141
7.3
Advances in the study of English as a World Language 145
7.4
Relevance for CMC studies 151
References
Appendix
1.
Anonymization of the primary corpus
2.
The primary corpus data 169
Notes
Index
85
139
157
169
169
279
299
Acknowledgements
Fieldwork for this study was partly funded by a short-term doctoral student’s grant
from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), for which I am grateful. I wish
to thank all informants at the University of the West Indies Mona in Jamaica who made
this study possible by allowing me to read and cite their personal e-mail. Clive Forrester
and Joseph Farquharson are not only among them, but also continued their support for
the project practically throughout the whole writing process, giving me native-speaker’s advice and commenting whenever I contacted them via e-mail. I am also deeply
indebted to the Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy at the University
of the West Indies Mona. Hubert Devonish, Kathryn Shields-Brodber, Michelle BryanEnnis, and Keren Niles were wonderfully helpful and cooperative hosts during my two
visits for fieldwork there. – Aside from those already mentioned, and Christian Mair,
who was an inspiring, supportive, and thorough PhD supervisor at every stage, several
linguists provided valuable advice and corrections on various aspects of the thesis: Andrea Sand, Dagmar Deuber, Naomi Baron, Peter Auer, Peter Patrick, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Armin Schwegler, and Carol Myers-Scotton. – Marzia Milazzo supplied the
photograph (Figure 4). – Claudia Kohler drew my attention to alternative interpretations of the Bible passages cited in chapter 5. – Liza Veldhuis, Katharina Böhm, and Ulf
Gerdelmann were very helpful and unforgiving proofreaders; all remaining errors are
of course my own. – My parents’ contribution is possibly the greatest, and the hardest
to gauge. I thank them for all their support through the years.
Freiburg, May 2006
Abbreviations
AAVE
AmE
BrC
BrE
CA
CLP
CMC
COJEC
EJE
ISE
JamC
JamE
LE
LJ
MM
RO
StE
UWI
African-American Vernacular English
American English
British Creole
British English
conversation analysis
the Cassidy-LePage spelling systems for English-based creoles
computer-mediated communication
Corpus of Jamaican E-mail and other CMC
Educated Jamaican English
International Standard English
Jamaican Creole
Jamaican English
London English
London Jamaican (cf. BrC)
Markedness Model
rights and obligations
Standard English
the University of the West Indies
chapter 1
Introduction
1.1 An oral language in a written medium
Like many pidgin and creole languages, Jamaican Creole (JamC) has no official
orthographic standard and is usually thought of as an oral language.1 In fact, it has
coexisted in Jamaica throughout its history with its lexifier language, a standard
English (StE), in a standard-vernacular continuum. StE, or more precisely: the
local standard variety of English, Jamaican English (JamE), is used as the formal
code and JamC as the most informal code in this continuum (1961: 2–3; Bailey
1966; Cassidy & LePage 1980; Patrick 1999). JamE fulfils most functions of an
official language and is the language of literacy instruction in Jamaican schools,
while JamC is the dominant language of intra-family interaction and thus the native language of most Jamaicans.
As the age of electronic communication is now well past its dawn, and access
to computers is slowly improving in Jamaica,2 computer-mediated communication (CMC) with its (up to now) mostly text-based message forms has initiated
the first period of widespread use of written JamC. As in speech, Creole3 appears
in these written forms in alternation with English, and writers exploit the contrast
between the codes in a range of codeswitching (CS) functions.
Before the advent of CMC, Patois4 occurred in writing only occasionally, typically in experimental uses by professional writers. These limited domains of written Creole included collections of folk tales (e.g. Beckwith 1924, a collection of
Anansi tale transcriptions), dialect poetry (e.g. Bennett 1966), the transcribed
and published lyrics of dub poets and dancehall artists,5 and newspaper columns
(though probably few as consequential as Cooper’s, cf. her account of her writing
“(W)uman Tong(ue),” 2000). “It is among the politically progressive sections of
the educated public and in literary writing that the use of Creole as a stylistic device has in recent years been taken to new heights” (Mair 1992: 81).
This push of JamC into the domain of written use is one step in a broader shift of
functions that the code has been undergoing for several decades. Mair sketches it
as the three-step movement from ‘language’ via ‘code’ to ‘symbol’ (cf. the title of
the 2003b article). From “an unselfconsciously used majority language linked to
standard English in a complex linguistic continuum,” the Creole has turned into
2
merely one of two codes whose use is optional for educated and internationally
oriented Jamaicans. In diaspora settings such as England, JamC as used by the
children of Jamaican immigrants can no longer be described as a fully functional
communicative code. Instead, a structurally reduced version of JamC “becomes a
consciously deployed metacommunicative symbol whose chief function is to express distance from the adult middle-class social mainstream” (Mair 2003b: 232).
Figure 1. The creole life-cycle according to Hall (1962; 1966).*
* Diagram adapted from Sand (1991: 51).
As an additional code and as a symbol, JamC is being used extensively in the
Jamaican diaspora and on the internet, which “has opened up new horizons for the
use of Creoles in writing which would not have been dreamed of a mere 10 years
ago.” Due to this great observable vitality, Mair argues, it is unlikely that JamC will
take the course that the life-cycle theory for pidgins and creoles, propagated by
Hall (1962; 1966) (cf. Figure 1),6 predicts for creoles: change toward the lexifier
language, and eventual extinction. Likewise, Patrick (1999) contradicts this aspect
of the life-cycle theory for Jamaica.
Introduction
In order to obtain findings based on empirical data that allow insights into
this pragmatic change that has been suggested for Patois, and to give an adequate
description of the code’s new functions and status in CMC, an ethnographically
informed, qualitative study of naturally occurring, informal CMC is needed. This
is what the present study offers.
Although there have been significant theoretical and methodological advances in
applied and sociolinguistics in recent years, these have hardly been adopted by
researchers concerned with English as a World Language (EWL) and the sociolinguistics of (post-)creole language situations. The sociolinguist Penelope Eckert
has termed the most recent move in sociolinguistic study ‘Third Wave Variation
Studies.’ Contrasting it with the first two waves, she characterizes it as follows:
Building on the findings of the First [quantitative] and Second [ethnographic]
Waves of variation studies, the Third Wave focuses on the social meaning of variables. It views styles, rather than variables, as directly associated with identity
categories, and explores the contributions of variables to styles. In so doing, it
departs from the dialect-based approach of the first two waves, and views variables as located in layered communities. Since it takes social meaning as primary,
it examines not just variables that are of prior interest to linguists (e.g. changes in
progress) but any linguistic material that serves a social/stylistic purpose. And in
shifting the focus from dialects to styles, it shifts the focus from speaker categories
to the construction of personae. (Eckert 2005)
This new view of social meaning as being transported by styles, which in turn
are used to construct personae, does more than open up the view to a kind of
language use that was long outside of the reach of sociolinguistics: speech events
such as role play and ironic use of codes were simply not captured in Labovian approaches to speech communities. Such First Wave studies were interested mostly
in unconscious language use and choices among variants stratified according to
given, external social categories such as age, gender, and social class. In studies
of the Second Wave, the concept of social meanings was more relevant (in fact,
these studies address for the first time the concept of metapragmatic meanings
connected to linguistic variants), but analytical and explanatory categories were
hierarchically structured just as in First Wave studies, and the focus was still on
unconscious language use and the creation of a systematic larger picture in the
explanation of language use.
The Third Wave of variation studies does not look for a hierarchy of meanings
in language forms to tie back to a hierarchy of social categories. Linguistic variants
are not considered in isolation, but as part and markers of styles, which are made
up of a number of variants and together have the capacity to create meaning by
way of indexing locally relevant personae. The Third Wave continues the trend initi-
3
4
ated by the second wave of investigating ever smaller social units, thereby enabling
more fine-grained and precise qualitative analyses of the social meanings conveyed
by choice of variants. The analytical unit in Third Wave studies is no longer the
speech community, but the community of practice: a small social network defined
not by coincidental cohabitation of its members in a given geographical space, but
by shared recurring actions, or practices.7
At the same time, a process of theoretical reorientation has been taking place
among applied linguists concerned with language use in multiethnic, multilingual,
urban Great Britain. Ben Rampton, one of its most prominent representatives, has
referred to the emerging approach as ‘late modern ethnography’ (cf. e.g. Rampton
1998b; Harris & Rampton 2002). Based on his well-known research on language
crossing, he illuminates the practical implications of this new interest in styles,
personae, and communities of practice for the analysis of CS:
it would be helpful if code-switching research relaxed its commitment to discovering coherence and systematicity in code-switching, and attended more closely
to incongruity and contradiction. In the process, a clearer view would emerge of
the (not infrequent) local occasions when code alternation no longer functions
adequately as a contextualisation cue and instead becomes part of the ‘main action’ […]. (Rampton 1998a: 290)
It is precisely in CMC that CS is very much part of the main action, and quite possibly even more so than in speech. Because CMC language is written, it is much
less spontaneous than speech; in fact it can be considered rhetorical. In this much
more planned type of language use, CS occurs not only unconsciously, making
use of the code contrast as a highlighter in order to expose deviations from the
main discourse.8 In such cases, the sequentiality of switches is of little importance,
i.e. the mere code contrast is more relevant in the creation of additional meaning
through CS than what part of the referential meaning is delivered in which code.
In CMC, CS also occurs frequently in planned, rhetorical processes of meaning
creation that depend heavily on which code is used for which part of the message.
Here, codes are used in specific rhetorical functions that draw on social meanings
and connotations by allusion to personae which may be operative throughout the
larger speech community, but which may also be relevant only to the interlocutors
of a given interaction. These processes of meaning creation require complex inferencing both from the listener and on the part of the analyst to decode.
Informed by the theoretical and methodological innovations of Third Wave Variation Studies and late modern ethnography, an analysis of Jamaican CMC material
can contribute to the discussion of the changing functions of JamC, which so far
lacks detailed findings from the study of empirical, qualitative evidence. The pri-
Introduction
mary research question of this study is: what are the discourse functions of JamC
in the new text types of CMC, and how do they differ from those of speech?
Based on the results, the concluding chapter will address further questions in
a broader context:
– How do the discourse functions of JamC in CMC compare to those of
JamC as spoken in the Jamaican diaspora, specifically the best-researched
diasporic variety of JamC to date, British Creole?
– What are the implications for EWL studies in general, and for research
into Jamaican sociolinguistics in particular?
– How can the discourse-analytic study of CMC data benefit from the adoption of a third-wave-inspired, style-centered approach as adopted for parts
of the analysis in this study, and the results of the analysis?
1.2 Outline of the study
The remainder of chapter 1 is devoted to a review of the most important theoretical concepts in Jamaican sociolinguistics, as far as they are connected to the subject of this book, and a brief look at the state of the art in EWL and CMC studies
(1.3). Sections 1.4 and 1.5 provide, respectively, the necessary information on the
data on which this study is based and the methodology adopted.
Chapter 2 forms a transition into the analyses presented in the two subsequent
chapters. In it, I discuss a long-standing debate in the study of creole-speaking
communities: the problem of reconciling the theories of the creole continuum
and of diglossia. The first of these models Jamaica as essentially a monosystemic
speech situation, where variation takes place across a continuum in which English
and Creole form extremes; the other sees two distinct systems. Since this book is
about switching between codes, it is important to clear up the theoretical background in front of which we will consider codeswitching.
In chapters 3 to 5 I analyze the functions of Jamaican Creole in CMC through
an analysis of CS strategies in the data. The approach I adopt in this analysis is heuristic. In order to consider the phenomenon of CS in Jamaican CMC from as many
different viewpoints as possible, I critically apply several long-standing as well as
more recent theoretical concepts from CS research to the analysis of the data. In my
presentation of the different CS functions and meanings I proceed along a cline suggested by Auer’s continuum from ‘contrastive’ to ‘inherent’ CS functions (1992).
In chapter 3, I apply the concept of ‘situational CS,’ which forms the heart of
John Gumperz’s theory of CS: it assumes that speakers switch codes to adapt to the
present interactional situation.
5
6
While in situational CS, speakers’ behavior is mostly seen as reactive to changes
in the world around them, the concept of metaphorical CS, discussed and applied in
chapter 4, describes instances of switching in which speakers actively try to achieve
something through switching. Critics have often pointed out that no codeswitch
is only a passive reaction, and that every speaker who switches wants to achieve
something. This critique builds on the discussion of CS theory in chapter 3.
Chapter 5 turns to more recent developments in the field of research: it
presents ways of seeing CS as a strategy by means of which speakers construct
their own identities. Having thus considered the alternation between Patois and
English from a variety of angles, I ask in the summary of the analysis in chapter 6
whether the emerging picture of Patois as used on the web justifies a view of it as
being functionally reduced in comparison with its use in speech.
The conclusions presented in chapter 7 summarize and place the findings of
my analyses within the context of Jamaican sociolinguistics, EWL studies, and
CMC studies.
1.3 Background
1.3.1 Jamaican sociolinguistics
1.3.1.1 Research on codes and their functions in Jamaica.
The sociolinguistic situation of Jamaica is generally considered a (post)-creole
continuum in which a creole (JamC), unique to the island, coexists with a local
variety of English (JamE). (The prefixation of post to the term creole continuum by
some writers is owed to their belief in the accuracy of Hall’s model of the creole
life-cycle, cf. Figure 1.). The creole emerged in language contact between European, English-speaking colonizers and slaves from various West-African tribes as a
result of Jamaica’s colonization by the British. JamC is closely and obviously related
to English at the lexical level, but shows strong influence from West African languages in syntax, morpho-syntax, and phonology.9 While JamC is not intelligible
to native speakers of other varieties of English who have no knowledge of it (or, at
least, another English-based Creole), JamE is fully compatible with other standard
varieties of English, from which it shows noticeable differences in phonology, but
only minor ones in the other areas of linguistic analysis (on which see Sand 1999;
these differences include selected carryovers of Creole structure and lexical borrowings into English, and certain idiosyncrasies in usage).
In terms of the categorization proposed by Rickford & Traugott (1985), the
macro-sociolinguistic analysis of code prestige shows converse scales of overt and
Introduction
covert prestige for English and Patois, where English is traditionally the code of
overt prestige, and Patois the code of greater covert prestige.
Great variation is observable in most settings of daily life between more Creole-like and more English-like ways of speaking. There is disagreement among
linguists on essential questions pertaining to the description of the Jamaican situation, such as whether to regard JamC as a language, and whether – therefore – to
consider Jamaica bilingual. Stances on these issues relate more or less directly to
which of two basic concepts scholars prefer in modeling the relationship between
JamC and JamE.
The first of these two concepts is diglossia, in which the language resources of a
speech community are seen as divided into two functionally discrete sets: an H
and an L variety. The original introduction of the term to the sociolinguistic context is attributed to Charles Ferguson (1959).10 The key defining passage is:
Diglossia is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards),
there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely
by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but
is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation. (336)
Ferguson lists sample domains of use for H and L (329), e.g. political speech, university lecture, conversation with peers, and poetry. “The important point is that
the domains do not overlap and the varieties can be seen as being in complementary distribution” (Sand 1999: 40). Ferguson’s “defining cases” of diglossia are Swiss
German/Standard German in Switzerland, and Haitian French Creole/French in
Haiti (326).
Caribbean linguists Hubert Devonish and Kathryn Shields-Brodber are among
those linguists who embrace diglossia as an accurate model of the Jamaican situation, as are Mark Sebba and Susan Dray.
For example, Shields (1989) writes in a critique of the continuum as an analytical concept for Caribbean sociolinguistics:
Analyses of language in the Caribbean have often failed to represent the complexity
and dynamism of the variation which they are investigating. Assuming a correlational rather than an integral relationship between social and linguistic factors, they
research language as an idealized, theoretical construct independent of the speaker
(cf. DeCamp 1971; Bickerton [1977]). He is inevitably relegated to the inferior role
of ‘socio-linguistic automaton’ […] The characterisation of variation in Jamaica as
being explicable by a continuum ranging from Creole to English […] is a product of
this kind of theoretical orientation. (41)
7
8
Sebba & Dray (2005) find Ferguson’s definition of diglossia to be basically fitting
for Jamaica, but add that
the picture is complicated by the fact that the Creole shares the majority of its
vocabulary with Standard English, allowing it to be viewed as ‘bad English’ rather
than as a separate language of lower status. Furthermore, since all schooling is, at
least in theory, through the medium of Standard English, most people have some
degree of exposure to the prestige variety and may treat it as a target even if they
often are unable to get near it.
Devonish dismisses this empirical fact of variation along a continuum as a challenge to the model:
Speakers have repertoires that span varying ranges on the continuum. However,
for any speaker, the more formal social situations would be likely to produce the
use of varieties more approximating English, and for informal situations, those
more approximating creole. What I suggest is that this is simply a manifestation
of the kind of linguistic convergence which Ferguson (1959: 332) notes to occur
in diglossic situations. (Devonish 2003: 159)
Shields-Brodber considers the diglossia model accurate for Jamaica, at least for the
status quo of a few decades ago (“in colonial and post-colonial times,” 1997: 58),
but makes clear that Fishman’s adaptation of Ferguson’s model (1967) is closer to
Jamaican reality than Ferguson’s original definition.11
Mühleisen (2002) and Sand (1999) discuss the relevance of the diglossia model
to Jamaica. Both dismiss it because of the strictness of the functional separation
which it stipulates for H and L:
the model of diglossia with its simple dichotomy of H- versus L-language and its
respective allocation of different functions proves too narrow a concept to capture
contemporary interactions and changes within domains and (macro)-functions.
(Mühleisen 2002: 215–216)
Sand (1999: 49) wonders why the concept of diglossia still enjoys considerable currency in linguistic descriptions of creole settings. It does not fit the setting, but in
the work of some theorists, she concludes, it “is reduced to its ideological sense.” Because diglossia emphasizes the functional discreteness of the H and the L variety, this
model favors a view of JamC as a language in its own right, rather than as a dialect of
English. This plays into the hands of creole speakers’ language rights advocates such
as Devonish, a proponent of the diglossia model (2003). It is in the interest of anyone arguing along this line in public discussion to demonstrate the full functionality
of JamC in all social domains in order to disprove those who, on different political
agendas, see JamC merely as a dependent dialect of English and therefore inferior to
the standard. Thus, a view of JamC as a separate language is favored.
Introduction
Another view, the creole continuum model, stresses the relatedness between the
Creole and the standard. Crucially, JamC and JamE are only two of a large number
of lects in the cline from standard to increasingly creole speech: the acrolect (English) and the basilect (Creole). Between these two most extreme poles of the continuum, there are implicationally ordered, mesolectal forms of speech.12 Thus, in
the Jamaican situation, any given utterance may potentially be produced in any
one of a great number of lects that do not differ in denotation, but in their degree
of creoleness/standardness (cf. Figure 2).13
Figure 2. Different ways of saying the same thing: one utterance realized in some lects of
the Jamaican creole continuum.*
* This example was worked out in Grace Rookwood’s course L28J “Introduction to the Structure
and Usage of Jamaican Creole” at the Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy at
UWI Mona in a session which I recorded during speech data collection for ICE Jamaica (April
2003). The students were native speakers of JamC.
The creole continuum model was first proposed by DeCamp (1971) on the basis of speech data from Jamaica,14 and has since been used in the description of
numerous other post-creole speech communities. It holds that most Jamaicans
command more than just one lect of the creole continuum. These different levels,
or lects, are implicationally ordered among each other (cf. Rickford’s reordering of
DeCamp’s data, 1987), which means that acrolectal and basilectal forms cannot be
mixed randomly on one level of the continuum, but that features are categorized
by different degrees of creoleness, and the occurrence of one feature is implicated
by another. A very creole variant of a variable is considered to occur only if the
more basilectal variants of the less basilectal variables have been selected. For the
sample continuum in Figure 2, this means that the more Creole choice of lexeme
for ‘mother,’ muma, is expected only to occur in speakers who have also selected
9
10
the Creole complementizer se instead of acrolectal that, a choice that is already
made at more acrolectal levels of the continuum.15
Depending on a speaker’s personal background, he or she may display proficiency spanning a considerable range on the continuum. Meanwhile, passive competence is assumed for practically all levels of the continuum for most members of
the speech community.
According to the creole continuum model, the daily reality of forms that are
neither fully Creole nor fully English are not coincidental or erroneous mixes of
the two pure varieties, but regular parts of the continuum situation. In fact, mesolectal speech makes up the majority of speech performed in Jamaica, while the
purest Creole and the purest English are rather hard to come by. Bailey acknowledges that her grammar of JamC is based on an idealized variety that is basilectal
to an extent that is rarely encountered in reality (cf. Patrick 2004b: 409).
The model does not necessarily suggest a view of JamC as anything less than a
language, but it highlights the systemic interrelation between the two linguistic varieties of Jamaica and shifts the descriptive emphasis from the two purest varieties
at the extreme ends of the continuum to the dominant varieties, and variation, in
between. Perhaps as a consequence, Peter L. Patrick, who authored a major study
of mesolectal Jamaican speech from a variationist viewpoint, denies the accuracy
of any description of Jamaica as bilingual, or even bidialectal (p.c.). Instead, Patrick
considers Jamaican language to be monosystemic based on the accuracy of the
creole continuum model that joins all levels of speech in Jamaica, as his study
demonstrates empirically (1999).16
Comprehensive discussions of the usefulness and accuracy of diglossia and the
creole continuum model are included in Sand (1999: 39–61) and Deuber (2005:
15–20, 29–31). At this point, it is necessary to point out that apart from the shared
aim of describing sociolinguistic phenomena in bicodal situations, the two models
address rather different aspects of it: diglossia provides a description according to
functional criteria, whereas the creole continuum models the structural aspects of
a linguistic situation.
As outlined above, the basic problem with diglossia, thwarting its applicability to the Jamaican situation in the eyes of some, is the strictness of the separation
between the functional domains it implies. In most domains of oral use in Jamaica
today, codeswitching is to be expected. Thus, forms of Creole are often heard in
university education, where English dominates otherwise. Likewise, switches into
English occur in most families although Creole is the preferred code for intrafamily interaction.
The creole continuum model provides the basis for a more realistic description of the reality of language use in society in Jamaica. Nonetheless, as I will argue
Introduction
in chapter 2, in the qualitative analysis of CS in naturally occurring language data,
it is less helpful to describe a range of various intermediate lects on the continuum
than to take language use to be the result of the strategies with which speakers
and writers draw on the basic resources that they have at their disposal – and Jamaicans see their resources as binary, i.e. at any given point during language production they are using either JamC or JamE according to their own classification.
The notion of a mesolect does not feature in Jamaicans’ conceptualization of their
own linguistic resources. What in a structural description qualifies as mesolectal
speech may be the result of a dominantly Creole speaker attempting his or her best
version of StE, but just as easily the most creole speech that an otherwise strongly
standard-oriented speaker attempts. Various factors in speakers’ personal backgrounds influence their performance of the two codes, among them the preferred
code choice in the family, social and economic background, and level of education,
which strongly impacts on speakers’ proficiency in StE, since school and university
are the prime sites of StE acquisition in Jamaica.
Socioeconomic status also impacts language use in another way that is relevant
to this study: it limits access to computers. Jamaica is a developing country, classified as a “lower-middle income economy” by the World Bank, the second lowest of
four categories of average income, and the country as “moderately indebted,” again
the second category of four, where the first includes the most indebted countries
(World Bank Group 2005).
As has emerged by now, it will not be productive within the scope of this study to
enter the discussion over Jamaican Creole’s status as a language.17 It is, however,
certainly one of two codes18 that Jamaicans have at their disposal in shaping their
linguistic communication. For any utterance, they have the choice between two
codes in which to make it, even though in performance, a more diversified range
of lects can be attested in both intra- and inter-speaker variation.19
Structural aspects of JamC, and recently also of JamE, have been addressed repeatedly in quantitative, feature-based studies; the same is true for variation along the
continuum.20 There is, however, a shortage of qualitative studies addressing the
interactional dynamics of language use in Jamaica. Existing publications on CS in
Jamaica include Pollard (1978; 1998), Lawton (1980), and Shields-Brodber (1992).
Following the latter, Sand (1999: chapter 6) and Knäble (2001) also researched
convergence and accommodation phenomena in radio talk shows. All of these
studies have the merit of drawing attention to the importance of the participant’s
perspective in the study of language use.21 For example, Lawton (1980) explicitly
criticizes the creole continuum model22 because it tends to obscure the fact that
Jamaicans not only model their linguistic resources as binary – a fact often scoffed
at by theoreticians of the continuum (e.g. DeCamp 1971: 350) – but that this divi-
11
12
sion into codes is also meaningful in interaction, which is lost in merely structural
descriptions of language in Jamaica.23
Pollard’s, Lawton’s, and Shields-Brodber’s publications have the shortcoming
of working from mostly impressionistic data, or rather the author’s own nativespeaker experience. Sand and Knäble, while working with a more transparent
data-base (transcripts of radio talk shows that are included in the ICE-Jamaica
corpus), focus on one specific aspect of CS behavior, namely the contexts of and
motivations for convergence of one speaker with another.
As with the example of Jamaica, the field of EWL studies as a whole has most
recently moved into the area of quantitative, corpus-linguistic methodology in feature-based descriptions of individual varieties based on large sets of data. Examples of studies in this paradigm include Schmied (1997; 2004) on English in Tanzania and Kenya, Jefferey & van Rooy (2004) on South African English, Sand (1999)
on StE in Jamaica, and Sand (2004), a comparative study of article use in the StE
varieties of Singapore, India, Kenya, Jamaica, Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and
New Zealand. However, the field has yet to move into the area of major research
projects which, parallel to Third Wave variation studies, incorporate the findings
of the feature-based, descriptive work of the preceding research paradigm, but at
the same time turn to the ontological realm of studying the role of varieties and
variables in the creation of locally relevant meanings in interaction.
Patrick (2004b) points out that there is a need for studies that address the great
creative potential of Jamaican expressive resources:
I conclude by calling for research into poorly-explored areas, encouraging the empirical use of language corpora to shed light on JamC by looking at new and little-studied sources. Linguists often rely too much on their own, or other people’s
intuitions, or on a handful of well-known texts or sources of data […] JamC is a
vital language, continually producing new data, both innovative and traditional,
for linguists to attend to. Recent useful examinations include the study of ordinary
vernacular writing, mass media, style and register, vernacular orthography, translation to and from JamC, academic writing, and institutionally-defined speech
and literacy. There can be little doubt that a great deal more remains to be discovered. (437)
The necessary advance for Jamaican sociolinguistics explores the role of codes as
semiotic resources and considers the variable meanings and functions of their use
in contrast with each other. CS is a phenomenon in which the discourse functions
of codes become particularly apparent through contrast with each other. These
functions are variable, just as the connotations adherent to each code are dynamic,
depending on the conversational, local, and larger social context of any interaction.
Introduction
1.3.1.2 Changing CS behavior in Jamaica.
Two final issues concern recent shifts in the distribution of function and prestige
among English and Creole in Jamaica, and the role of Creole in the Jamaican diaspora.24
The general status of CS in Jamaica, from a macro-sociolinguistic point of
view, can be described as one in which CS is the unmarked choice. According
to Myers-Scotton in formulations of her Markedness Model (e.g. Myers-Scotton
1993a: 480–484; 1993b: 114–131), this type of situation, in which neither code
plays the functionally reduced role of the marked code, involves an equal identification of speakers with the rights and obligations sets (RO sets) of both codes. For
Jamaica, this means that speakers switch codes often in a majority of oral interactions and thus show identification with the RO sets both of English and of Patois.
A summary of what each of these RO sets amounts to is doomed to vagueness.
Certainly, there has been a change in the prestige of English, the language of the
colonizers and always the code of greater overt prestige, which since independence
has increased in covert prestige as it is coming to be associated less with political oppression and more with the metropolitan, English-speaking, international
culture of nearby North America. Patois, meanwhile, has come to be considered a
symbol of Jamaican national identity and a symbol of explicit national pride, even
though traditional attitudes of disdain toward Patois as a “bad” form of English
still have currency in public discourse.
The strategy of ‘CS as the unmarked choice’ is used by those speakers who
have native or near-native proficiency in both JamC and JamE, i.e. those Jamaicans
who spoke Creole in their families while growing up and started acquiring English
with their introduction to the educational system. These speakers are dominant in
public discourse; there is a small minority of upper-class Jamaicans who use only
English, and a (considerably larger) group of less educated lower-class Jamaicans
who speak only Creole, or whose command of English is not actually standardlike. All informants in the corpus are accurately described as using ‘CS as the unmarked choice.’
JamC has been continuously increasing its prestige and become acceptable to
be used, in alternation with English, in domains where formerly only English was
acceptable. Shields-Brodber writes of “the functional dethronement of [StE] as the
exclusive language of public-formal domains” and concludes:
There can be no question, therefore, about the increased audibility and visibility,
as well as legitimacy in public/formal contexts which are accruing to [JamC], or
about the productive bilingualism of educated communicators who, traditionally,
would have chosen to project a monolingual-in-English identity. (Shields-Brodber 1997: 64)
13
14
She clarifies that this situation is the result of a relatively recent development, set
off by Jamaican independence from Britain in 1962.25 In her view, the diglossia of
previous decades has been eroded. Christie (2003: 2–3) sketches the development
identically. Wassink (1999) in her assessment of language attitudes toward JamC
sees “seeds of change” (57) for the better in the Creole’s prestige, especially among
her younger respondents. Mühleisen (2002) offers a book-length report on the
increasing prestige of English-lexifier Caribbean creoles.
Nonetheless, this shift is being resisted by certain parts of society. Public discourse on language attitudes in Jamaica features extreme positions (Mair & Sand
1998: 192-195). One of them is the position of Creole language rights advocates
such as Devonish (cf. 1983; 1986; 2003). Devonish and other scholars at UWI
Mona have promoted the rights of Jamaicans having little or no proficiency in StE,
which has traditionally caused them disadvantages in official contexts such as the
legal system. To this end, Devonish has proposed the official recognition of JamC
as a language and a range of related practical measures, such as the adoption of an
official spelling system for JamC by the state (cf. Hinrichs 2004).
The opposing position is that of conservative intellectuals such as journalist
Morris Cargill, who went on record in the Jamaica Gleaner with the statement that
he was “tired of those who seek to make a big thing out of patois. If our people, encouraged by some rather dim academics, wish to continue with it, well, good luck
to them” (cited in Mair & Sand 1998: 195). His argument points out the economic
disadvantages suffered by monolingual JamC speakers and ignores the possible
advantages of bilingualism, or more precisely: bicodal proficiency in both JamC
and JamE.
In summary, the shift of relative prestige for English and Patois since the 1960s
has resulted in a change from a situation of ‘English as the unmarked choice’ to ‘CS
as the unmarked choice’ and is noticeable mostly in a heightened acceptability of
Creole use in formerly exclusive domains of English. On the whole, however, the
concept of converse scales of overt and covert prestige for Patois and English is still
valid despite these changes, with English being the code of greater overt and Patois
the code of greater covert prestige.
1.3.1.3 English and Patois in the Jamaican diaspora
The Jamaican diaspora is the result of several decades of steady emigration out of
Jamaica into, for the most part, the English-speaking countries of the Northern
hemisphere. In large cities such as Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Manchester, and London, there are Caribbean immigrant communities numbering up
to several hundred thousand26 which do not simply merge into the local cultural
mainstream, but are recognizable as a cultural and social minority that makes its
own distinctive contributions to the cultural landscape.27 In host societies such as
Introduction
the USA and Great Britain, considerable attention on the part of governments has
been invested in legislation concerning the social integration of immigrants from
the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, since the 1970s.28
The linguistic consequences of this emigration from Jamaica, particularly regarding Creole use in the diaspora, have been studied mostly in Great Britain. The
central works in the area are the monographs by Wells (1973), Sutcliffe (1982),
Hewitt (1986), Sebba (1993), and Rampton (1995). The main trends observed can be
summarized as follows:
– British Jamaicans of the second generation and beyond use British Creole
(BrC), a focused form of JamC “which is maximally different in phonology and grammar from Standard English” (Sebba 2003: 158), while at the
same time “structurally reduced, rudimentary” (Mair 2003b: 232). BrC is
considered “a collection of local British varieties of [JamC]” (Sebba 1993:
139) which have emerged through dialect contact with “vernacular varieties of urban English English” (Sebba 2004: 196). It is an additional code,
usually acquired during adolescence, while the local variety of English
(e.g. London English, LE) is normally the first language.
– Unlike in Jamaica, there is no structural Creole-Standard continuum, but
one rather focused variety of Creole with no intermediate lects linking it
to English.
– The status of BrC among British-born Jamaicans is that of a marked code
in all conversational contexts, i.e. English is by far the quantitatively dominant, unmarked code.29
– Due to the enormous popularity of Jamaican music and the high profile
of Rastafarianism as a pop-cultural stereotype, JamC and certain sub-varieties (especially Dread Talk, the variety of JamC spoken by Rastafarians)30 are recognized not only in Jamaica and its diaspora communities,
but throughout the societies of host countries. This high visibility gives
the Creole language of Jamaica elevated cultural status among the creoles brought into host countries by Caribbeans immigrants. It is therefore
adopted in a process of second-dialect acquisition not just by children of
immigrants from Jamaica, but also from other Caribbean nations. It therefore serves an expanded symbolic function of marking British Caribbean
identity.
– Due to the prevalent co-occurrence of Caribbean identity with African
ethnicity, similar processes of functional expansion for BrC happen with
blacks from areas other than the Caribbean, e.g. British-born Africans.31
– Since the groups of British-born Jamaicans, other Caribbeans, and Africans share black ethnicity as a typical primary identity feature, the symbolic
15
16
functions of BrC, according to most accounts, cluster around the concept
of black British identity (Sebba 1993; Mair 2003b; Patrick 2004a).
On the whole, it can be said that the discourse functions of Patois in the diaspora
are greatly reduced compared with its function in conversation in Jamaica. It is
used in CS with English, but considerably less frequently than in Jamaica, and it is
always the marked code. The range of its symbolic functions in strategies of identity construction using CS is condensed compared with speech in Jamaica.
1.3.2 Defining e-mail as a text type
The number of scholarly publications on language in CMC has virtually exploded
in recent years. Beside the descriptive interest triggered by CMC language, this
doubtless has to do with the fact that researchers have come to recognize and appreciate the high quality and value of CMC data for linguistic analysis. CMC texts
are often easily accessible to the researcher at little cost (e.g. internet discussion
forums, blogs, newsgroup mailings, or chatroom conversations). Also, the fact that
participants in CMC interaction form a virtual community (to a greater or lesser
extent, depending on text type and other aspects of the interactional setting), interaction is completely textual, and all communication takes place in one and the
same channel, which is documented in the data. Research
is facilitated by the fact that people engage in socially meaningful activities online
in a way that typically leaves a textual trace, making the interactions more accessible to scrutiny and reflection than is the case in ephemeral spoken communication. (Herring 2004: 338)
This means that in comparison with speech recordings, there is little danger of the
researcher missing communicative channels on the extralinguistic level that are
outside the reach of the recording apparatus (consider the possible loss of kinesics
and proxemics in audio-recorded conversations). It should be said, however, that
for the text type contained in the primary corpus for this study, e-mail, these two
points are only partly valid: for one, private e-mail from dyadic interactions is
among the hardest types of CMC data to collect (surpassed only by instant messenger (IM) data32), because most personal e-mail is intended for one recipient
only.33 Also, private e-mail is often, and certainly in the case of the data analyzed
in this study, written among people who know each other in real life, i.e. rather
than forming a virtual community that exists only in cyberspace, these CMC communications are embedded in a larger complex of more or less regular contact that
includes face-to-face interaction and an abundance of extra-textual phenomena
relevant to the interactional context.34
Introduction
A third factor makes CMC interesting for research, particularly into English
as a World Language: the combination of strongly informal language use with a
written medium, which means that many vernacular language forms are coming
to be written much more widely than before the advent of CMC, and that written
interaction in English is opening up to the whole spectrum of world varieties of
English, instead of remaining restricted to standard forms of language. This aspect
has fascinated linguists since the dawning of computer-based interactions, as such
early publications as Baron (1984) attest.
In this section, I will try to show why CMC, and especially e-mail, is such an
interesting text type from a linguistic perspective.35 The text type constituting my
secondary corpus, postings on internet discussion forums (or message boards),
is very similar to e-mail in terms of the time constraints that influence its production – an important factor that influences the linguistic features of any text
type. The fundamental difference is that on these discussion forums, interaction
is of the one-to-many or many-to-many type, while e-mail is usually one-to-one
(only in rare cases – with messages addressed to multiple recipients – is it oneto-many). Thus, interaction in discussion forums is less private than in e-mails,
a factor which I will address whenever it is relevant in explaining differences in
findings for the primary and secondary corpus in chapters 3 to 5.
When speaking of “language” in CMC (or “Netspeak” in Crystal 2001), it is
important to bear in mind that the features which are often considered to be typical, or even distinctive, of CMC are only present in a subset of all language that
occurs in CMC. Linguistic signs of informality and written stylizations of speech
may occur significantly more in CMC than they did in traditional, printed text
types. However, the internet also transports texts that bear all features of traditional written text production. Speeches, lectures, treaties – all the most formal
types of documents exist alongside very informal CMC on the internet. Linguistic
analysis should be careful not to confuse the newer, more informal types of written
language use with the totality of language on the internet.
What researchers have been interested in for most of the short history of CMC
studies is an innovativeness in language use that is acceptable in CMC and was
unacceptable in more traditional printed texts, due to the very low formality demands posed by the electronic medium and the text types in it. Also, certain types
of interactions pose great time constraints on the writing process, leading to less
revision and less planning in written language production, which is thought to be
permissible in CMC but not in traditional written language. As a rule, these features of unrevised written language increase along the range of CMC text types the
more their production is real-time based, or synchronous. They are most prominent in fully real-time based Instant Messenger interactions and chats, and least
frequent in non-interactive texts written for publication on the internet (cf. Crys-
17
18
tal 2001: 42–43). E-mail is closer to the real-time based end of that continuum: it is
not entirely real-time based, as it is fully acceptable to take delays of hours, days, or
weeks before answering; but replies are often written very quickly and spontaneously, with no intermittent planning, and sent off without revision. Fast exchanges
of messages in one thread between two interlocutors can also yield interaction that
approaches real-time characteristics.
However, an important characteristic of e-mail, distinguishing it from chat
interactions, is that planned and reflected language use is always possible in principle, if users desire it. This also makes it fundamentally different from speech in
face-to-face conversation, which is always and inescapably real-time based and
features the least planned language use of any type of linguistic interaction.
There has always been agreement among researchers that language use in CMC
was more informal than in traditional written texts (Baron 1998: 147). However,
it soon became clear that this alone was not a sufficient characterization of CMC
language, and that its perceived informality was perhaps not sufficient ground for
considering it to be “like speech”.
“[Can] we generalize about the language of e-mail at all?” writes Crystal
(2001: 11). The more methodologically sophisticated studies showed that CMC
was far from being “informal” and like speech in every repect. For example, Collot & Belmore (1996) gave a corpus-based assessment of the properties of e-mail
language, using a subcorpus of chat data and a subcorpus of online discussion data,
with a total of 200,000 words. Rather than discussing CMC language unidimensionally and in terms of the criterion of formality only, they adopted Biber’s multidimensional-multi-feature model (1988) and explored six textual dimensions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Informational vs. involved production
Non-narrative vs. narrative
Situation-dependent vs. explicit
Overt expression of persuasion
Non-abstract vs. abstract information
On-line informational elaboration
Each of these dimensions was a bundle of several quantifiable linguistic features.36
In none of the textual dimensions did their electronic language corpora score absolute extremes. The most notable scores were in dimensions four and five. Only
editorials and professional letters scored more highly on “overt expression of persuasion” (dimension four), and only official documents and academic prose scored
more highly on abstractness of information (dimension five).
This corpus analysis does not warrant the classification of the data as absolutely informal. Particularly the score for dimension five, abstractness of expression,
Introduction
was notably high for both subcorpora, which shows that the claim of e-mail being
informal cannot easily be maintained without qualification.
A further challenge to a simple classification of e-mail as informal is the fact
that its language is becoming more varied as the range of its applications broadens.
If the predominant style among the first generation of e-mail users was mostly informal, this is likely so because e-mail, due to its newness as a medium, was trusted
mostly with communicative purposes of a less important and by themselves informal nature. Recently, users have trusted e-mail with much more critical communicative applications, including business consultations, the negotiation and closure
of legal contracts, etc. Gains’s study shows that the purposes and settings of e-mails
can be the cause of a great deal of variation in the styles used in e-mail, and that the
property of “informality” is not sufficient as a description of e-mail as a text type
(Gains 1999).
Nonetheless, the fact remains that language use in e-mail is less regulated by
formal and pragmatic norms than in other written text types, and that it is a choice
for users to make whether they wish to adhere to the norms established by paperbased writing. The more informal language use is likely to occur in CMC, not in
paper-based texts.
1.3.2.1 Fascination with the “hybridity” of CMC language.
As a consequence of the fascination with informality among linguists, the early
years of CMC studies saw a great many publications that foregrounded the “hybrid” nature of CMC language, seen as displaying a mix between features of written and spoken language. Frequently, authors resorted to oxymora of the “written
speech”-type in labeling the new linguistic phenomena of the electronic media
(e.g. Elmer-Dewitt 1994; Maynor 1994; e.g. Hale & Scanlon 1999: 9). Naomi S.
Baron suggested that electronic language is a new phenomenon resulting from
contact between the modalities of speech and writing:
the seemingly schizophrenic character of email reflects ongoing creolization. Users of email (like users of creolized spoken, signed, or written systems) have considerable choice over how to formulate and respond to messages, stressing the
character of one progenitor or another. This variation is evident in the stylistic
range found in today’s email messages, even when sent by the same individual.
(Baron 1998: 164, see also 2000)
In continental Europe, and especially in the fields of German and Romance linguistics, scholars used the epithet of “conceptual orality” in trying to solve the
seeming contradition between features of informality (interpreted as features
of orality) and the fact that e-mail and the other new text types were written: a
text-typological model by Koch & Oesterreicher (1985) separates the continuum
19
20 Codeswitching on the Web
between formality and informality from the binary feature of medium (graphic/
phonic), which allows for written (graphic) language which bears features that are
more typically found in speech, i.e. which can be “conceptually oral.”
Figure 3. Koch & Oesterreicher’s model of ‘language of proximity’ (Sprache der Nähe, left)
and ‘language of distance’*
* The letters a-k stand for different exemplary text types: a – private/intimate conversation,
b – phone conversation with a friend, c – oral interview, d – published interview, e – private
journal entry, f – personal letter, g – job interview, h – sermon, i – academic lecture, j – newspaper article, k – administrative regulation (Koch & Oesterreicher 1985: 18).
This practice of ‘othering’ the language of the new electronic text types is of doubtful value, since it blocks the view of what CMC language shares with existing text
types (see also Harris & Rampton 2002, who warn of the overly genererous use of
creolization metaphors in cultural analysis). It should be remembered that e-mails
are written texts no matter how one looks at them. Many authors, among them
Crystal, have by now realized that CMC language shares very little with speech (cf.
Crystal’s typological comparison between CMC and speech, and between CMC
and writing, 2001: 43–44). Perhaps as a result of this, Jürgen Spitzmüller observes
that there has been a shift in the field of research: recent studies have pointed out
that “prima facie similarities between internet and [face-to-face communication]
are functionally not similar at all” (Spitzmüller 2006: 33).
Introduction
What appears to be “oral” on the internet may on closer inspection turn out
to be an intentional, conscious stylization of oral language features in the written
medium, or the consequence of any number of other factors (e.g. markers of reductive language use, which often stem from lack of editing in internet writing).
However, these features are never actually oral.
The most prominent feature of e-mail as a medium is that it affords very easy,
cheap, and fast communication among users who have to meet one requirement:
they must have access to the internet. As a medium, e-mail is written; as a register,
it is extremely varied. It is impossible to make worthwhile generalizations about
the type of the language that is used in e-mail. Even the familiar claim that “the
language of e-mail is informal” is a crude simplification.
Written language production is always more complex than spontaneous
speech and involves considerably more planning. If users wish, e-mails can be as
thoroughly planned as any traditional written text type. Compared with speech, it
is therefore accurate to regard e-mail language as rhetorical.
In CMC, we are not witnessing language change so much as innovative types
of language use. Gains laments the failure of academic research so far to provide
an adequate description of the language of e-mail (1999: 82). The question to ask
is whether that would be at all possible or desirable at this point in time. I suggest
that due to the openness and flexibility of the medium of e-mail, it will be a long
while before a stringent and proprietary register evolves for e-mail.
1.4 The data: compilation and structure of the corpus
This study follows a two-pronged approach: at its heart lies the analysis of e-mails
written by Jamaicans – students at one of Jamaica’s universities or recent graduates.37 The e-mail portion of the corpus will be referred to as the primary corpus.
Its size is ca. 40,000 words (see Table 1).
For investigations requiring a larger database, a secondary corpus of ca. 60,000
words was compiled from postings to internet discussion forums for Jamaicans.
The ensemble of primary and secondary corpora will be referred to as a Corpus of
Jamaican E-mail and other CMC (COJEC).
The total size of the corpus is small compared to the large standardized corpora that are available for major varieties of English, such as the British National
Corpus (100 million words) or the quartet of matching corpora for BrE and AmE
in the 1960s and 1990s, Brown, LOB, F-LOB and Frown (1 million words each, cf.
e.g. Mair et al. 2002). Nonetheless, it compares favorably with other achievements
in the as yet small world of Caribbean corpora.38 However, a size that would allow
claims to statistic representativeness was not the objective in data collection. The
21
research questions of this study are qualitative and address issues of dynamic and
creative, new forms of language use. Thus, a representative corpus, if such a thing
exists,39 was not needed. As Sebba, Kedge & Dray (1999) write, a “less demanding
requirement which can be made of a corpus is that it be exemplary.”40 The goal for
COJEC was to provide an exemplary corpus of English and Creole writing practices by Jamaicans in CMC.41
Figure 4. Customers at an internet café in Montego Bay, Jamaica
Where additional qualitative evidence is needed to illustrate low-frequency phenomena, I will cite material from websites and blogs separately; these are not included in COJEC.
The appendix to this book contains the complete primary corpus.
1.4.1 The primary corpus
For the European researcher, collecting a corpus of private e-mail in the Caribbean is a task with several problems attached. For one, I was unable to use e-mail
written to me by Jamaicans. The most interesting phenomenon, written Creole
use, was unlikely to occur in them due to my lack of L1 proficiency in JamC and
Introduction
my clear outsider status in the speech community. Also, only naturally occurring
data was relevant to the research questions of this study, so that the goal had to
be to obtain private messages that had already been written by Jamaicans to other
Jamaicans.
Quite obviously, it is more difficult to obtain copies of private e-mail interactions from other people than, for example, to make speech recordings. Informants
have a need for and a right to privacy, and every message that they forward to the
researcher has first to be checked for confidential content.42 It is tedious work for
informants to thus weed through their old messages and then forward them to
somebody else, who has certifiably little business reading them.
Many linguists working on CMC have stressed the desirability of private email corpora, but lamented the difficulty of collecting private e-mail.43 Usually,
alternative, more readily available sources of data were chosen. For the majority of
published linguistic studies of e-mail data, the difficulty was solved either by using non-private e-mail, i.e. newsgroup material (Collot & Belmore 1996; Herring
1996; Yates 1996; and Davis & Brewer 1997), or by including the researcher’s own
e-mail in the corpus and otherwise falling back on one’s own immediate social
network (e.g. Graedler 1999; e.g. Crystal 2001: chapter 4, using the author’s inbox
as data; Montes-Alcalá 2005). Georgakopoulou (1997) used messages written or
obtained by members of her own social network of friends in her study of e-mail
among Greeks in England, as did Yasmeen for her M.A. thesis on English-Urdu
e-mails among students in Pakistan (2006).
The difficulties connected to e-mail data collection in a non-domestic setting
should not distract from the very high quality which can be expected of e-mail
data. All material can be assumed to have occurred naturally, yet complete information about participants and their relationship can be obtained in interviews.
Because interlocutors usually know each other in real life, they have deep and
multifaceted personal relationships. They are the backdrop to all e-mail communication and thus make for a richness of interactional context that is not present in
more public and anonymous CMC interactions, e.g. chats and internet discussion
forums.
Data collection took place during two periods of fieldwork: February and March,
2002, and mid-March through end of April, 2003. I was based and worked on the
Jamaican campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Mona, a suburb of
Kingston. In a situation where no previous personal friendships existed between
me, the researcher, and informants, a considerable part of my research time during the first research period in 2002 was spent talking to potential informants and
convincing them of the sincerity and worthiness of my research project. I spoke to
groups and audiences at lectures of up to 150 people trying to attract possible in-
23
formants, but had comparatively little success there. By comparison, great progress
came from relations with individuals, who, having decided to help my cause, not
only contributed their own material, but also introduced and recommended me to
their wider social networks.
Most data was obtained from students at UWI. Some messages were written
by members of other Jamaican institutions and by recent UWI graduates of (the
oldest one had graduated five years before). These writers were part of the social
networks of student informants.
As a result, the writers who contributed to the corpus are a homogeneous
group in terms of their educational background. In the broader Jamaican spectrum, they all were part of the most highly educated social group which has the
best access to language education in English. Given that JamC was the first language for all writers,44 the factor of linguistic abilities, as far as it depends on educational background, is thus controlled. All writers are Jamaican nationals.
35 informants contributed material, written by or to them, to the corpus. The
total number of different e-mail writers is 85. The corpus contains 208 messages.
Most of them occurred in dyadic interactions. Only eight messages were written
by an individual to a group of recipients; they are: m# 002–09, 002–14, 002–17,
002–19, 002–20, 004–01, 006–01, and 033–08.
A technical factor limited the number of messages that I obtained from informants who agreed to supply material. At the time of data collection, all informants
were using a webmail service, mostly hotmail.com and yahoo.com’s e-mail service.
Only four writers (but none of the actual informants) were using an account provided by their employer, which would have enabled them to store larger numbers
of e-mail messages. For webmail, the total mailbox volume then was restricted to
2MB, so that it was not customary to archive large amounts of sent and received
messages. Those informants who were willing to provide material had a selection
of rarely more than ten messages to pass on to me. Some kept providing me with
material throughout the duration of my fieldwork, and four informants even kept
sending me e-mail messages for a few months after my two visits to UWI.
For all excerpts from corpus material that are quoted within this study, I used
the anonymization practice that is common in the ICE corpora conversation transcripts (cf. Greenbaum 1996): names were not deleted, but replaced with other
names which contextually matched the original name (preserving titles and terms
of address), i.e. male first names were replaced by male first names, a Mrs. remained a Mrs., but with a different last name, etc. In the full e-mail corpus, which
is contained in the appendix, names were more simply replaced by letter codes (cf.
Table 8 in the appendix for a list of these codes).
Introduction
Each e-mail message was marked with a code beginning with m#, followed by
a number for the informant who supplied it and a running number for the message (e.g. m# 011–24, the 24th message supplied by the 11th informant).
Absolutely no orthographic normalizations were applied either to the corpus,
nor will they be applied to excerpts appearing in the text of this study. In quotes
from the corpus I will add notes where orthographic errors obscure meaning.
Punctuation was adjusted to common typographic conventions only where
errors in the original changed the automatic word count that would have been
produced using conventional punctuation. Thus, errors like
him)and
him,and
him , and
him … and
him ) and
were normalized to
him) and
him, and
him, and
him… and
him) and
in order to ensure a correct word count. Omissions of punctuation marks were
not corrected.
1.4.2 The secondary corpus
The discussion of the language of CMC above (1.3.2) focused on e-mail, but the
points made there generally apply to the text type of the secondary corpus. Internet
discussion forums are also known as (internet) message boards and bulletin boards
(cf. Lewin & Donner 2002). They are publicly accessible websites using http protocol with dynamic content. Visitors may register as users and add posts to the website, identified by a self-selected nickname. These nicknames serve an anonymizing
purpose in that it is not possible to glean a user’s real-life name from the information provided by the discussion forum websites. All posts can be read by all other
users as well as non-registered readers visiting the internet site, which makes the
text type an attractive data source for linguistic study.
Public accessibility is the second major difference between discussion forums
and e-mail. It causes some differences in writers’ self-presentation which has an
25
impact on language use; this factor will be discussed in the analytical chapters
where it becomes relevant.
The vast number of discussion forums that exist on the internet differ in the
kinds of users they address and the topics of the discussions going on in them. The
websites containing the discussion forums that were used for the secondary corpus, jamaicans.com and ackee.com, exist explicitly for, and are used dominantly
by, Jamaicans, a majority of them expatriates living in North America or Great
Britain.45 Both jamaicans.com and ackee.com offer a range of different discussion
forums. Some of them are topically restricted – e.g. the forums “Jamaican news
and politrix” and “Faith, reason & philosophy” on jamains.com)–while others are
open to any topic and general conversation, e.g. “Pon de verandah” and “General
discussion” on jamaicans.com. While on jamaicans.com, the forum topics are determined by the editors of the website, ackee.com lets users start and name new
forums.
Interaction between users occurs in threads, i.e. posts and reply posts devoted
to the same question or sub-topic. Material was selected from the forums for inclusion in the corpus in units of threads, i.e. stretches of posts and reply posts devoted
to roughly the same theme were copied out of forums. This means that most posts
included in the corpus normally stand in a thematically cohesive context with other
surrounding posts.
For the secondary corpus the cutoff point for data collection was chosen at
roughly 1.5 times the volume of the primary corpus. There are 58,488 words,
or 773 posts, of discussion forum material in all; 37,620 words/563 posts from
ackee.com and 20,868 words/210 posts from jamaicans.com.
The numbering system chosen for the posts is: p# followed by a code for the
source website – a for ackee.com and j for jamaicans.com – and two numbers, the
first signifying the larger subfile that a post was saved in (there are five files with
ackee.com material and four from jamaicans.com). Hence, p# a-03–08 stands for
the eighth post in the third file containing material from ackee.com.
Anonymization was not necessary for the secondary corpus because the discussion forum material is publicly available on the internet and users already write
anonymously, identified only by nicknames (e.g. Cutie, studmuffin, jamaican_sister, Selassie-I-dawta).
Orthography and punctuation were handled as in the primary corpus: no corrections were applied to orthography, and punctuation was corrected only where
it affected word count.
Introduction
Table 1. COJEC (a Corpus of Jamaican E-mail and other CMC): structure and basic characteristics of the two subcorpora
Primary corpus
Secondary corpus
Type of data
Private e-mails
Posts on internet discussion
forums
Data obtained from
Writer or addressee of message
http://www.ackee.com
http://www.jamaicans.com
Social form of written
communication
One-to-one
Exceptions: group e-mails
(one-to-many)
One-to-many
Size in number of words
38,551
58,488
ackee.com: 37,620
jamaicans.com: 20,868
Number of messages/posts
208
total: 773
ackee.com: 563 posts
jamaicans.com: 210 posts
Main criteria for inclusion of
data
Code choice
Informant background
Creole must be used at some
Writer and addressee(s) must
point in the threads that were
be Jamaican
included
Real-life identities of
writers known?
Yes
No
Writers use nicknames only
All names and private informaYes
tion anonymized?
No
Data sources are publicly accessible
Orthography normalized?
No
No
Punctuation normalized?
Yes
Yes
Where relevant to word count Where relevant to word count
With the discussion forum material, less control is possible over informants’ backgrounds. However, there is good reason to assume that the writers of the posts
included in the corpus are all Jamaicans based on the topics and content of the
exchanges. Non-Jamaican participants in the discussions on the whole were extremely rare. Where the context of an interaction suggested that one participant
was not Jamaican, either their posts or the entire thread was excluded from data
27
selection. Hardly any control was possible over socioeconomic status and educational background. Compared to the primary corpus it can be said that a considerably greater subset of the discussion participants lived outside Jamaica than of
the contributors to the e-mail corpus.46 In fact, the discussion forums are primarily targeted at expatriate Jamaicans, functioning as a virtual diaspora community.
This difference in social structure of the communicative settings between primary
and secondary corpus will be adressed in the analyses where it is relevant.
1.5 Methodology
The aim of chapters 3 to 5 is to assess the discourse meanings and functions of
JamC, as opposed to English, in the data, and to determine the extent to which
the communicative functions of the Creole as a code have been reduced to the
status of a symbol. This situates it methodologically within the larger context of the
sociolinguistic branch of CS research, which has been producing theory since the
early 1970s.47 However, a simple application of existing frameworks of CS theory
to the data is problematic.
The three most influential contributors to theory in the sociolinguistic branch
of CS studies are John J. Gumperz, Carol Myers-Scotton, and Peter Auer. Gumperz and Myers-Scotton pursue the goal of developing descriptive tools for CS in
any speech community. Especially in the various versions of Myers-Scotton’s MM
it is evident that her overarching interest is in CS universals, which she hopes to
deduce from individual case studies (cf. Meeuwis & Blommaert 1994). To both
Gumperz and Myers-Scotton, all relevant CS behavior is unconscious. MyersScotton writes this explicitly in a private e-mail to the author in February, 2005.
In his introduction to conversational CS, Gumperz stresses very clearly that “participants immersed in the interaction itself are often quite unaware which code is
used at any one time. Their main concern is with the communicative effect of what
they are saying” and that “selection among linguistic alternants is automatic, not
readily subject to conscious recall” (Gumperz 1982: 61, emphases added) (cf. also
Gumperz’s contributions in Auer & Di Luzio 1992).
The belief that interesting and relevant natural speech data is only produced
unconsciously is shared with, and possibly inspired by, Labovian variation studies,
which was leading sociolinguistic research at the time Gumperz turned to the social meanings of CS in the early 1970s (Blom & Gumperz 1972). And it is the root
of the first problem.
As Mair suggests, one aspect of the new set of functions that Creole performs
in the diaspora and CMC is that this deployment is “frequently conscious and
strategic” (Mair 2003b: 247). If there is a connection between consciousness of use
Introduction
and the discourse functions that Creole performs in the new domain, then analysis
must explore it – a task which cannot be approached in the frameworks of Gumperz or Myers-Scotton.
A second problem, related to this first one, is that CS theory remains underworked for written language. Language in CMC is written. While the differences
between orality and writing have been receiving attention from linguists for a long
time, the transferability to writing of leading theoretical achievements in CS research – all of which were developed from and for the analysis of conversation
– has never been questioned in studies devoted to CS in written data.48 The conditions of written language production are vastly different from those of speech. It is
well possible that CS behavior in writing is therefore different and requires a theoretical approach that existing frameworks do not afford. Specifically, consciousness of use may again be the problem: due to the more planned and rhetoric nature
of all written language compared to speech, CS there is likely to be employed more
consciously and require more analytical flexibility than in speech.
The graphic and monological quality of CMC data disallows the adoption of
Auer’s approach to CS, which is known as the conversation analysis approach. Its
prime methodological tenet is that the function and meaning of a switch in one
conversational turn only becomes evident in the discursive consequences as displayed by another interlocutor’s subsequent turn (e.g. Auer 1998b).
As a final problem, recent trends in applied linguistics have suggested that in
multilingual urban settings, code contrasts may be used in ways that do not simply
underscore referential meaning (by indexing RO sets as in the MM, or giving contextualization cues as in Gumperz’s work), but are in and of themselves the signs
through which conversational meaning is constructed.49 Rampton’s Crossing, one
of the most significant contributions to applied sociolinguistic CS research so far, is
devoted to such phenomena. These uses of CS are again rhetorical and intentional,
as crossing involves the use of linguistic varieties normally associated with social or
ethnic groups to which the speaker does not belong. However, such CS occurs not
only in crossing, but also in switching among varieties which can be considered the
speaker’s “own” and even in monolingual speech, as new approaches to conversational discourse analysis are showing.50
The development of theory on such planned and rethorical uses of CS is only
beginning. There is evidence that certain speech activities favor them (e.g. role
play and performances), and there is evidence that the “liminoid” phase of postadolescence and pre-adulthood favors them (especially in modern industrial society, cf. Turner & Turner 1982: 45; Rampton 1999: 358). On the whole, however, the
focus thus far has been on ethnographic, qualitative, applied studies without the
constraint of having to build large, catch-all frameworks. Such work draws on recent development in CS research and adjacent fields. Importantly, analytical con-
29
cepts such as identity, context, and the social meaning of linguistic codes are no
longer seen as static. For this reason, Auer (2005) speaks of a recent and profound
“reconstructivist turn” in the social sciences, which in linguistics has caused researchers to turn away from essentialist approaches to identity. While early theory
in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis worked with static, essentialist concepts
in all three areas–cf. identity, which in Labovian sociolinguistics is a combination
of a very small number of parameters: age, socioeconomic status, gender, race,
and very little else–more recent views are constructivist, and identity, context, and
code meaning are multifaceted, dynamic concepts whose content depends on any
number of variables in the interaction. Such work, through its methodological
openness, has a smaller chance to produce macro-level frameworks for application in any sociolinguistic setting, but greater chances of extrapolating the actual
relevance and meaning of CS in any given setting. This kind of heuristic approach
to data is very obviously not in the interest of the older, macro-sociolinguistic
frameworks of Gumperz and Myers-Scotton.51
Since no ready-made theoretical approach for the analysis of CS in CMC is available, I will choose an altogether heuristic approach in which I combine the ideas of
Gumperz’s and Myers-Scotton’s models with the inductive approach of Rampton
and, to a certain extent, Auer’s conversation analysis. That is to say, I will critically
apply the relevant concepts of code-meanings and functions that have been proposed in the literature.
The overarching goal of the analysis is to provide a detailed account of the
range of discourse functions that Creole performs in the data. In the presentation
of the results, I proceed along a cline of CS functions that is inspired by the notion
of a continuum from “contrastive” to “inherent” functions, as proposed by Auer
(1992). As Myers-Scotton points out (p.c.), the choice of these labels is potentially
unfortunate: all CS is somehow contrastive, and inherent is not the most eloquent
term for what it wants to denote. What this opposition describes is a kind of CS
at one end of the continuum whose primary conversational meaning depends on
the contrast between codes, but does not draw on any social meanings or connotations that adhere to either of the codes. On the other end, CS draws on meanings
inherent to the codes. The latter type is better explained as working with a kind
of implicature, Myers-Scotton argues (e.g. 1998: 20–22). In the MM, switching is
conceptualized as a conversational strategy governed by a maxim,52 i.e. it is compatible with Grice’s cooperative principle (1989). What are the most inherent types
of switches in Auer’s continuum can be understood as the type that make the most
complex implicatures.
At this point, it is important to note that CS functions and meanings are never
monolithic; practically all CS displays overlap between several of the functions
Introduction
discussed here. I will refrain from pointing this out throughout chapters 3 to 5
to ensure readability. Instead I will select extracts from the corpus because they
exemplify one type of function with particular clarity. However, this rarely means
that other types of CS functions might not justifiably co-feature in an interpretation of that extract.
The relevant writings on CS will be cited in more detail and, if necessary, summarized as they become relevant in the presentation of the analysis in the chapters
presenting the analysis.
31
chapter 2
The creole continuum and CMC
Two closely related questions need to be addressed before the analysis of the data.
One is whether written data such as these can be assumed to reflect the Jamaican creole continuum in the same way as speech data. The second question is
whether we are faced with a new variety of JamE that has emerged in the medium
of CMC, and wich needs to be treated differently than the known codes of JamE
and JamC.
2.1 Is the creole continuum reflected in Jamaican CMC?
Theorists of the creole continuum agree that in a setting like Jamaica, where a
creole co-exists with its lexifier standard language, linguistic variation happens
on a gradatum between two non-discrete poles (Patrick 1999). Speakers have the
freedom of moving across a large number53 of implicationally ordered intermediate – or mesolectal – stages, up and down the style continuum, as can be observed
in speech. The continuum model is widely accepted among researchers who have
carried out variationist studies of post-creole speech communities, and the aim of
this chapter is not to discount it.54 Rather, its applicability to written language such
as CMC will be tested, and the question of its reconcilability with the practice of
CS will be addressed.
The creole continuum is a descriptive device designed, and best suited, for the
description of sociolinguistic situations. Any individual’s language use may span
only a part of the continuum. For example, Pollard (1978) illustrates the stylistic
span commanded by Bambi, her 80-year old informant, in Figure 5. In relation to
the whole range that is theoretically available between full basilectal Creole (here:
“JC”) and Jamaican English (here: “SJE”), Bambi’s stylistic range is rather narrow
and close to the basilect.
Nonetheless, Pollard observes a clear orientation toward CS in Bambi’s speech, a
functionalization of the contrast between a more basilectal and a more acrolectal
code, within the speaker’s narrow range. Devonish sees no contradiction between
the orientation toward CS in individuals on the one hand and the sociolinguistic
reality of the continuum on the other. In fact, the limitations of speakers’ competences explains the linguistic reality of the continuum:
Speakers have repertoires that span varying ranges on the continuum. However,
for any speaker, the more formal social situations would be likely to produce the
use of varieties more approximating English, and for informal situations, those
more approximating creole. What I suggest is that this is simply a manifestation
of the kind of linguistic convergence which Ferguson (1959: 332) notes to occur
in diglossic situations. This convergence produces varieties intermediate between
H and L, the H here being English and the L being creole. (Devonish 2003: 159)
Figure 5. Range of the Creole continuum covered by the speech of Pollard’s informant
Bambi (Pollard 1978: 21)
Peter Auer stresses repeatedly that in any analysis of CS, it is essential that we orient toward code juxtapositions as perceived by the speakers – or for the present
case: writers – more than toward linguists’ definitions of ‘code’ (e.g. 1998b; 1999).
“A methodology to prove participants’ orientation at the juxtaposition is […] to
show that it is used as a contextualization cue (i.e. that it is ‘functional’)” (Auer
1999: 312). From such a speaker-centered perspective, it patently suggests itself
that Jamaicans see their code inventory as binary, not as a gradual cline between
two poles.
In analytical practice, the speaker’s perspective is represented by the analyst’s
interpretation, a defining trait of qualitative textual analysis (Herring 2004). It can
be partly verified by checking back with informants and having them evaluate the
analyst’s interpretation. I subjected my own classification of codes in the corpus
as either ‘English’ or ‘Patois’ to three of the informants’ judgments for the total of
the e-mail material supplied by each of them. It was encouraging to note that my
assessments proved identical to theirs.
Both linguistic and ethnographic research provide support for the notion that Jamaican speakers model their processes of code-selection as choices between either
one code or the other. The continuum is a descriptive device used for the representation of collective language use by the community. Although diglossia models
complementary functions and the continuum is a descriptive device based on lin-
The Creole continuum and CMC
guistic structure, there is still disagreement about how accurately diglossia actually
describes the Jamaican situation.
As outlined in 1.3.1.1 above, native-speaker linguists from the Caribbean are
more likely to favor the diglossia model, or other binary models, than outsider
linguists. Early work on Jamaican CS stresses the binary nature of the linguistic
resources for speech. Velma Pollard, a native speaker of JamC and JamE, describes
“the social rationale behind individual code-switching” (Pollard 1978: 18), but reconciles the model of a continuum with CS, arguing that CS can take place at various locations on the scale of the continuum, depending on a speaker’s individual
proficiency. However, she points out that any given Jamaican speaker has a mental
representation of a two-part, non-continuous linguistic system and sees him- or
herself as speaking either JamC or JamE at any given time.
Similarly, Lawton (1980), analyzing CS in Jamaican fiction and advertising,
states that in their speech, Jamaicans always intend to produce either one code or
the other, and takes a strongly critical look at the continuum model, going so far
even as to dismiss it entirely and to suggest a “two-language system” as a more accurate model (211).
Lawton argues that as well as being the fundamental characteristic of Jamaicans’ cognitive models of their code inventory, the dichotomy between JamC and
JamE is the defining feature of Jamaican public language. It underlies all language
performance, and intermediate varieties between JamC and JamE are results of
interference between the two systems, as in the case of an individual’s imperfect
command of JamE that leads to a mesolectal variety. They are not, Lawton argues,
justification for modeling Jamaican language resources as a continuum.
Variationist studies such as Patrick (1999) for Jamaica, Winford (1993) and Winer
(1993) for Trinidad, and Rickford (1987) and Satyanath (1991) for Guyana, contradict
Lawton’s assessment by demonstrating the validity of the continuum.55 DeCamp was
aware that the concept of the continuum stood in opposition to many native speakers’
perceptions.
Many Jamaicans persist in the myth that there are only two varieties: the patois
and the standard. But one speaker’s attempt at the broad patois may be closer to
the standard end of the spectrum than is another speaker’s attempt at the standard. (DeCamp 1971: 350)
Sand observes in a similar argument:
Native speaker perception may be important to explain social pressure and motivation for linguistic accommodation, but it cannot serve as an argument against
the notion of the creole continuum. (Sand 1999: 56)
35
As the data analysis will show, however, native speaker perception is central to
how Jamaican writers make use of their code inventory in CMC. Most Jamaicans
see a clear division between ‘English’ and ‘non-English,’ which they may refer to by
any one of a number of different terms, including Patois, broken/bad/corrupt English,
dialect, etc. (Shields-Brodber 1997: 58; Wassink 1999; Devonish 2003: 159).
Ethnographic research, carried out during data collection for this study,56 revealed that the code accepted as “English” may include slight markers of creolization, though mostly reductive features such as unmarking and ellipsis, but no
overt structural features.57
One highly and internationally educated speaker, giving an unscripted public
talk which I recorded during fieldwork for the Jamaican component of the International Corpus of English (on which see Mair 1992), used such reductive creolisms on several occasions in the course of 45 minutes of speaking. I asked him
whether he considered this sentence, spoken by him in his recording, to be already
Patois or still English:
women Ø more and more entering the work force, that trend Ø even more important here than in the United States
He replied: “That’s not dialect. It’s English. It’s just a kind of relaxed speech.” He
said the same for instances of plural unmarking which occurred in his speech. In
their self-assessments, informants generally considered only those passages to be
Creole that showed positive presence of creole features, and not only reductive
features.
This observation is fully in keeping with Allsopp’s description of “informal”
Caribbean English in his DCEU:
accepted as familiar; chosen as part of usually well-structured, casual, relaxed
speech, but sometimes characterized by morphological and syntactic reductions
of English structure and other remainder features of decreolization. (Allsopp
1996: lvi)
Whether isolated lexical items derived from Creole function as creole markers58
or are acceptable to native speakers as part of the JamE code cannot be decided
in general, but depends on the lexeme in question. Sand (1999: 77–110) proposes
a classification of lexical Jamaicanisms in English into “transparent” vs. “opaque
lexical features.” Among the opaque features are lexemes included in the StE lexicon which, in JamE/JamC, may show semantic differences, special connotations,
or special usages. Writers may in some instances not be aware of the specific Jamaicanness of such features, and many are probably acceptable even in Educated
Jamaican English (EJE, cf. its idiosyncratic prepositional uses such as from in the
meaning of ISE since, Shields 1989; Mair 1992: 88). Transparent lexical Jamaican-
isms need not automatically function as creole markers. Mair (2002) proposes in
his study of creolisms in written JamE a classification according to four parameters, all of which have an impact on whether native speakers would consider a
form to be acceptable in JamE, or as marking a unit as JamC. These four criteria,
illustrated with examples in Table 2, are: conscious vs. unconscious use, degree of
mediation, contextual effect, replacing “international” synonym/alternative. The
third of these criteria is based on Allsopp’s classification, proposed in his DCEU
(1996: lvi), and is probably the category most firmly based on native speaker judgment of forms. Its values are ‘formal,’ ‘informal,’ ‘anti-formal,’ and ‘erroneous or
disapproved.’
Thus, despite possible complications in the judgment of individual lexical
forms, evidence on the whole is strong that native speakers of JamC and JamE
understand their linguistic repertoire to be a binary set of codes, not a continuum.
Even among educated speakers, a certain amount of reductive creolisms is tolerated within the part of the code inventory of speech that is defined as ‘English.’ In
the code which native speakers define as ‘Patois,’ great variation is actually present
between the upper mesolect and the basilect – depending, of course, on each
speaker’s idiolectal stylistic preferences.
The informants who supplied material for COJEC have a high competence in
Jamaica’s standard variety of English compared to the rest of Jamaica’s population.
Students at UWI are required to take English language courses at the beginning of
their studies, which focus on standard English in writing and speaking. This exposure to the standard is not shared by Jamaicans who do not receive higher education. If reductive creolisms enter the informants’ use of English in CMC, this is
very unlikely to be owed to a lack of familiarity with the rules of standard English,
but because using this “relaxed speech” register of English is seen as acceptable in
CMC, a text type that generally tolerates very high degrees of informality.
The cognitive model which native speakers have for the relationship between English and Patois sheds light on why English and Patois dominantly occur as separate
codes in the CMC data. To represent gradual shifting from one code into, or toward, the other in writing is not only a difficult task given the absence of phonology and prosody.59 It also appears that in speech, only switching is a consciously
employed stylistic strategy, and is therefore represented in writing.
To illustrate the difference between the use of light Creole influences upon English
(in the form of reductive creolisms) and codeswitching, I present one writer’s use
of both forms of style variation.
The writer chosen, Cynthia, supplied 11 messages to the corpus. Cynthia uses
standard and reduced forms in close proximity to each other. Here is one sentence
37
38
containing two sites for the copula in StE of which one is realized and the other
is not:
[…] Have fun shopping, I Ø only sorry I am
not there to help in that department. […]
m# 012–17
Table 2. A typology of creolisms in written JamE (Mair 2002: 42)
form
probably used
jerk pork
‘jerked pork’
degree of
mediation
contextual
effect
replacing ‘international’
synonym/alternative?
unconsciously
direct
neutral/
informal
yes
yard
‘[poor] dwelling’
consciously
direct
informal
no
talawa
‘sturdy, strong’
consciously
direct
anti-formal
no
employed to
‘employed by/with’
unconsciously
indirect
neutral/
informal
yes
for a hundred years
everyone knows
‘…has known’
unconsciously
indirect
informal
no
it can’t stop
‘can’t be stopped’
consciously
direct
anti-formal
no
Similarly, the following example shows three forms of regularly marked past cooccurring with Ø-past, as well as two unmarked third person singular present
forms, all within one sentence:
[…] She don’t even remember if she send over
the info to Prof. Jones that I got upset with
her because I spoke to her already and she
say she got it. […]
m# 012–029
The reduced forms are not the preferred forms in Cynthia’s writing, as Table 3
shows. The acrolectal variant always dominates. I counted reduced features in
all of Cynthia’s messages, which have a total volume of 1113 words. I chose the
variables -ed (including adjectival use of participles), inflectional -s with verbs and
nouns (including possessive -s), and the copula be. All of these have an overt variant – the acrolectal variant according to the rules of StE – and a zero variant based
on the influence of JamC grammar.60 Table 3 summarizes the results.
As the counts suggest, Cynthia uses zero-forms sparingly, and not every paragraph
contains them. In fact, they occur in clusters, i.e. some passages contain more reduced forms than others. However, even in such passages, the zero-forms are not
dominant, as the regular forms of StE prevail. Despite the obvious incongruity of
the reduced forms with StE grammar, they do not constitute codeswitches. If they
occur unaccompanied by any overt Creole feature, they must be understood as
style shifts within the English code.
Table 3. One writer’s use of deletion for -ed, -s, and be in English passages
-ed
-s
be
contexts
considered
verbal inflection for past/participle, including adjectival
use
noun and verb
inflection
all, including auxiliary and full verb
use
sample sites
called, cooked, sent, told
the things, my mother’s
car, she sends
I am sorry, they’re
going to come, she’s
asking
N=
28
28
44
deleted forms
6
3
11
deletion rate
21.43%
10.71%
25%
Cynthia’s material also contains six instances of full codeswitches into Patois.
These are insertions in which not only Creole unmarking is employed, but also
other markers such as Creole pronouns instead of the StE pronoun system, Creole
articles, lexical items, etc. (Passages thus identified as Patois were not included in
the count of reductive creolisms above.) This is one example of a codeswitch:
Hi Laura:
Seen, I will mail the ref to you on Monday, as I put it away
safely at home. Too much changes a gwane here, so I try not
There are too many changes going on here,
to keep personal things in my drawer (laugh).
5 […]
m# 012–017
sj
Referral
39
Returning to the question at hand, it can be said that the adaptation of mesolectal
and basilectal forms for use in CMC has generally not preserved the ordered and
small transitions of the spoken continuum, but replaced them with two separate
codes which are in principle easy to distinguish, even if occasional difficulties or
overlaps are encountered in individual lects.
Nonetheless, limited style variation within the Patois and English codes occur.
The participant-centered, discourse-analytical perspective that is necessary in the
qualitative analysis of codeswitching justifies the modeling of the informants’ code
repertoire as binary. Any external, structural description of the language material
contained in the corpus would need to model variation in the data more subtly,
even if it is no straight reflection of the creole continuum of speech. For example,
a structural description would have to account for the differences in creoleness
between different writers’ usages, model a difference between English containing
slight mesolectal marking and English that is fully in keeping with the rules of ISE,
etc. If any more than two stylistic levels were to be designated in such a model,
which would necessarily be an arbitrary act, they would at least have to designate
a formal and an informal English code plus an English code including reductive
creolisms, and at least one upper mesolectal and a more basilectal level of Patois.
Such a model would not be useful in a discourse-analytical perspective for the
reasons stated above.
2.2 Has a new variety of Jamaican English evolved in CMC?
Mair sees “the emergence of a hybrid form of written Creolised English which is
modelled on the spoken Creole-English continuum” (Mair 2003b: 144) in CMC as
a process already completed.
It can be said with certainty that my data show the situation in e-mail to be
fundamentally different from speech. Standard English is by far the dominant code
in quantitative terms in practically all e-mails, even in exchanges among friends
and in intimate relations. This is clearly not the case in speech. Two closely related
ethnographic factors contribute to this dominance of the standard even in e-mail,
a medium with a tolerance for informality of register that is unparalleled in the
history of written genres.
First, Jamaicans are introduced to writing in the English language, not in Patois, even though Patois is the first language for the great majority of Jamaicans (cf.
e.g. Roberts 1988; Pollard 1998). An important goal of Jamaican school education has traditionally been to teach students to write “good” English, free of Patois
influence. Despite efforts in recent years to adapt educational policy in Jamaica
toward greater tolerance for Creole as a legitimate local language (cf. Devonish
2001; Devonish 2003), the majority of Jamaicans are still most comfortable writing
in standard English (Devonish 1996b; Cooper 2000). It may well be a reflection of
the higher prestige of the standard compared to Creole that Jamaicans are obviously more comfortable writing in the standard.
Second, writing the creole poses problems for many writers because of the lack
of any agreed-upon orthographic standard. Writers are usually forced to rely upon
instinct and creativity in transcribing creole lexemes, which is a considerably more
demanding task than writing a familiar standardized language.
Instead of the “written Creolised English which is modelled on the spoken
Creole-English continuum” which Mair speaks of as a new linguistic variety found
in CMC, we can more specifically speak of a new functional distribution among a
binary set of resources: English, a quantitatively dominant, unmarked code, and
Patois, an additional marked code. A minor innovation lies in the fact that in the
English code, a considerable amount of informality, and even reductive creolisms,
are tolerated. Also, the new electronic media have initiated a new development by
providing the first-ever forum for the use of Patois in writing by a considerable
number of people, which is even leading to grassroots tendencies of orthographic standardizations as shown in Hinrichs (2004) and Deuber & Hinrichs (2006).
More fundamentally, CMC has brought about a new functional distribution between English and Patois in writing, with Patois having surrendered the primacy
it holds in informal communication in speech to English. The creole continuum in
this domain is being replaced by a two-part set of stylized codes, and with a new
emphasis on codeswitching practices emerging.
A major difference exists between CS in written data from Jamaica and in the data
analyzed in previous studies of CS in writing that have appeared to date. These previous studies have for the most part pointed to similarities between CS behavior in
speech and in writing.61 The main difference between their corpora and mine is, of
course, that they all studied CS between two standard languages,62 while my Jamaican data reflects CS between a standard and a closely related vernacular language.
Most importantly, in the previous studies no skew can be attested in the rough
quantitative relationships between codes in speech versus in writing. In the data at
hand, however, much more English is used than in speech. English is unquestionably the unmarked, baseline code in the CMC material, which cannot be said for
speech. Such differences between my study and those using data only from standardized languages are principally due to the lack of a writing standard for JamC.
41
chapter 3
How the situation determines code choice –
a “simple, almost one-to-one relationship”?
3.1 Introduction
Chapters 4 and 5 will take a close look at CS used as a contextualization cue in
Jamaican CMC discourse. The central analytical goal is to find out more about the
metapragmatic values that writers convey through CS, and thus to describe the
functions that Patois performs in this new type of discourse.
However, I will begin the analysis with the discussion of situational CS in this
chapter. In the work of John J. Gumperz, situational switches are fundamentally
different from those that function as contextualization cues: they are consequences
of changes within the conversational setup, and happen without the will of the
participants. In situational CS, there is “a simple, almost one-to-one relationship
between language usage and social context” (Gumperz 1982: 61). Because of the
absence of agency and volition in its original definition, this concept is no longer
prominent in CS studies. However, it is still worthwhile to examine the correlations between aspects of the exterior conversational context – specifically setting,
topic, and addressee – and the corresponding code in the material, even if any
notion of automaticity in these connections is treated with reservation. Therefore,
with all due caution, my analysis begins with a brief exploration of ‘situational
codeswitching.’
Patois enters e-mail discourse in non-random CS behavior. Jamaicans use Patois
in writing only when they have a reason to do so, though there certainly are a large
number of possible reasons. This chapter will attempt to present them systematically. The difference from speech is that JamC is almost always the marked choice
in CMC. The advent of CMC has brought a great expansion of the written domains
of use for Patois and nurtured the development of some tendencies of grassroots
standardization in the area of Creole orthography (Hinrichs 2004; Deuber & Hinrichs 2006). But it will not lead to the Creole establishing itself as a written language independent from English.
The practice of the spoken continuum underlies CS practices, in which greater
and smaller intra-individual style variation between English and Patois is possible. However, most individuals do not vary freely along the continuum. As my
examples will show, the codes employed tend to be stylized so that it is always clear
which one the writer intends to use – English or Patois. There is inter-individual
variation in the degree of creoleness with which the code “Patois” is created, but
individual writers typically target one fairly consistent level of creoleness for their
Patois code, and an acrolectal, largely creole-free variety of English for their English code. The English they use may contain signs of mesolectal interference, but
the distinction between it and the Creole code will remain evident.
In addition to these two main codes, some writers employ additional registers. Within the realm of the “English” code, a very formal and relatively focused
standard variety exists,63 but also a very relaxed and informal variety modeled on
colloquial AmE.64
By codeswitching, I understand a clear change from one structural system to another. Because of the non-discrete relationship of English and Patois on the speech
continuum, this should be more precisely defined as “a movement along the continuum on several levels of linguistic analysis, which leaves the writer’s intention to
switch to a different structural system beyond doubt.” I considered smaller changes
to be merely style shifts. For example, an insertion of only a Creole lexical item, or
only one noun phrase, but unaccompanied by any other structural adaptations in
the rest of the sentence, is usually considered only a slight style shift.65
In this chapter and the two that follow, I intend to explain codeswitching behavior in the data, guided by the central questions of how Patois and English are
functionally related to each other in Jamaican e-mail, and where the essential differences between speech and e-mail lie in this area. The approach is comprehensive: it presents results of an inductive, qualitative analysis of all codeswitches in
the material, progressing along a typology of CS meanings. They are ordered from
‘contrastive’ to ‘inherent’ meanings of switches66 and also include many of those
that have been covered by major frameworks designed for the qualitative analysis
of CS. While John J. Gumperz’s approach to the stylistic functions of CS has covered mostly CS functions in the less conscious area of the continuum, the most
planned types of CS have hardly been studied. Sebba & Wootton (1998) is a very
useful pioneering study of such types of CS use (based on conversational data
from adolescent Caribbeans in London).
3.2 Situational codeswitching in the corpus
The concept of situational CS has been among the more intensely disputed contributions made by Gumperz to the world of CS research; more specifically, the
conceptual separation of ‘situational’ from ‘metaphorical’ CS in his framework has
How the situation determines code choice – a “simple, almost one-to-one relationship”?
been questioned.67 In his original model, the two types of metaphorical and situational CS are dichotomous. The dividing criterion between the two is the presence or absence of intentionality in speakers’ selections of codes: metaphorical CS
is basically intentional, while situational codeswitches are defined as reactions of a
speaker to changes in conversational setting, topic, or addressee (Blom & Gumperz
1972). Two of these do not occur within e-mails due to the nature of the medium,
but could be considered as a factor in variation across e-mails.68 Changes of topic,
however, do occur naturally in e-mail. If several e-mail messages by the same writer are considered, observations about addressee-related intra-speaker code variation can be made as well.
The essential problem with the concept of situational CS that has been noted
in the literature is that even code selections which are made in reaction to a change
in setting, topic, or addressee involve some element of speaker volition. It is any
speaker’s choice whether he or she wishes to comply with the expectations surrounding a change of conversational setup or not. For example, there does seem to
be a natural correlation of intimate addressees with an informal style on the one
hand, and respectable and high-ranking addressees with formal style on the other.
However, in any situation where a personal friend as addressee is exchanged for a
person of rank and respectability, the speaker adapts their speech style out of their
own will and in their very own personal interest, no matter how expectable such a
behavior may be.
Furthermore, many aspects of these relevant parameters can be renegotiated
in the course of conversation. Auer writes with reference to Gumperz’s concept of
situational CS that
it is based on an odd, too confining conception of ‘the situation’ – something like a
cage, chosen by the co-participants themselves, but inescapable as soon as the cage
door is locked (i.e., the situation defined). This is certainly not an adequate image: ‘the
social situation’ is something which is accomplished by co-participants […] through
their interacting they continuously produce frames for subsequent activities, which
in turn create new frames. Thus, every turn, every utterance changes some features
of the situation and maintains or re-establishes others. (Auer 1984: 90)
To Auer, there is “no reason then to draw a line between two categories of codeswitching.” There is merely a continuum between parameters of the situation that
are harder to negotiate and those that are easily renegotiated, i.e. there are some
predictable and reliable connections between choice of a certain code and aspects
of the situation, and some less reliable connections. But since, for instance, switches
of a stylistic type, defined as ‘metaphorical’ by Gumperz, can help redefine aspects
of the situation, it would make little sense to conceptually separate the two types.69
45
This dynamic view of situation that Auer puts forth ties in with a dynamic
view of identity, which is central to the analysis of CS and identity. Antaki et al.
(1996) provide a good illustrative example of the fluidity of situational parameters.
In their study, a young, newly-qualified doctor did not consistently employ the
social identity of ‘doctor, medical expert’ in conversations with his friends. Despite
a lot of talk about illnesses and medical exams, the identity of the ‘doctor’ only appeared very late into the conversation, and other conversational modes were often
preferred before that.
In my analysis of situational CS, I will try to highlight some of the more reliable
and predictable connections between code choice and aspects of the situation.
Similarly, some changes of setting are likely, but by no means certain, to affect
discourse behavior. Across the informant group a quantitative increase in Patois
use – manifested in the number of codeswitches and, hence, the total words of Patois used – can be noted that is caused by one or both participants being away from
Jamaica. This phenomenon is of course not situational CS in the original sense of
individual codeswitches being triggered on the micro-level by a concrete change
in conversational setting. However, it represents a correlation on a rather more
abstract level between situation, understood as the context of text production, and
code use that is worth exploring.
As particularly clear examples illustrating situational parameters that considerably
increase the likelihood of Patois being used, there are three writers in the corpus
who use no Patois when writing from Jamaica to someone in Jamaica, but turn to it
in messages written home from abroad. Informant 002 supplied 20 messages written by himself, of which the final one was written from abroad to friends at home.
It is the only one which contains any Creole – and rather long stretches of it. In a
similarly close correlation between the use of Jamaican language material and being
away from home, informant 026 begins his first message home from a work-stay of
several weeks in Florida with a tongue-in-cheek use of Rastafarian rhetoric:
(1)
Well here I am in Babylon and LAAAWD I ready
to get back home. I started workin couple
days ago with this business place in the
area, its nothin much, but I get paid. […]
m# 026–13
Rastafarians see themselves as children of Israel who live in Babylon against their
will. The Rasta use of the term Babylon, which is polysemous and can mean, among
other things, ‘the system,’ ‘the USA,’ but also ‘policeman,’70 is one of many elements
of Dread Talk71 that have penetrated Jamaican youth language. While this message
contains no fully Patois material, the reference to Rastafarianism as a clear marker
of Jamaican pop culture serves to signal Jamaican identity. In subsequent messages, the writer continues this use of Dread Talk elements but also switches into
Patois for stretches of up to several sentences.
The inclination of Jamaicans to use more Patois while abroad is pervasive.72
It is made explicit by one writer, who writes from Jamaica to her sister, who is
conducting studies in South America. The message makes explicit reference to a
Jamaican’s need for Patois while abroad:
(2)
A wah a gwan? mi know seh yu nuh have no body over deh a
What’s up? I know that you have nobody over there to
chat patios, so just fi mek sure seh when yu come back a ja
talk Patois with, so just to make sure that when you return to Jamaica
yu still know how fi dwit mi agi yu likkle.
you still know how to do it I’ll write you a little.
[…]
m# 003–10
As a final observation on this correlation between code use and situation, a comparison between the e-mails of the primary corpus and the discussion forum data
is telling. The discussion forums are frequented mostly by Jamaicans living outside
of Jamaica, whereas the majority of e-mails were sent within Jamaica. Consequently, the use of Patois in forums seems to be more loving and careful, and writers
make more of a conscious effort in producing written versions of Patois. For example, a topic that has come up several times in discussion threads in the few years
since I started observing them is Jamaican proverbs and sayings, with participants
naming traditional proverbs they know in the Patois version73 and typically indulging in memories of older family members who used to say them.74
Both proverbs and the conversational topic of proverbs are rare in the student
e-mails. There are three instances of proverbs in the e-mails: “you must be careful
how ‘yuh rub butter inna puss mouth’” (m# 012–20), “Dem gi mi baskit fi carry water!” (m# 002–10), “nah tek sand to the beach!” (m# 011–03). All of them are Patois
insertions into otherwise StE writing. If the category of ‘proverbs and sayings’ is
extended to include ‘typically Jamaican topoi,’ one example is worth mentioning.
47
(3)
Nutting nah gwan. Same ole same ole. Life soon get better
Nothing’s happening. Same old, same old.
though.
Say hello to your sisters. LOVE Karen
m# 015–02
sj
re: what’s going on..75
Of particular interest here is the sentence “Life soon get better though.” It constitutes one of many ways of verbalizing a particularly Jamaican sentiment: “Life
soon get better” indicates optimism in a difficult situation; as one informant paraphrases in StE: “Life is tough but I am surviving.”76 This stance is very frequently
encountered and enters many conversations as a comment on hardships of all
kinds. Alternative ways of expressing the same idea that are also frequently used
in spoken Jamaican are: “Tings soon get betta,” “A jus so life go more time, but
one day one day…,” or “Maasa God soon come back.” Different possible wordings
of this topos exist in the Jamaican cultural space, rather than one fixed one, as is
usually the case with proverbs. Of these alternatives, the writer did not choose the
most strongly Creole one, but decided on a wording with no overt creolism, using English grammar with only verbal tense marking deleted. This relaxed type of
reference to Jamaican linguistic tradition is much less frequent in the discussion
forum data.
Table 4. A quantitative comparison of Patois use in samplers of the two
COJEC-subcorpora
e-mails
discussion forums
sample size in
number of words
4188
6078
words of Patois used
835
2410
number of Patois insertions
49
145
portion of sample
written in Patois
19.94%
39.65%
average length of
Patois insertions
17.04 words
16.62 words
Georgakopoulou made the parallel observation that the construction and negotiation of participants’ “shared contact identities” (2004) was a prominent factor
governing both the structure and the selection of content in e-mail interactions
among Greeks living in England. The shared experience of living in the diaspora
seems to be a powerful force leading to the use of online interactions in defining
and continually reconstructing one’s non-mainstream identity in the Greek-English e-mails as well as the Jamaican discussion forums (cf. Karim 2003 for studies
of online diasporae worldwide).
In the discussion forum posts, there are more switched passages in Patois than
in the e-mails. On the whole, more Patois is used in the discussion forum data
than in the e-mails, even though in both text types, English is indisputably the
unmarked code for all purposes. This is reflected in the findings of a quantification carried out on samples of the two subcorpora. I created a smaller subcorpus
of e-mails which included the first e-mail by each writer in which Patois was used.
That means that no purely StE messages were included, because writers may have
avoided CS for any number of reasons and I was interested only in quantifying
material in which CS actually occurred. For the discussion forums, I decided to use
a larger sample because the discussion forum section of COJEC is also larger than
the e-mail-section. Here I also excluded all posts in which only English was used.
Even though it is unproblematic to distinguish between Patois and English
according to the criteria laid out in chapter 2.1, this quantitative probe reminds
one of the “difficulty to quantify CS in any meaningful way,” which Myers-Scotton
writes of (1997: 218): the use of CS is variable according to a number of factors,
and even if this quantification were based on very large samples, any individual
may have very good reasons to display a substantially divergent quantitative distribution of codes. However, the findings displayed in Table 4 support the impression
that Patois use occurs in shorter insertions, but on the whole significantly more
frequently in discussion forums than in e-mails. The reason for the relatively small
difference between the e-mail and discussion forum subcorpora for average length
of Patois insertions is that in the sample of discussion forum data, two topics were
addressed that were closely related to Patois material. In one thread, participants
simply listed Jamaican proverbs for a substantial number of contributions, and in
another, participants addressed stereotypical differences between Jamaicans and
the rest of the world. Both topics were treated in formulaic posts that were exclusively in Patois, i.e. the posts consisted (as in the first case) only of a proverb, or
only of humorous, hypothetical statements of this pattern:
[…]
yuh eva see Jamaicans a climb mountain wid flag and claim
Have you ever seen Jamaicans climb a mountain with a flag and claim
victory when dem reach di top?
victory when they reached the top?
49
yuh ever see we ah hang out inna di miggle of di Amazon
Have you ever seen us hang out in the middle of the Amazon
5 jungle?
jungle?
yuh ever see we a jump outta plane wid one parachute or a
Have you ever seen us jump out of a plane with a parachute
boast seh we going bungee jumping next Sunday?
or boast that we’re going bungee jumping next Sunday?
[…]
Yuh eva hear a Jamaican man tell him ooman seh “Honey,
Have you ever heard a Jamaican man tell his wife,
10 you can take the car to work today, mi will tek di bus”?
I’ll take the bus
p#
a-01–01
Yuh eva hear a J’can man seh, “My best friend is a batty
Have you ever heard a Jamaican man say, “My best friend is
man, and mi nuh shame fi seh so??????”
gay, and I’m not ashamed to say so?”
Yuh eva hear a J’can seh, “bwoy, di is far too much
Have you ever heard a Jamaican say, “boy, there’s far too many
whites for me; bring sinting fi chase it??????”
whites around for me, get me something to chase them
p#
a-01–02
A possible reason for the more overt use of elements of Jamaican folk tradition in
discussion forums, compared to e-mails, may lie in the fact that interaction on the
internet is more public than in e-mail. Even though the discussion boards are perceived as purely Jamaican, interaction there is notably less private than in e-mail.
Recipients in the latter are controlled, while discussion boards are theoretically
open to anybody. Interaction on the boards is perceived as exclusively among Jamaicans, i.e. communication is not geared to the presence of non-Jamaican ‘overhearers’ (cf. Bell 1984; 2001), but causes a particularly focused type of performance of Jamaicanness by participants, which does not occur in the more private
interactions found in e-mail. While in the discussion forums, Patois use is more
pervasive and proverbs are often employed and discussed, e-mails employ less direct and more subtle ways of constructing Jamaican identity (cf. section 5.3).
Intra-individual variation according to addressee is documented well by informants who contributed several e-mails to addressees of different social status
to the corpus. Informant Henry supplied three messages that represent a style
continuum. The most formal code, English, is used with his employer, who is a
department head in the Jamaican Ministry of Commerce, Science and Technology. He uses an intermediate style level with a female friend who also works at the
ministry, answering her question how he was doing. The least formal code, Patois,
is used with an addressee group of male friends from university (which Henry also
attended at the same time as working in the Ministry). He reports to them what
happened between him and a girl he met at a party the previous weekend in the
presence of his friends (namely, “nutten”). These messages are reproduced here,
the first one abridged:
(4)
Mr Johnson,
I just read an article from the Symantec
(Norton) site that seems to be very
disturbing. […] I cannot emphasise
enough the need for us to start work on the
user policy here at the Ministry. […]
m#
021–01
(5)
Everything is fine. I’m just a little
overworked (as usual). I had a problem at
Anti-dumping yesterday and so
after class I had to go back to sort it out.
Didn’t leave the bloody place till 12:30 or
so :-(
Anyhoo, I’m ok now. Thanks for asking.
m#
021–02
(6)
By the way, nutten neva gwaan wid Shayzan.
nothing happened with Shayzan.
W went to another party afterwards and didn’t
leave until after 4 or so. She decided to go
home after that. There will be other times
however..... hahahaha
Henry
m# 021–04
51
52
The first, rather official e-mail uses StE from the highest end of the Jamaican continuum, a specialist vocabulary, and several politeness markers, such as last-name
address, or hedging as a way of making the call for action less direct and imposing.
It has all textual properties of a conservative, paper-written letter in a professional
context. (5) is written to a colleague at the ministry who is also a friend of the
writer. There is still no use of Patois in this message, but the English used is notably
less formal than in (4): there is no overt form of address at the start of the message,
a colloquial intensifier (bloody) is used, and the rather informal graphic device
of an ‘emoticon’ is used (cf. Crystal 2001: 37). Finally, (6) is addressed to friends
outside of the workplace. The writers’ relationship to them is entirely private and
non-professional. Here, Patois enters the writer’s discourse in a codeswitch for the
main clause of the first sentence.
Generally, writers choose a formal, acrolectal style with superior addressees.
All the messages included in the corpus which informants wrote to a professor,
pastor, employer, or other professional relations, are kept in a strictly formal,
standard variety of English. The style on the most formal end of the continuum is
much more focused than the one used with equals. In messages to peers, friends,
colleagues, family members etc., a greater variety of style levels can be encountered. Different codes and registers co-occur within the same e-mail messages only
when the participants’ relationship is in some way friendly, non-official, and when
they interact as equals. Patois, i.e. the least formal code available to Jamaicans, is
only used in the latter kinds of interactions.
Where topic-related CS is concerned, the question is whether any correlation between a topic and a code can be discerned at all. The corpus warrants only one
claim as to any type of a fixed connection between a topic and a code: religious
matters are never discussed in Patois. Any mention of God, belief, prayer, etc. is
made in an intentionally acrolectal code, and writers who were using a different,
less formal style or code before the change of topic correct their style for as long as
their discourse dwells on this topic.77
Two examples may suffice to illustrate this point:
(7)
[…] Dem man yah smoke to much, man. Dem bret smell like
The men here smoke too much, man. Their breath smells like
urine, mi caan tek i at aal. Neways, mi kuul
urine, I can’t take it at all. Anyway, I’m doing fine
and of course i am holding on to my God, there’s no other
way and no other choice, especially seeing that i am so far
5 away.
[…]
m# 001–02
(8)
[…] Yeah man, i am ok and i have met some wonderful people,
dem sey wi a family, dem nat evn waan mi fi kom bak a
they say we are family, they don’t even want me to go back to
Jamaica. Sey mi cudda stay an mi wouldnt even haffi
Jamaica. They’re saying I could stay and wouldn’t even
work...
u Know how people stay wen dem all excited eh.
have to work you know how people get when they are all excited
5 I am here, time is going rather quickly and before you
blink i will be back in Jamaica. thing is, i need to make
sure i get as much as possible done in the time i have
left without going crazy. Well, I know that God is with
me and he will see me thru. I sleep well at nights, […]
m# 003–11
The situations of both writers are quite similar: both are abroad and working; the
writer in (7) is teaching school in Paris, while the one in (4) is conducting linguistic field research in a Creole-speaking community in South America. Both writers
address the topic of God as a guide in a place so far away from home.
Example (7) shows an abrupt intrasentential change of codes along with the
thematic shift toward God. In the other example, two sentences in English lie between a Creole passage and the mentioning of God. The correlation between religious topics and the use of standard English becomes clear in both examples.
Religious matters are addressed in 12 of the e-mails contained in the corpus
(not counting, of course, interjections such as “Oh God”). There are no more striking topic-related codeswitches such as that in (7), but the religious topic is tied exclusively to English in all of these messages. Ten of these messages employ CS, which
indicates that the writers were open to using Patois when they felt it was felt appropriate, but this was apparently never the case with the topic of God and religion.
The relationship between religion and code choice may is more complex in
everyday reality in Jamaica than the data reflect. In churches, creole use may occur,
as Joseph Farquhason reports (p.c.) and I have observed. However, an unwritten
rule to use one’s best version of English within the church seems to be widely accepted.78 Depending on the average level of education within a congregation, more
strongly creolized English is likely to occur in churches of some denominations
than in others. For example, Farquharson estimates that the English produced in
53
54
Anglican, Catholic, and Seventh-Day Adventist services is noticeably more acrolectal than that encountered in Pentecostal, Revivalist, or Apostolic churches.
Altogether, churchgoers agree that English is the language of religion. To illustrate, I quote from a personal e-mail to me from Farquharson:
There are even speakers of [JamC] who when they pray switch to a King James
variety of English with Thy, Thou, whence, cometh, doth, etc. […] Most view the language [i.e. Early Modern English] as elegant and I would not be surprised if many
believe that that the words there are the very words of God, Moses, etc.
On the issue of the translation of the Bible into JamC, which is available from the
Bible Society of the West Indies (UBS 1990) and was welcomed by many creole
linguists, he reports:
There was much opposition to translating the Bible into [JamC], and that is because many persons see it as irreverent to translate God into a non-language, and
a language used mostly for comedy. On the few occasions where I have heard the
Bible Society’s translation read at services, it has generated laughter. At the last
Carol Service I attended, an elderly lady uttered ‘Foolishness!’ when the scripture
was being read in [JamC].
For COJEC, the strict use of StE for religious topics is possible because all writers
have a good command of both English and Patois in writing. The code distribution
for this topic as found in the data does not reflect reality as actually encountered in
Jamaican churches, because some creolized English may occur there, but it reflects
the determination among most Jamaican churchgoers that English is the language
of religion.
A long-standing conceptual opposition in CS studies is the designation of ‘we’and ‘they’ codes (Gumperz 1982: 88). Conversational topics relating to emotion,
the interpersonal sphere, or intimate relations, in short: topics that entail a high
degree of personal involvement, tend to be discussed in a ‘we’-code, while the
‘they’-code tends to be used for outgroup communication and, correspondingly,
topics of a more general, objective, distanced nature. I will review the concept of
‘we’- and ‘they’-codes with regard to the Jamaican e-mail data in more detail in
chapter 4.2 below. In the context of situational CS, it should simply be said that
the ‘we’/’they’-model (independently of how well it fits the data at hand) does not
warrant the postulation of reliable connections between topic and code, either.
To use the putative ‘we’-code in its typical function as the medium for topics
of personal involvement is just one of several options that speakers in bilingual,
or bicodal, settings have. The use of the ‘we’-code for these topics is not obligatory
and cannot be predicted. However, when used, the ‘we’-code has certain rhetori-
cal functions, such as that of creating solidarity between speaker and listeners (or
writer and addressee), as will emerge from the discussion below.
Mair (2003b), treating posts on the jamaicans.com discussion forum, suggests
a contrast between “lukewarm” and “hot” topics, the latter leading to greater personal involvement and thus to a more pervasive use of Patois, the ‘we’-code (244).
The “lukewarm” topic in his example starts from a request for advice on how to
deal with skunks and raccoons as a homeowner in the US, made by a regular contributor to the discussion group. This conversation is carried out entirely in (colloquial American) English. By contrast, a discussion of life in Kingston leads to
the use of strong Creole by several participants, as a conflict between Jamaicans of
rural and urban origins develops.
The observation is accurate that of the two discussions I examine below, the
topic in which the ‘we’-code is used is one which promotes more personal involvement. Generally, my data deliver support for this observation. However, it should
be remembered that many discussions of “hot” topics, with potentially strong personal involvement, manage without the use of Patois. Just as well, Patois may occur in boring topics. Particularly on the jamaicans.com bulletin board examined
by Mair (2003b), from which about half of the material in the discussion group
portion of my material is taken, participants may sustain the use of Patois for long
exchanges containing large numbers of replies to an original post, for a variety of
reasons quite unrelated to the topic. For a wealth of examples from the e-mail portion of the corpus, I refer the reader to chapter 5, which deals with identity-related
CS. At this point I merely wish to give two examples from the discussion group
material to illustrate my point.
One thread discusses why most women who were given the “Miss Jamaica”
title are not black. In the words of the user “yardiegal,” who opens the floor on this
topic:
(9)
I was just on another board readings some posts on the
new Miss Jamaica Universe and what crossed my mind was
that although we are a predominantly black country we
have had few dark skin girls represent us over the years.
5 Why is that? Is dark not beautiful? Sometimes when I
watch these beauty pageants I feel really embarrased to
call myself Jamaican. I mean isn’t this kind of trend
giving dark skin sisters an inferiority complex. I just
don’t get it. I welcome your thoughts on this
p# a-03–08
55
56
This message with its pure StE sets the tone for the ensuing discussion. (There are
typographical errors, and it might be argued that “dark skin” (ll. 4, 8) would be
dark skinned in StE, but there is no ground for speaking of a true Creole interference in this post, since the lack of a regular suffix may always be due to typing
errors.) The participants argue rather heatedly, and two opposing views emerge.
One party finds that it is time a black Miss Jamaica was chosen, and that the status
quo reflects longstanding attitudes of racial hierarchy in Jamaica. The opposite
party finds that the race of the incumbent Miss Jamaica should not be an issue,
that beauty should be appreciated regardless of race, and that the reason for the
lack of a black Miss Jamaica thus far is that the very dark skinned women do not
enter the pageants out of their own accord, but that that is a problem that will take
care of itself given time.
The following post shows that the discussion does bring about considerable
disagreement among the participants:
(10)
DEMA, Girl, you are in denial. Your opinions
are short-sighted and you seem to be
concerned too much with yourself to see the
bigger picture. Please get over yourself
and open your pretty brown eyes. PLEASE!
p# a-03–16
The next post exemplifies the great personal relevance that the topic has for all
members of the discussion:
(11)
[…] i can see that you have a complex with
lighter skin people. One thing I am sure
about its that i am Jamaican and I am
phenotipically and spiritually black.
p# a-03–17
However, for the considerable length of 23 posts, containing 3679 words of text,
the discussion remains practically free of Patois. After that, the conflict subsides,
the atmosphere gets friendlier, and participants start using Patois again. But up
to that point, there is only one codeswitch (aside from two Patois exclamations,
namely “Lawd!”):
(12)
[…] I am what you would refer to as caramel complexion
but what happen to the rich chocolate girls I mean come
on. open up your eyes and realise that Jamaicans on a
whole has a skin color issue. If yu nuh have tall hair an
If you don’t have straight hair and
5 brown skin yu nuh look good. Why yu tink the whole a di
brown [i.e. light] skin, then you don’t look good. Why do you think all the
gal dem down a Jamaica a bleach. It has been hammered into
girls down in Jamaica are bleaching their skin.
their heads from day one that lighter is better. Real
slavery mentality. […]
p# a-03–10
The form “what happen” in l. 2 contains Creole unmarking, but on its own does
not qualify as a codeswitch. On the whole it may seem surprising that the more
serious treatment of the topic of race and its representation in public does not trigger the use of Patois, a potential ‘we’-code for black Jamaicans, at a much earlier
point. This distinguishing function is obviously not needed in an online discussion in which the participants form a homogeneous group in terms of racial and
national identity, and which takes place without any overhearers or referees of
different race, as is the case with London Jamaican conversations. Nonetheless,
most participants in the online discussions live in North America or England, so
that their code use outside of CMC may well be closer to the functional distribution
that Sebba sketched for London. In Caribbean diaspora communities, Patois often
serves the function of an ethnic ‘we’-code to the extent of getting exploited for this
purpose by non-Jamaican blacks, as Sebba (1993) and Rampton (1995) show. In a
homogeneously Jamaican conversation – one with all Jamaican participants which
addresses the issue of racial identity within Jamaica – Patois can hardly be used as
a racial ‘we’-code, since it is the language of all Jamaicans, including non-blacks.
Thus, we can say that in CMC among Jamaicans, it is not typical for Patois to be
used as a symbol of racial identity.
As an example of a rather lukewarm topic, the secondary corpus offers a thread
entitled “Gym time.” The user “tanya” writes the opening post:
(13)
I never thought it would be so painful to join a gym. I
attended for the first time after making my resolution in
secret this year. I picked an all womens gym thank god!
Well they put me on the threadmill and me nearly dead
I almost died
57
58
5 after half an hour. Then to work on my stomach muscles. I
had to sit and push this bar in front of my shoulders down
for two sets of twenty without allowing it to come all
the way back and click.
p# a-04–40
The writer’s resolution to open this topic in a standard, colloquial English leads to
hypercorrection in the word treadmill, in which the initial plosive is misinterpreted
as a result of interdental stopping in JamE (which is very frequent even in the most
formal acrolect as a consequence of Creole influence79), leading to the substitution
of 具t典 for the 具th典 grapheme. There is a brief Patois insertion however, for the rather
dramatic assertion that the treadmill almost killed “tanya.”
Three users respond by offering their experience. The tone of these comments
is objective and matter-of-fact, and the code used is English, e.g. “the 1st few weeks
will be hard as you settle into a routine. after that it will become second nature”
(p# a-04–43). However, all of this wisdom makes another user, “Peppa” (who has
also recently joined a gym), nervous about the negative prospects of the experience:
(14)
Tanya why did you have to go do that, I signed up with a
gym yesterday and I had planned to start tomorrow, I had
an idea that it is going to be rough but
trust mi yu mek mi fraid cause mi a tell yu
believe me, you are scaring me because I’m telling you
5 mi a di laziest (one word go so?) person wha mek,
I am the laziest (is there such a word?) person ever made,
whoi mi ded now.
Whew, you scared me to death.
Yu lucky a one year yu sign up for
You’re lucky you only signed up for one year,
cause a 2 mi sign up fa, den mi go buy up sneakers
because I signed up for two. Then I went to buy some sneakers
an clothes today. Mi tear off de tag dem,
and workout-clothes today. I tore off the tags,
10 oonu think mi can carry dem back? :-)
do you (pl.) thing I will still be able to return them? :-)
Next ting mi an instructor ago inna problem (that is if I
Next thing, the instructor and I are going to have problems with each other
show up) ‘cause from80 school days when I used to play Netball
mi could’n bend over an touch mi toe
I haven’t been able to bend over and touch my toes
even when mi fit like a fiddle. Whoi...
even when I was fit as a fiddle. Whew…
p#
a-04–44
“Peppa” here gives a short introduction to her post in StE, but for the rest of the
lament uses Patois. There is a stylistic effect to the use of this code: it underlines the
personal and emotional aspects of the account, so it occurs in a context of personal
involvement.
After this post, the discussion continues for 14 contributions straight in English. A side-branch of the discussion trails off to the topic of old high-schools in
Jamaica and possible mutual acquaintances of the participants. The topic of gyms
is apparently not exciting enough to compel the community to stick strictly with
it. Occasionally, users return to the topic, as in: “Tanya – Here is a tip that works
for me” (p# a-04–56), but the most important statements seem to have been made
at the beginning of the conversation.
This example shows that even a boring, or lukewarm, topic, in which the dominant tone of the discussion is objective, and English is used, has the potential to
lead to personal involvement. These are cases in which CS into Patois may occur.
In conclusion, I have shown that there is a clear correlation between personal style
and the relative position of the addressee to the writer, which confirms expectations. CS strategies are employed mainly with addressees of roughly the same status,
or with whom a friendly relationship is established, while social superiors are addressed in English.
Meanwhile, the correlation of codes and topic on the whole remains problematic.
Since in theory, any topic can either cause personal involvement, or be treated coolly,
it seems futile to formulate rules on correlations between any topic and a code. Even
a topic that is dominantly treated objectively may have some users codeswitching.
In such instances, a more detailed examination of the motivations underlying the
switches and the functions performed by them is usually more productive.
The next chapter deals with individual switches and the motivations underlying
the use of the different Jamaican language resources, assuming that situational
codeswitching is a basically marginal phenomenon in the data. The great exception to this statement is the topic of religion. As a reflection of the religiosity, which
is deeply ingrained in Jamaican culture, writers pay the topic of God and the surrounding themes their highest linguistic respect by consistently avoiding Patois,
and preferring acrolectal English when discussing it.
59
chapter 4
Giving contextualization cues
How writers provide context information
through code choice
4.1 ‘Metaphorical codeswitching’ in Gumperz’s model
In Gumperz’s model, the most important distinction among codeswitches is between
situational and metaphorical types. This distinction was first introduced by Blom &
Gumperz (1972) and developed over the following decade by Gumperz. Situational
CS, as discussed in chapter 3, is considered to be tied to changes in the conversational situation, and usually caused by them. There are clear relations between certain
situational parameters and one of the available codes, and correct usage is goverened
by rules and norms. These rules and norms, in turn, are known to all members of a
speech community, and used “automatic[ally]” (Gumperz 1982: 61).
Speakers can also switch codes actively and without the intention of changing the conversational situation, but of enriching it and their messages. In these
cases they do not follow a situational change, but make metaphorical use of their
competence in the social meaning of codes. This added metaphorical meaning can
help to contextualize denotational content. The great majority of codeswitches in
the e-mail corpus can be understood as an exploitation of the expressive potential
that is thus available to speakers in a creole continuum for the purpose of providing such contextualization cues.
Codeswitches can be classified according to the kind of contextual information
they add and the conversational loci in which they occur. Gumperz in his Discourse
Strategies cited six different types of such metaphorical codeswitches (1982: 75):81
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Quotations (direct quotations or reported speech)
Addressee specification (to direct a message to one of several addressees)
Interjections (or sentence filters)
Reiteration (either literally or modified)
Message qualification (e.g. sentence and verb complements)
Personalization vs. objectivization (e.g. degree of speaker involvement)
This list has been adopted and adapted many times in studies of CS that were
based on the concept of the contextualization cue. Gumperz himself considered
the list “preliminary;” nonetheless it was intended as a start toward a list “that
holds across language situations” (Gumperz 1982: 75).
Auer refined this list and argued for the inclusion of different types (1995: 120).
His typology intends to focus exclusively on conversational loci of CS, rather than
include both such loci and functions of CS, as Gumperz’s does. The inclusion of
“topic shift” as a site for metaphorical CS is a consequence of his critical reworking
of the concept of situational CS, as topic shifts are sites for situational switches in
Blom & Gumperz (1972).
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Reported speech
Change of participant constellation
Parenthesis or side-comments
Reiterations, i.e. quasi-translations
Change of activity type
Topic shift
Puns, language play, shift of ‘key’
Topicalization, topic/comment structure
Like Gumperz, Auer points out the problematic nature of such mere listings of conversational loci that are susceptible to CS. His most important points of critique are
that first, these typologies may be able to provide initial descriptive hints as to what
is going on, but will hardly help in the (more important) theoretical exploration of
why CS actually has conversational meanings. And second, he points out that such
typologies disregard sequential aspects of CS, i.e. might potentially classify a switch
from code A to code B the same way it might a switch from B to A (Auer 1995: 121).
(It is partly on this critique that Auer bases his proposal of a conversation-analytic
approach to CS, which is centrally concerned with sequentiality.)
Myers-Scotton as well is critical of such lists, which she calls “open-ended taxonomies,” as frameworks in analyzing CS.
Most other CS practitioners [besides Gumperz] have followed Gumperz’s lead, providing an unordered list of the stylistic functions of CS […] And, as in Gumperz’s
own writings, in the work of some of his followers it is often not very clear what
they intend by the functions listed for CS, or how these functions are interrelated.
For example, in Gumperz (1982: 78–81) there is no consideration how such functions as ‘objectivization’ might overlap with other functions such as ‘reiteration’.
(Myers-Scotton 1993b: 59)
Meeuwis & Blommaert in turn fault Myers-Scotton for overlooking the “theoretical aims [in Gumperz’s work] to relate communicative praxis to the construction
Giving contextualization cues: how writers provide context information through code choice
of the social order” in her criticism (1994: 392). Trying to capture all possible types
of naturally occurring codeswitches in one such typology is, in my view, indeed
doomed to failure. Due to the necessarily qualitative nature of discourse-analytical CS research, differences between the individual perspectives of researchers will
necessarily continue to lead to differences in description and the placement of
emphases on different types of switches. Therefore, these lists of CS functions can
only be truly valid within the limits of individual studies, but they can serve well to
structure the larger scope of the analyst’s interpretation of the communicative and
stylistic functions for which CS is employed.
Auer also notes that this approach suffered from the total exclusion of one
major alternative school, the one studying the structural constraints on CS.82
As one major problem of the mutual exclusion of the sociolinguistic and
structural approaches to CS research, Auer points to the lack of a place for the direction of switches in the tradition of Gumperz’s work. He argues that working with
prefabricated lists of CS types limits the analytical scope and proposes that each
codeswitch in a conversation be analyzed individually, based on all information
that is available. Generalizations and broad typologies should be produced only
inductively. His proposal is a sequential analysis of conversation.
Auer concedes that the method of sequential conversation analysis is suited
mostly for dialogue and face-to-face conversation, not so much for the monological text types of CMC (p.c.). Yet, my analysis will retain the method’s central tenet
of analyzing all switches individually and use all available ethnographic and contextual information in their interpretation. As a structuring device for the presentation, I do not use a ready-made checklist, but instead proceed along a continuum
of switches from ‘contrastive’ to ‘inherent’ meanings.
No part of this analysis of discourse behavior in Jamaican CMC should be understood as an attempt to provide a theoretical backdrop which allows predictions
about any individual’s CS behavior. On the contrary: any specific codeswitch remains essentially optional. This is so despite the fact that it is possible to discern
in the data various types of CS contexts and meanings that seem to be typical, and
despite the fact that “code-switching has become a norm for educated and noneducated participants alike” in Jamaica (Shields-Brodber 1997: 63) – clearly, CS
is the unmarked choice in Jamaican speech (e.g. Myers-Scotton 1993a). Speakers
and writers are free at any point in their utterances to choose the code in which
they wish to continue.83 CS thus expands the creative possibilities that are available
to speakers and writers. This study’s interest is in identifying the new roles and
symbolic values which the Creole carries for Jamaicans who transfer this traditionally oral language into the new medium of CMC.
63
One classic type of CS as a contextualization cue is that which is used to highlight
quotations embedded in the discourse.84 Gumperz points out that in these cases
it usually is of little importance in which code the quoted utterance was originally
made. The intention of the codeswitch here is to identify the embedded utterance as an imported segment of another discourse. Along with CS, other types
of contextualization cues could be used for the same function. In monolingual
speech, for example, a change of voice pitch or body posture can signal an embedded quote; in writing, punctuation devices such as quotation marks can be used;
and both modes – speech and writing – may draw on introductory quotative such
as he said. The following example uses a mesolectal quotative, i.e. an unmarked
finite verb form. The passage does not give clear evidence as to whether the quotative should therefore be considered part of the unmarked passage, i.e. the one in
the mesolectal baseline code, or as belonging to the marked passage for which the
writer switches codes. The unmarked, mesolectal verb form “say” used with the
third person singular could fit with either code and is therefore a fitting transitional element between both codes.
(15)
Hi Cynthia
Since I coming on the weekend i begging before I reach,
could you try and get some Apples (jamaican) roast 2
breadfruit and festival at your office for me and hussel
5 up some ackee. By the way Sol say him want fry fish. (laugh)
Sol says he wants fried fish.
but if any of the above is a problem you dont have to okay.
thanks much, lov laura
m#
012–15
The writer of the message, which is reproduced here in its entirety, is about to
return to Jamaica after a stay in Florida that lasted several months. The baseline
code of this message is standard Jamaican English which contains some features
of Creole influence, the type of reductive creolism that is acceptable in informal
English. They are two present continuous constructions without a copula (“I coming,” “I begging”), and the use of reach as meaning ‘arrive,’ a lexical use which is
entering acrolectal JamE from the Creole.85 The highlighted passage in which she
quotes her friend Sol, however, is markedly Patois: not only are the verbs say and
want unmarked for the third person singular simple present, a feature which on its
own would not stand out from the other mesolectal features, and the participial
form of fry unmarked,86 but the writer also uses a Creole personal pronoun (him
‘he’), the only one in the message. This rather salient switch to the Creole pronoun
system, in combination with three reduced forms in one short clause containing
six words, serves to mark the main clause of the sentence in question as much
more basilectally Creole than the rest of the message, while the sentence’s opening
adverbial – ”By the way” – ties in with the baseline code of the rest of the message,
informal Jamaican English.
This switch does not cover the full range of the continuum and can be intuitively described as a medium-size switch. Nonetheless, there is a clear contrast between the informal English baseline register and the more Creole code employed
for this short stretch.
In spoken Jamaican, phonology would be employed to give much clearer hints
as to the speaker’s intended location for the different parts of the utterance on the
continuum. Here, the effect of a codeswitch for one clause is achieved by a notable
increase in the density of mesolectal features and a switch to the Creole pronoun set.
The clause in question is separated from the writer’s own discourse not only
by the codeswitch, but also by the use of a second device, a typical feature of the
variety Crystal names “Netspeak” (2001): “(laugh).” Set off from the text by parentheses, this bare verb form is the attempt to import a kinesic element into written
discourse which does not traditionally occur in written language (although this
strategy of using nonfinite verbs outside of a syntactic structure probably follows
the long-established conventions of cartoon language, itself an innovative and experimental genre). Real laughs cannot occur in writing, and their conversational
function as contextualization cue would otherwise have to be verbalized. A traditional (i.e. pre-CMC) translation of a laugh in this hedging function into writing
would be, for example, “please don’t take this too seriously” or “just kidding,” but
the low formality requirements in CMC, including a low demand for explicitness,
allow an experimental and more economical form such as “(laugh).”87
Since the writer here is in effect asking her interlocutor to buy fried fish for her
friend (a male friend with whom the writer was in unclear relations at the time of
writing), a potentially big imposition along with the requests for Jamaican apples,
roasted breadfruit, festivals, and ackee,88 she intends to distance herself from Sol’s
request for fried fish.
The switch in this example contextualizes the quote from Sol as something
that the writer herself very clearly does not say herself, i.e. it is a hedge. Georgekopoulou describes hedging as a typical function of CS in her Greek-English e-mail
material, employed as a means of politeness management.
As hedges, […] code-switches present an unmarked co-occurrence with requests:
these have been well researched as face-threatening acts (acts which by their nature run contrary to the face needs of the addressee and/or the speaker […]).
(Georgakopoulou 1997: 150)
65
Brown & Levinson (1987: 65) point out that requests pose a threat particularly to
the addressee’s face, and hedging can be a strategy of politeness, which in turn is
understood as an expression of the desire to maintain claims of territory and selfdetermination. This rhetorical move can be understood as face-saving.89
The writer is giving a list of altogether five typical Jamaican foods in this message which she asks the addressee to have ready for her upon her arrival (she is
visiting Kingston for only one afternoon to take an exam, and will not have time
to go shopping herself). It might be more practical for a shopping list to contain
a complete, uninterrupted list of items. The separate mentioning of fry fish is even
more surprising since ackee is most frequently cooked together with fish.90 Accordingly, the addressee treats the fish and ackee together, as her reply shows:
(16)
[…] Thats not a problem, I will try my best to get the
stuff for you. […]
I will get the fish and ackee for Sol. […]
m# 012–16
The reader (Cynthia) treats the list as a whole and the fish and ackee together as a
separate unit “for Sol,” even though only the fish was designated for Sol by Laura
in her request message.
In conclusion, the codeswitch in (15) helps to encode one out of five requests
as a quote from somebody else, thus mitigating the overall impact of the message
as an imposition. It is not at all clear, however, whether this separation into four
items requested by the writer plus one requested by her friend is up to fact. The
clearly marked quote from Sol is used as a device to mitigate the message’s potential imposition, and Cynthia’s reply shows the request to be altogether successful.
Thus, example (15) shows CS used successfully in face-work, but not – as is often
the case – on the base of the potential of Patois as ‘we’-code to create solidarity,
but rather of the simple contrastive CS function which marks off a quotation and
thereby hedges its content.
The discussion of example (15) has focused on the function of the switch itself,
but not on the meanings connected to the chosen code. This and similar issues will
be discussed systematically in the section on identity-related CS.
The context that Gumperz treats under the heading of ‘switching for quotations’ (1982: 75) can reasonably be expanded to all instances of ‘switching for the
content of a direct or indirect quote,’ which can be defined as ‘switching for subordinate clauses complementing verbs of cognition, volition, or utterance.’ The
data show that particularly that-clauses – meaning subordinate clauses introduced
by that as conjunction – are worth closer inspection.91 They typically follow verbs
such as know, say, decide, tell and corresponding nouns, such as knowledge, idea, state-
ment, demand etc. Such clauses have been called, for example, “declarative content
clauses” (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 951). In JamC as well as in StE, the conjunction in such clauses can be deleted, resulting in “zero-that-clauses” (Quirk et al.
1985: 735).92, 93
The switched passage in (15) thus is a special case of the grammatical definition of “switching for se-clauses.” A look at some examples of se-clause-switching
in the wider sense – i.e. not involving quotations – shows that the contextualizing
effect of CS with quotations is a special one.
This is an example of CS for an embedded se-clause:
(17)
Hey, wats going on girl? A feel idle, u know seh a long time
that I haven’t
time mi nuh rite yuh a line. So, wats up?.... a miss
written you a line in a long time.
u an all but i want to know if u’ve thrown me away after all
these years... a feel sooo soooo sad.
5 […]
m# 032–01
The baseline code of this message is informal English characterized mostly by the
typical features of e-mail-language written at great speed and with little attention
to correctness of orthography or punctuation, and marked by a few signs of Creole
interference. A number of graphically economical features are used, such as nonstandard spellings and reduced punctuation, as is typical of e-mail independent
of the language it is written in, e.g. 具wats典 for what’s, or the rebus-like abbreviation 具u典 for you. Some of these forms show interference from mesolectal JamC:
具an典 is a short form of and which reflects Creole consonant cluster reduction. This
phonological feature is however very common in many nonstandard varieties or
informal registers of English the world over, and thus hardly a very clear case of a
graphical creolism.
Only one graphic feature of the baseline code is a clear reference to mesolectal
JamC: “a” is not a graphically reduced form of I (there is obviously no economy in
the exchange of one letter for the other). Rather, the choice is intended to signal
the monophthongal pronunciation of I in mesolectal JamC phonology (at a level of
creoleness just above the switch to the Creole pronoun system, which would turn
the pronoun into mi).
Another element of Creole interference in the baseline code is the use of the
verb throw away used with a person as object. The writer here creates, probably
unconsciously, a loan translation of JamC dash we, which, as a complex verb, has a
67
metaphorical meaning of ‘abandon’ (also in friendships and relationships), while
dash by itself is in fact most accurately translated into English as throw (DJE). Several instances in the corpus show the Creole word near the beginning of e-mails. Six
messages in the corpus consist exclusively of such a reproach. On the evidence, it
seems to be a rather common way of initiating or re-initiating an e-mail exchange
among Jamaican university students to accuse the addressee of being an unreliable
friend, and complaining of having been “thrown away” by the other.94
In an interesting parallel finding, Georgakopoulou pointed out that this type
of e-mails, which she calls ‘catching up messages,’ is distinct from other kinds in
terms of the narrative strategies used in them, which is her central analytical category in the analysis of Greek-English e-mails (2004).
For the Jamaican context, anthropologists Horst & Miller (2005) define ‘linking
up’ as a distinctly Jamaican way of using cell phones to maintain social networks,
which have functions and structures that differ fundamentally from those found
in, e.g., first-world countries in Europe or North America.95 As a consequence, a
significant proportion of phone calls have no other purpose than ‘link-up,’ i.e. are
practically free of content and serve, according to informants themselves, only
to keep their social network active and intact. Horst & Miller’s informants themselves explained the function of their personal and kinship networks as closely
related to sustenance and survival; this is also the essential finding of several other
recent anthropological studies on Jamaican social networks.96
From this perspective, we can understand the notable frequency of ‘catching
up messages’ in the Jamaican e-mail corpus as a consequence of the importance of
staying in touch with one’s friends and relatives as a coping strategy.
The following beginnings of e-mails are all from messages which resume contact after a period of silence between the communicants:
(18)
Pauline why are you so wukliss?!?
Ok, i realise that you
97
useless and dishonest ?
have run off to Paris, but that doesn’t mean seh yu fi
that you have
dash weh yu ole time fren dem!!
to abandon your old friends!
[…]
m# 001–01
(19)
I THIN K U DESERVE THE BIGGEST TRACING EVER IN YOUR
LIFE
TIME. WHY U NUH CALL MI. WHAT HAPPEN U DASH MI WHEY.
Why don’t you call me. What happened – have you abandoned me?
[…]
m# 010–01
(20)
My girl, where are you – u dash me weh?
have you abandoned me?
[…]
m#
022–04
These three examples out of about ten in which dash we is used (and many more
that start with similar reproaches), and my glosses of the decisive passages, suffice to illustrate that dash we is a vocabulary item essential to a standard rhetorical
move in many informants’ e-mails, and that it lacks a similarly poignant translation in StE. The misuse, by ISE standards, of throw away shows that the writer aims
at a largely standard English baseline variety for her message, which she maintains
even at the cost of not being able to use such clear and culturally very appropriate
terms from the mesolect as dash we (without translating them).
Meanwhile, she reserves a mesolectal code, located much lower on the creole
continuum, for special purposes: a switch occurs before a se-clause in which she
points out her own role in the silence between the two communicants: she herself
feels “idle” because she has not written a line to her friend for a long time.
The switch into Creole is implemented through several devices:
1. use of a JamC pronoun: mi (cp. 具a典 in the surrounding text)
2. JamC tense marking: the verb in “mi nuh rite” is unmarked, while StE
would use the present perfect
3. use of the JamC negating particle na 具nuh典 instead of StE strategies of negation
4. nonstandard orthography is used even for words that do not differ in StE
and JamC: 具rite典 for write, 具yuh典 for you
The codeswitch in (17) is structurally similar to (15): in both cases, the baseline
code has relatively slight marking by mesolectal features, the switched passage is
an embedded se-clause, and it contains several very clear lexical, structural, and
orthographic creole features. However, the switches in both cases have different
contextualizing functions: in (15) the switch serves to create a distance between
the writer and the content of the quote by highlighting the different identity of the
original speaker. In (17), no quote is involved, and the codeswitch is not employed
to differentiate speaker roles.
69
What is then the contextualizing function of the switch in (17)? A forced application of any of Gumperz’s five categories for metaphorical switches will be unsatisfactory. The only possible fit would be the residual category of “personalization vs.
objectivization,” but a classification in this category would not be of much explanatory value, given the vast scope of contexts to which it can be applied.98 Intuitively,
the switch highlights the author’s core reason for writing the message: she has recently realized that she has not written to her friend Mel in a long time, and wishes
to reinitiate contact. Given the large number of similar message beginnings in the
corpus, we may not need to invest too much pity for her feeling “sooo soooo sad”
about the temporarily recessive contact “after all these years.”99 It is likely that all of
excerpt (17) (the opening paragraph of the message) is just a rhetorical embellishment of a message whose essential content amounts to “Hello, how have you been?”
At least, this is what the message’s postscript suggests:
[…]
P.S Jus to let you know that i really mis u.
m# 032–01
After her complicated elaboration in which she first presents herself as idle and
then, possibly, neglected, the writer here summarizes her message’s intention. It is
therefore fitting that she prefers her more acrolectal baseline code for this postscript
over the more Creole code to signal its tying in with the whole rest of the message.
Conversational CS, i.e. the kind which serves to highlight message content from
the surrounding text by providing a formal contrast and which can serve various
pragmatic functions, can be more productively examined by expanding the scope
to sequential aspects of CS, which I will now introduce.
4.2 ‘We’ and ‘they’ – sequential aspects of switching for contextualization cues
The conceptual opposition between ‘we’- and ‘they’-code is, like that between situational and metaphorical CS, among Gumperz’s lasting contributions to the study
of CS. I have briefly introduced it in the section on situational CS. In a bicodal setting, based on the ethnographically founded designation of an insiders-sphere to
one code and of the outsiders-sphere to the other, part of individuals’ CS behavior
can be explained by the intention to include or exclude listeners, signal an inclusive or exclusive attitude toward what is said, etc.
The tendency is for the ethnically specific, minority language to be regarded as the
‘we-code’ and become associated with in-group and informal activities, and for
the majority language to serve as the ‘they-code’ associated with the more formal,
stiffer and less personal out-group relations. But it must be emphasized that […]
this association between communicative style and group identity is a symbolic
one: it does not directly predict actual usage. (Gumperz 1982: 66)
Sebba & Wootton (1998) apply the conceptual opposition critically to CS in conversational data from adolescent Londoners of Caribbean parentage. London Jamaican (LJ) is a local version of and “only slightly different from” JamC (265). It
functions as a cool “youth code” among British-born Caribbeans and other adolescents; Jamaican parentage is not a necessary condition for using it. It is not a
native language to any of its speakers and is usually acquired in the transition
from childhood to adolescence (cf. Sebba 1993). In most informal conversations,
London English (LE) “predominates in terms of quantity” (265), and it is always
the unmarked choice. This reflects the fact that LE is the speakers’ native language
and LJ is acquired additionally and reserved for marked contexts.
With regard to sequential aspects of switching, Sebba & Wootton present a
significant finding:
broadly speaking, participants in a conversation orientate to LJ stretches embedded in a basically LE turn as having differential status from the adjacent LE material, providing the principal message content. On the other hand, LE stretches
embedded within a basically LJ turn correspond to material of secondary importance, such as speakers’ comments on thematically more important material, or
diversions from the main theme of the turn, for instance those involving speakerinitiated insertion sequences. (266)
The conversations of British-born Caribbeans in Sebba & Wootton’s material represent a linguistic situation that is different in several decisive aspects from that of
native Jamaicans who are writing e-mail in Jamaica, or on a short-term stay abroad
(cf. Sebba 1993). These differences, and the different functions of the Creole in the
diaspora and in Jamaica, will be considered in detail in the section on identityrelated CS. For now, however, the similarities between the two situations are of
greater interest. They lie in the putative function of the Creole in both situations
as a ‘we’-code, as opposed to the more standard English code (in London, LE), the
‘they’-code.100
For adolescent British-born Caribbeans as well as Jamaican university students writing e-mail, the respective Creole is a ‘we’-code by several criteria: it is
the minority code in the sense that it is a local variety compared to the standard,
which connects with the vast community of ISE speakers. And it is nationally and
ethnically exclusive.101
Despite the privileged role of Creole (LJ), which tends to be associated with
principal message content if used in CS, the authors maintain that there is some
difficulty in declaring it the ‘we’ code, as opposed to LE as a ‘they’-code. In another
71
72
obvious parallel between Sebba & Wootton’s data and COJEC, the more standard
of the codes is preferred by most speakers/writers in practically all thematic contexts, including private and informal. Acrolectal JamE and LE are the quantitatively dominant codes in their respective settings.102 Therefore, Sebba & Wootton
conclude for London that the more standard code, LE, has a kind of ‘we’-function
as well. My analysis of identity-related CS in the e-mails (chapter 5) will show that
there are similar ambiguities surrounding the ‘we’/’they’-distinction for COJEC.
These parallels warrant an examination of the e-mail material for similar regularities in the sequential aspects of CS. Sebba & Wootton’s description of sequential code distribution, transferred to Jamaican e-mail, would read:
a. Patois stretches embedded in an otherwise acrolectal environment103 have
differential status from the adjacent English material, providing the principal message content.
b. Acrolectal stretches embedded within a basically Patois environment correspond to material of secondary importance, such as writers’ comments
on thematically more important material, or diversions from the main
theme of the passage, for instance those involving insertion sequences.
Taken together, this two-part hypothesis clearly addresses the role of Patois as the
marked code in all contexts, which is used to deliver the most important content.
This two-part hypothesis proves helpful in explaining the switch in example
(3); neither does the material fail to provide a good number of further examples
in support of both parts of the hypothesis. After presenting some of these, I will
discuss how far this sequential distribution rule reaches in the discussion of the
material, before I return to the discussion of CS-functions with se-clauses.
Example (17) provides principal message content in the inserted Patois stretch.
The beginning of the e-mail is built around the central observation that the writer
herself has not written to the addressee in a long time. Only after that does the
author suggest that the addressee might have “abandoned” her, and that she feels
sad about this.
As (18)–(20) show, harsh and direct reproaches would not be unacceptable at
this point in an e-mail, but the writer mitigates it by placing the blame partly on
herself. This act of mitigation is central to the message, as the whole e-mail has no
other agenda than to re-initiate contact with the addressee. Other messages, which
start with a playful, but direct, reproach for the writer’s perceived abandonment,
contain other topical elements. For example the message excerpted in (18) goes on
to telling various news items about mutual friends. (19) is followed not by actual
news, but by a cliffhanger: the promise to disclose something interesting if the addressee responds and resumes contact with the writer.
[…] Anyways I have something to tell u but u have to call
me to hear it. […]
m#
010–01
Finally, (20) is followed by some details about recent developments in the writer’s
life, and a proposal of a time and place for a personal meeting.
None of these are present in the e-mail excerpted in (17), which is a probable reason why the writer opts for a mitigated version of the more expectable
reproach. The inserted stretch in Patois thus contains the two central aspects of the
e-mail’s opening: the reason for writing, which serves as a thematic hinge to the
whole e-mail, and the mitigation of the reproach.
Another example of central message content given in an embedded Creole
passage is this:
(21)
[…] I spoke to Mario otherday, Jamil was not there.
Hopefully i can go and visit one day.
As for my boyfriend Stephen, him alright him give problem
he is all right, he causes trouble
every two week, but i am still loving him.
every other week,
5 Tamisha have you booked your flight as yet, hurry up and
come...
love Maria....
m# 015–01
The sentence containing the Patois insertion is a prime illustration of giving the
principal message content in the marked code. Turning to the topic of her boyfriend, the writer uses an English introductory phrase (“As for my boyfriend”) and a
concluding element (“but I am still loving him”). The heart of the matter, i.e. the true
content of the passage, stands between these two elements: Stephen is superficialy all
right, but on closer inspection turns out to be a constant source of problems.
This is the most vivid aspect of the writer’s treatment of the topic. The introductory phrase is purely topical and has no news value, and the final clause is
more a statement of resolve than a report of the actual state of affairs. The Patois
insertion, on the other hand, contains the subjective assessment of the relationship
between the writer and her boyfriend, which is the true comment.
A switch in the opposite direction, i.e. standard material embedded in a basically
Patois passage, is less frequently found. It is much more typical for e-mail writers
to insert Patois stretches into basically standard writing than the opposite. For
73
74
example, the entire corpus contains only four e-mails whose baseline code clearly
is JamC. Three messages are cases of possible doubt, where creole material quantitatively outweighs standard material, but whose baseline code nonetheless is
standard, the creole occurring mostly in insertions. All other messages have a StE
baseline code beyond any doubt.
The four messages that use Patois as their main code contain examples that
show the use of more acrolectal material for less important content, in keeping
with Sebba & Wootton’s finding:
(22)
[…] Yeah mi ago chill wid one a mi fren them
Yes, I’m going to chill with one of my friends
weh mi use to par wid a UTECH.
who I used to hang out with at UTECH.
Him come up pon a programme and the company file fi him
He came up here on a program and the company filed for him
fi five years and gi him a house and a transp
for five years and gave him a house and a car
5 suh him ask him boss if mi can jams wid him
so he asked his boss if I could stay with him
and them seh yeah mi juss affi pay 300 a month
and they said yes, I would just have to pay 300 a month
and that includes utilities suh mi juss a wait
so I am just waiting
till the end of the month fi leff Miami.
until the end of the month before I leave Miami.
[…]
m# 001–03
The central information in this passage is clearly the good news that the writer
has been given the chance to stay in his friend’s house at an affordable rent, which
provides him with a perspective after the end of the month. The clause “and that
includes utilities” is not central to the message, it merely specifies the previous information. The switch is therefore in keeping with Sebba & Wootton’s observation
of regularities in sequential aspects of CS.
Although the English insertion does not contain the most central piece of information of the passage, it could be seen as an intensifier, in the sense of saying
“this is a cheap price, and it even includes the cost of utilities.” It is hard to make
this argument just based on the e-mail material; spoken data would contain more
reliable information here. Another possibility is that the standard was chosen for
the insertion because it represents a verbatim quote of someone at the company
who said to the author that the rent “includes utilities.”104 Again, one can only
speculate; in fact the absence of a quotative or quotation marks is good reason not
to consider the insertion a quote.
The most solid claim that this switch allows is that it demonstrates a very traditional distribution of ‘we’-code and ‘they’-code. Like example (17), this passage
shows the more salient and important information being given in Patois, while
additional, less important information is presented in a more acrolectal code. “In
fact, the idea that ‘creole’ or ‘patois’ is used for emphasis is familiar to code-switching speakers and is almost a folk linguistic notion” (Sebba & Wootton 1998: 275).
Taken together, examples (15) to (22) show that both among London Jamaicans and in Jamaican CMC, Patois functions as a marked code that is used to
highlight prominent text passages.
Having thus established a rather conventional distribution of ‘we’- and ‘they’functions for Patois and acrolectal codes in the e-mail, I will continue by showing
codeswitches in some other typical functions of the metaphorical type. In doing so,
I will not follow Gumperz’s well-known list of typical metaphorical switch functions too closely. It has frequently been criticized for being rigid, and the COJEC
material is a case in point, demonstrating the need to adapt Gumperz’s list to the
data at hand. For instance, one very typical type of CS, frequently found in conversation, has the function of “reiteration for clarification” (Gumperz 1982: 78). This
type of CS function is not found at all in the data. Another typical function of CS
in conversation is “addressee specification” (Gumperz 1982: 77), which does not
occur either. The reasons are medium-related: since e-mail is a written medium,
readers can reread any passage as often as they like and misunderstandings can
thus be cleared. Simple reiteration does not help to clarify in a written medium.
Likewise, an e-mail is usually addressed to one person only and a change of addressees does not normally take place. Although it is in principle possible to write
a message to a group of recipients and to single out individual members of the
audience in certain passages, which could be made clear by a codeswitch, this is
not documented in the data. It is also conceivable that a message could switch its
intended addressees at one point in the text, e.g. by asking the initial reader to pass
on the rest of the message to somebody else. However this is also a special case,
atypical of the medium, which does not occur in the data.
Because Gumperz’s list is not directly transferable to just any set of data, I will
present some types of CS that are very frequent in the data. All of these employ the
codes in functions that warrant the ‘we’- and ‘they’-code labels.
75
A quite standard function of CS is its use for the expression of negative emotions
(Gumperz 1982: 80; Saville-Troike 1989: 68; Mair 1992: 80; Sand 1999: 154). Put
more generally, in bilingual situations the more informal code, in the present case
Patois, has the potential to soften the blow of negative message content. The negative emotion can be either the writer’s own anger, or the reaction to bad news. In
both cases, the use of CS to mediate negativity can be understood as facework. (23)
is an example of a writer venting his anger at the addressees, members of a student
government committee, who had shown low interest in evening meetings.
(23)
What I’m about to say is not nice. It’s actually quite
horrible but here goes. WHEN WE SET MEETING A EVELING105
When we agree to meet at a time in the evening
TIME OONU MUS TRY AN’ NOT ONGLY MEK IT BUT CANTRIBUTE!
you (pl.) need to try and not only attend but also contribute!
Guys, on a serious note. We are set back significantly
5 when we do not meet weekly. Why you may ask? […]
A most disgruntled Ambassador,
Anthony.
m# 023–01
sj
This is a letter of Displeasure
The content of the marked passage is serious, in fact it both states the reason for
the writer’s “displeasure” (cf. the message subject) and voices his anger. Nonetheless he feels that – very likely due to the use of Creole – it is not serious, as his StE
continuation in l. 4 attests: “Guys, on a serious note.” This demonstrates that the
writer deliberately resorted to Patois to make the harshness of the core message
content more acceptable to all participants, administering criticism and redress at
the same time.
The following excerpt shows a writer even commenting on the potential repair
function of the Creole. Answering the anxious question of his friend Laura, who
is living abroad in the US, whether a certain event in Mona, Jamaica (a final exam
at the university) will take place at a time that will enable her to attend it and still
return to the US on the afternoon flight, he writes:
(24)
well gal me sarry fi tel u seh u carna dark...
well girl, I’m sorry to tell you that you’re out of luck
(lit.: that your corner is dark)
oh i am sorry I should have said: hello Laura, it is very
unfortunate that i have yo te you that your exam is on
april 29 at 4–6 pm so you will not be able to catch the
5 four thirty flight and so u will have to take 2 days off
work.. hush106 life is a bitch when it wanna be but knowing
you i know you wil find a way aroun that.. […]
m# 012–24
sj
time table
The writer of this message first presents the bad news in Patois (l. 1), incorporating
a frequent Jamaican saying appropriate for misfortune. He then corrects himself
and restarts in a consciously formal register of standard English (ll. 2–5), implying that in the face of Laura’s great misfortune, Patois was not formal, or serious,
enough. He explicitly declares it to be inappropriate in the situation: “oh i am sorry
i should have said:” (l. 2). This double-start is altogether an ironic play on the
meanings of the codes of Patois and English. Perhaps the writer honestly felt Patois
to be too familiar to convey such technical details as the date and time of the exam,
and this was his real reason for restarting. But he cannot seriously be “sorry” for
using Patois at first – after all, if he had felt it was seriously out of place, he could
have deleted and rewritten the beginning of his message.
The use of CS for the contextualization of negative content is amply documented in the Jamaican material. Negative or aggressive content is often felt to
be less acceptable in discourse in the standard language, as it always contains the
danger of offending the addressee. The use of a ‘we’-code can signify solidarity at
the same time as the negative, critical, or too honest, content is expressed. Because
Jamaican Patois as a code is also at the informal end of the style continuum, it is
also felt to be better suited for content which flaunts formal rules of politeness.
Writers who voice a reproach or criticism therefore often switch to Patois,
even if their e-mail is otherwise written in an acrolectal code. The switch functions
as an act of face-saving repair simultaneous to the act of delivering the message.
Other examples show an explicit repair being delivered after a potentially offending message has been given in a more standard code. CS in these contexts can
therefore be categorized as either concurrent or successive repair.
Many examples of concurrent repair with reproaches are found in e-mails
which start with a complaint about having been neglected by the addressee. Consider samples (18) and (19) above, which can serve as fitting illustrations. The following complete message, example (25), was written after the writer had received
a chain mail from the addressee, asking to forward the message to several friends
and promising consequent returns in cash from Microsoft-founder Bill Gates. The
subject line was renewed for this answer.
77
(25)
sj Enh-huh!
uh-huh107
Tasheeka yuh nuh have nuttin’ betta fi do?
Tasheeka, don’t you have anything better to do?
Is alright though I didn’t bother to send your message to
anybody - so funny. But I did fall for a similar trick
5 someone else played. Later.
Candy.
m# 005–01
Because she did not appreciate being sent a hoax e-mail, the writer complains in
Patois, asking if the addressee had nothing better to do than sending it out. The
formulation “Is alright though” could be considered a mesolectal form that serves
as a transition between the strong Patois of the first sentence, and the acrolectal
baseline code of the rest of the message.
The tone of the remaining text is good-natured and chatty. Additional repair
in StE is administered, e.g. by stating that the writer herself once passed on similar hoax messages to other people. Thus, although the purpose of the message,
written in Patois, is to voice displeasure at having received a useless message and
to ridicule the addressee because she fell for the hoax, face-saving repair is given
throughout.
Successive repair is offered in this example (the message is again given in full):
(26)
Hey Laura,
What is happening to you? I sense (from the e-mails) that
you are not at the Bank anymore. You can still email me
yu know!! me no waan look like me a faas ina yu business,
I don’t want to look like I’m prying into your affairs
5 so yu can e-mail me. Where are you now? What exactly is
happening?
m# 009–04
The reproach at the start of this message is once more that of not having received
any news from the addressee for a while. The addressee, Laura, has sent out group
e-mails to groups of recipients (e-mails containing jokes, but no personally addressed original writing), and the writer has noticed her change of e-mail address,
which suggests a change of employer. He complains about not having had a personal note which would have explained this change of circumstances. The reproach
is made indirectly by stating the obvious: Laura could still write an e-mail, even if
she may not be working at “the Bank,” i.e. a previous employer, anymore, and ends
strongly on an exclamation mark. The insertion functions as a repair by explaining
why the writer feels justified in not having written on his own initiative earlier: he
does not wish to seem too curious.
The entire message is only an enquiry about Laura’s well-being. Obviously,
a message containing only the words “How are you?” would seem too short and
unsubstantial on the screen. Therefore it is expanded in a fashion quite similar to
that used in example (17) for the exact same purpose: it uses the apparently established rhetorical move of a reproach with simultaneous redress simply to start off
the conversation.
Redress that involves CS relies on symbolic meanings connected to the codes.
English is dominantly used as the main code of communication, but Patois is used
for its ‘we’-connotations in specific contexts.
Other metaphorical codeswitches fall into the very broad category of “subjectivization vs. objectivization” (Gumperz 1982: 80). One writer supplied a long e-mail
(1044 words) to the corpus in which she reports the events of a long trip. The message was sent to a group of friends.
A Jamaican who had moved to Japan after finishing her university studies less
than a year earlier, she went on a journey, together with an Australian friend, that
featured stops in Canada, Japan, and three in the Caribbean, including two in Jamaica. Her narrative is in perfectly standard English, mostly without even slight
mesolectal marking, except for three notable Patois insertions.
Two of these three codeswitches serve clearly to set off subjective comments
from the generally more objective narration of the events of the journey.
(27)
[…] The flight from Mobay to Negril was in a very very
small plane and it was very very bumpy but it was better
than the bus so we never complained. When we arrived at
Negril airport mi neva did see mi bag, mi almost dead....
I didn’t see my bag, I almost died
5 but it did come pan one earlier flight....
But it had come on an earlier flight
(28)
Thank GOD again!
[…]
[…] That night Lydia and I went to Margaritaville (dont
know how to spell it, sorry), dat did flop. It did jus
that flopped. It was just
79
full a lickle pickney acting like a bunch of idiots. But I
full of little children
did get to meet the sexy boy name Woody that won the best
5 male contest.
[…]
m# 009–02
The lines of demarcation between English and Patois passages may seem unclear
in (27). The switch into Creole is unproblematic: it lies at a clause boundary and
starts with the very salient use of mi as a pronoun. But the switch back into English
may seem more gradual at first sight because the clause “but it did come pan one
earlier flight” contains no more than one definitely Creole lexeme, the preposition pan ‘on.’ On closer inspection, however, it is Creole throughout: for example,
tense and aspect are also expressed according to JamC rules. StE would have required past perfect – ”had come” – , which expresses the anterior tense. The form
“did come” is fully grammatical in mesolectal JamC for this context, in which the
use of did as an anterior marker is sufficient; no additional marking for tense is
needed (Holm 1988: 148; Patrick 1999: 203; Sand 1999: 112; Patrick 2004b: 413).
The whole clause can be considered JamC because it contains Creole marking at
the fundamental level of the TMA system.108
In (28), the English following the Creole insertion contains a mesolectal marker, the unmarked participle in “the sexy boy name Woody.” Setting aside the possibility of typographical errors of omission, the reason for this isolated use of mesolectal unmarking is most likely that the phrase “a boy name X”/”a girl name Y” is
phraseological in Jamaica, which the writer chooses to use, while a full codeswitch
is not intended. The form is certainly based on mesolectal grammar,109 but its use
in an otherwise standard context alone is no reason to speak of a codeswitch. It is
better described as a slight style shift through isolated borrowing of a Creole noun
phrase. Therefore, the end of the Creole insertion in (28) can be drawn after the
(very Creole) word “pickney.”
In (27), the narrative is interrupted by the account of a moment of shock, so
that the narrative mode changes. From an objective account of things that happened, and did not cause any extraordinary personal reaction on the writer’s part
(cf. “we never complained”), her big shock at the sudden discovery that her bag
was absent is narrated in Patois. The codeswitch parallels a switch from the recounting of facts to emotions, and – in the terms of Gumperz’s paradigm – from
the objective to the subjective.
In (28), the objective narrative is briefly interrupted for a personal evaluative
comment of the events. The visit at Margaritaville110 was of course not a flop in
any objective or even commercial sense. The writer simply did not enjoy herself
because too many of the patrons were noticeably younger than herself. The failure
to have fun was a disappointment. This subjective comment on the objectively
recounted event of the night at Margaritaville is accompanied by a codeswitch.
In both examples, the rhetorical function of the codeswitch derives first from
the mere contrasting of codes, because they help to formally distinguish subjective insertions from the objective main text. In neither (27) nor (28), however, is
the direction of the codeswitch random. Both draw on the the respective ‘we’- and
‘they’ functions of Patois and English. The use of the ‘we’-code Patois signals that
the content of the insertion is to be taken as more familiar and intimate than the
rest. It invites the reader’s identification with the writer’s adventures by emphasizing the importance of personal, emotional aspects of the action.
Also in both examples, the switched passages contain the most central information of the passage: The bag was missing, and Margaritaville was altogether
a disappointment, fulfilling again Sebba & Wootton’s criterion for a quite classic
distribution of ‘we’- and ‘they’-codes such as the one found in London.
This writer’s third use of CS in her travel account again draws on the contrast between codes to highlight a comment on the main strand of narrative, which functions slightly differently than the previous two.
(29)
[…]
Oh Thursday I went back to Kingston and Lydia stayed in Cuba
and took a bus to Trinidad (yes dem have somewhere name so).
yes, they do have a place that is called that
Of course coming back my flight from Cuba to Mobay was held
5 up […]
m# 009–02
In this insertion, the writer empathizes with her reader’s (assumed) surprise at the
news that Lydia, staying in Cuba, took a bus to Trinidad – Cuba and Trinidad being two islands at opposite ends of the Caribbean, separated by several thousand
miles and lots of water. She confirms the only possible explanation in Patois: that
there is also a place on the island of Cuba named “Trinidad” (and that the bus trip
thus took place within the safe borders of Cuba).
This passage employs CS in the classical function of a contextualization cue
in that it relies on the difference of codes to signal that the insertion is a comment
outside the main strand of narrative. It adds to the function of the parentheses
that enclose the insertion. Unlike (27) and (28) however, it does not contain the
central information of the passage. The comment is helpful, but not indispensable
to understanding the passage (because astute Jamaican readers will either be aware
81
82
of the existence of a town called Trinidad in Cuba, or be able to disambiguate the
name themselves). Also unlike the two previous examples, the use of Patois here
does not invite the reader’s identification. It rather jokingly extends the writer’s
sympathy for her readers’ confusion.
Using Patois in this instance creates solidarity among the Jamaican writer and
her readership of the same nationality, who are all confronted with the confusing place names of the neighbor country. This is a function of the ‘we’-code, but
here the code is used in a more consciously symbolic way than in (27) and (28).
Therefore, (29) shows some properties of identity-related CS, which is an entirely
different type of CS. In comparison with situational and metaphorical CS, which I
have discussed up to now, identity-related CS is marked by a much freer and much
more conscious use of the codes’ symbolic potential. This type of CS behavior is
not only much more creative and therefore more interesting than the kinds discussed so far, but also significantly more frequent in the material than the arguably
less conscious strategies of situational and metaphorical CS.
One aspect of identity-related CS is the assumption of roles and personae
through use of a certain code,111 which will be discussed below in detail and delivers the basis for a more productive interpretation of (29). The writer suggests, as
an identification point for herself and her readers, the persona of an uninformed,
possibly uneducated, Jamaican country bumpkin who grapples with the unfamiliar ways of farin (i.e., the world outside of Jamaica). Ethnographic study shows
this persona to be culturally very prominent, and it is recurrently used in the email data, particularly when one of the participants of the exchange is abroad or
recounts a trip abroad. Section 5.3 on the creation of social personae through CS
documents several examples.
Therefore, while (29) shows the more conventional use of CS for contextualization, it also marks a transition toward more conscious and abstracted uses of
Patois, in which its cultural significance is not merely connoted, but is the central
purpose of its use.
4.3 Summary
The most important findings of this chapter are:
1. With the exception of two e-mail messages, the baseline code in the emails is clearly some form of English, not Patois.
2. Patois is used in CS strategies which contrast it with English in some very
standard contextualization cue functions. Patois emerges as a reserve of
additional expressive potential which writers use frequently, but by no
means obligatorily.
3. There are no functions, topics or addressees which force the use of Patois,
whereas the use of English seems to be practically unavoidable with certain kinds of addressees and topics, e.g. persons of higher social standing
or of a purely professional relationship such as professors, pastors, employers, and similar. (Nonetheless, the notion of “situational CS” in its original
sense of non-volitional CS is used with caution.) The topic of religion also
rules out the use of Patois, provoking instead the use of acrolectal English.
4. In some contextualizing functions for which CS is used, it is of no importance in which direction writers switch – from a more acrolectal to a more
basilectal code or the other way. In most functions, however, Patois carries
a ‘we’-code function despite its general quantitative inferiority.
The next chapter will show how writers use Patois with much more complex and
creative symbolic potential than the mere ‘we’-function.
83
chapter 5
Codeswitching and identity
How writers describe themselves
through code choice
5.1 Recent theoretical developments in sociolinguistics and discourse studies
This chapter is concerned with the ways in which writers characterize themselves
and others through choices of linguistic forms. With regard to the data and the
present analysis of CS, the questions asked in this chapter are: what does a writer
say about his or her identity, or that of others involved, by choosing a particular
code in saying a particular thing? This interest in identity must be seen in the
context of a momentous shift of analytical interest within sociolinguistics (not just
in CS research) which has been taking place in the past fifteen years or so. Auer
characterizes it as follows:
There will be no one singular or undisputed answer to the question of what is new
in sociolinguistics these days. Yet a good candidate answer would be the recent
acute interest in social identity (or, more fashionably in the plural: ‘social identities’). […] it has only recently taken on a central role in sociolinguistic thinking.
One reason for this may be the enormous success of the ‘reconstructivist turn’
(outdating earlier ‘essentialist’ approaches) in the debate about collective (for instance, national) identities in the social and historical sciences, which has now
reached linguistics (cf. Mendoza-Denton 2002). Another reason may be a certain
dissatisfaction with variationist sociolinguistic models in which linguistic heterogeneity is ‘explained’ through correlations with pre-established social categories
such as socioeconomic status or ethnicity (cf. Cameron 1990). Social identity is
clearly a useful mediating concept between language and social structure. (Auer
2005: 403–404)
Identity-related codeswitches are different from those discussed up to now in that
rhetoric code use plays a much more central role. These kinds of codeswitches
do not work as contextualization cues merely through the highlighting function
that is based on the contrast between codes, making the content of the passage in
the marked code more prominent than that of the passage in the unmarked code.
They also draw strongly on the social meanings attached to both codes, primarily
to the marked code. In the terminology of Auer (1992), the types of codeswitches
discussed in this section have strongly ‘inherent’ meanings as contextualization
cues, where the opposite concept, at the far end of a continuum, is that of ‘contrastive’ meanings. ‘Inherent’ types of switches can be understood as using social
meanings of codes in a process of implicatures in the Gricean sense (1989; Auer
1992), as Carol Myers-Scotton points out (p.c.): the added conversational meaning of the codeswitch, depending on the form of the utterance like other types of
implicatures, has no fixed definition per se, but must be decoded based on the
available contextual and cultural information.112
These types of switches represent a highly planned and therefore conscious
use of Patois and belong to the kind of contexts for the use of the vernacular that
have long been unwelcome in quantitative sociolinguistics. In the work of William
Labov, the primary focus has always been on language that is as spontaneous and
natural as possible, and one of the central methodological concerns in Labovian
sociolinguistic fieldwork is how to overcome the “Observer’s Paradox” (Labov
1972: 209). While recognizing the existence of different speech styles, Labov has
proposed to organize those that occur within the sociolinguistic interview as different subtypes of either casual or careful speech (2001),113 with the ultimate goal
of being better able to focus on language performance in casual styles. As he shows
convincingly through quantitative analysis of variable use, careful speech is regularly and significantly more standard than casual speech (2001: 106), and it is
prompted by increased ‘attention to speech,’ defined as auditory self-monitoring
(1966; 1972). In other words, the more consciously a speaker’s linguistic resources
are deployed, the less likely is the use of the vernacular. The instances of identityrelated CS into Patois in the discussion that follows in this chapter are mostly in
opposition to this basic rule, because they represent willful uses of the vernacular
based on the expectation of added communicative value.
The “highly self-conscious” use of the vernacular in performances of the interviewees’s dialect for the benefit of the listener was noted in Schilling-Estes (1998:
54) as a problem for the traditional quantitative analysis of dialect data from Ocracoke, North Carolina. In e-mail, the use of Patois can often be considered a ‘performance’ due to the newness of the experience of writing it. As one example of
a very obvious and intentional performance of Patois in an e-mail, consider this
example, part of which was already cited in (2):
(30)
A wah a gwan? mi know seh yu nuh have no body over deh a
What’s up?
I know that you have nobody over there to
chat patios, so just fi mek sure seh when yu come back a ja
talk Patois with, so just to make sure that when you return to Jamaica
Codeswitching and identity: how writers describe themselves through code choice
yu still know how fi dwit mi agi yu likkle.
you still know how to do it, I’ll write you a little.
anyway I just want to say hi and that i hope that
5 you are doing well in your new coyntry. Mario called
last night and said that patrick was in the
hospital.
[…]
m# 003–10
The writer here gives an intentional performance of Patois for the benefit of the addressee, her sister, who is abroad and supposedly in need of some flavor of home.
Schilling-Estes sees this ‘performance register’ as a phenomenon worth investigating in its own right. Other styles that often involve such deliberate dialect performances are the use of a vernacular normally associated with a different social group
(‘crossing,’ cf. Rampton 1995), imitation of other speakers’ voices, the assumption
of personae that are recognizable as social stereotypes to the audience, the citation
of proverbs, and many more.
Eckert (2001: 123) points out that conscious use of the vernacular is no serious
challenge to the validity of Labovian quantitative analysis of very large corpora of
speech data, but it can be, and usually is, responsible for some of the statistical irregularity that occurs in any sample.
Alan Bell put forward another theoretical approach toward stylistic variation
which, like Labov’s ‘attention-to-speech’-approach, works with a unidimensional
ordering of variables from informal to formal, and which is equally challenged by
such instances of conscious stylistic performance. Bell’s ‘audience design’ model
(Bell 1984; Bell 2001) claims that speakers change their style primarily as a response to changes in their audience. In the reception of Bell’s model after its first
publication, a constant critical refrain was that it placed too much emphasis on
reactive style shifts. In the reworked version (2001), Bell addresses this problem:
To my mind, the greatest problem for the audience design framework as outlined
– and indeed the main challenge for any theory of style – is to take account of the
dynamic, initiative use of style by individual speakers to express aspects of their
identity […], while retaining a worthwhile level of generalization. One main critique made of frameworks such as audience design which attempt to systematize
style is that they are reductionist. They run the risk of minimizing or discounting
the complexity of speakers’ moment-by-moment, self-expressive use of language
[…]. This is indeed an issue for audience design, but it is equally one that any style
model will face, because any attempt to discern patterns or regularities in people’s
style will be open to the same critique. (163)
87
For initiative style variation motivated by the speaker’s processes of identity construction, Bell’s model provides the residual category of ‘referee design.’ Since the
interest of the present study is not in regularity of stylistic variation, but in the
meanings and implicatures that are created through the use of Patois, analysis of
codeswitches in the data will need to be more qualitatively detailed than declaring
them consequences of a writer’s ‘referee design.’
From the study of post-creole speech communities, an approach to variation
emerged that was designed to consider and explain all speech styles in a sample.
Acts of Identity (LePage & Tabouret-Keller 1985) marks a departure from the Labovian view of individual speakers as maks choices on a one-dimensional continuum
between vernacular and standard speech with any given variable. In a central tenet, the authors claim that
the individual creates for himself the pattern of linguistic behaviour so as to resemble those of the group or groups with which from time to time he wishes to be
identified, or so as to be unlike those from whom he wishes to be distinguished.
(1985: 181)
Acts of Identity offers several advantages as a theoretical backdrop for the analysis of
vernacular code use in identity-related linguistic behavior.
First, it opens the view to all styles occurring in natural language, including
performance-type, creative uses, and not just to the limited scope of styles which
the traditional sociolinguistic interview elicits, i.e. unmonitored speech.
Second, Acts of Identity greatly increases the number of linguistic variables that
are considered in analysis, whereas quantitative sociolinguistics always restricts its
analysis to a rather small number of previously selected variables.
Third, the model introduces individuals’ categories as factors in the explanation
of variation, and dispenses with sociological categories external to the speech act.
Finally, Acts of Identity joins stylistic and sociolinguistic research in one model,
i.e. perspectives on individual and on social variation, where the Labovian model
avoids any analysis of individuals’ reasons for variation.
In Acts of Identity, a constructivist philosophy has formed the base for a critique
of quantitative sociolinguistics, whose main interest is in the statistical correlation
between a social variable, seen as given and independent, and a linguistic variable,
seen as dependent (cf. Mair 2003a). While the Labovian view sees variation as determined by fixed categories such as age, class, and gender that are outside of the
individual’s control – an essentialist perspective – LePage & Tabouret-Keller’s approach is based on the belief that identities are in a permanent process of creation
and definition, and stylistic variation is seen as corresponding to it. Of course, the
advantages of this model come at the price of not being able to make any predictions regarding any aspect of an individual’s linguistic behavior.
For the study of CS, Myers-Scotton & Bolonyai (2001) explicitly attempt to make a
similar theoretical move away from the Labovian model that correlates independent social variables and dependent linguistic variables. Their claim is based on the
argument that Labovian sociolinguistics can only predict certain macro-patterns
in variation but always fails to actually explain the individual’s reasons for linguistic choices (3). Instead, the authors propose a reworked version of Myers-Scotton’s Markedness Model (e.g. Myers-Scotton 1983b; Myers-Scotton 1993a; MyersScotton 1993b; Myers-Scotton 1998) which, like Acts of Identity, stresses the role
of the individual in making linguistic choices. These choices are seen as rational
and aimed at optimality. In this model, social factors are seen as given, but not as
the determinants of linguistic choices. Like LePage & Tabouret-Keller (1985), Myers-Scotton & Bolonyai (2001) propose a paradigm shift away from Labov, who
wrote that “[language] is not the property of the individual, but of the community”
(1989: 52), toward a speaker-based view of variation.114
However open the Acts of Identity-model may be to different codes and linguistic
variables in any individual’s performance, its scope in explaining the social meaning of variables and the communicative benefit connected with their use is limited.
As the quote from Acts of Identity above suggests, its main explanatory focus is on
the speaker’s identification with different social groups. In Caribbean settings such
as St. Lucia and Belize, where most of the empirical work for LePage & TabouretKeller’s book was conducted, most speakers combine a variety of ethnic, linguistic, and national identities that is stunning by American or Western European
standards. In such situations it is useful to consider under what circumstances
they express identification with which aspects of their identities through choice
of a linguistic code that is symbolically connected to a specific social group. Yet
the model’s perspective on different meanings of individual codes is still one-dimensional, as it is based fundamentally on notions of linguistic convergence as a
sign of positive identification with a group, and divergence as a sign of negative, or
lacking, identification.115
In order to show which communicative functions Patois serves in CMC, this perspective is necessary and worth exploring. But it will be unsatisfactory to point out
for every JamC insertion that it signals identification with the social group speaking
Patois (essentially, all Jamaicans). Relevant questions to ask are: what kind of speaking style is created through the use of Patois, which of the many social meanings and
connotations connected with Patois are activated through its use, and which stance
do writers take relative to these meanings? This way, the process of creating added
communicative value through the use of CS can best be explored.
Such questions are also at the heart of the research agenda of “Third Wave
Variation Studies,” a relatively recent approach to variation thus termed by Pene-
89
lope Eckert (2005). This school of research does not question the validity of the
Labovian approach to variation, which it calls the “First Wave” of variation studies,
but tries to add to it by studying the social meaning of variables.
My material provides an excellent basis for the study of Patois use from a Third
Wave perspective. Since the writers of the material form a relatively homogeneous
group in terms of most fundamental categories such as age, socioeconomic status,
and education (though not gender of course), the sight is cleared for a style-centered look on the data.
I have identified recent developments in the theory of stylistic variation with
specific attention to the connections between style and identity. My analysis is
structured as follows: first I will explore the notion of Patois use as a positive identification with Jamaican ethnic and national identity, much in the sense of Acts
of Identity’s concept of self-identification with and distinction from certain social
groups. Second I will examine the use of Patois for the creation of styles that can be
used in creating personae with specific social meanings. A rather different type of
linguistic strategy, and the topic of the third part of my analysis, is the use of code
contrasts in organization of the different identities featured in narratives.
5.2 Acts of Identity: convergence as identification, divergence as distinction
The e-mail corpus provides a wealth of examples in which a message is written in
an acrolectal baseline code and Patois is used only in the most prominent textual
positions: for greetings and/or farewells. I refer to this strategy of enclosing the
(mostly) English-language message content in Patois greetings as ‘framing.’116
Framing has to be seen as a way of using Creole to indicate the writer’s Jamaican identity, even though Patois is no longer used as a communicative code for the
message content. Very much as explained by Acts of Identity, writers align themselves linguistically with Jamaican culture, which at the same time creates solidarity with their addressees. Sedlatschek (2005) points out in his study of Indian English that only one borrowed Hindi lexeme in a 1500-word passage of English can
be salient enough to mark the whole passage as Indian English. Thus, one word
alone can serve as an indicator of the writer’s Indian identity to the reader. By the
same token, one Jamaicanism – such as a greeting – can suffice to mark an e-mail
message that employs an otherwise non-specific variety of English as Jamaican.117
The Patois forms used in framing consequently do not occur in the shape of
fully-fledged CS. Jamaican forms in the greeting and farewell passages of a message may just as well consist of just one word – a lexical borrowing or Jamaicanism.
In either case, this strategy of using Patois is captured fully by the way that Acts of
Identity conceptualizes convergent linguistic behavior: by using a Patois form, a
writer expresses positive identification with the group that speaks Patois, which is
tantamount to stating one’s Jamaican national identity.
A typical and highly salient Jamaican farewell formula is likl muor (‘see you again
in a little while’).
(31)
[…] I don’t normally make move, especially a spontaneous
country flex, without ‘my boys’.... but we’ll see...
I have a class now, so likkle more.
HQ.
m# 011–04
To my surprise, likl muor occurs in the e-mails only this once. This may be because it is a very established, conservative item which university students tend to
replace with alternatives.118 The farewell that is by far the most frequent in speech
among university students at UWI, by my observation, is later. The item is not at
all restricted to use in conversation among young people; rather, it is acceptable
in informal conversation (or as a closing thereof) between members of practically
any age group.
This elliptical form of see you later is also used in non-Jamaican, English-speaking communities, but in Jamaica it is particularly frequent. In the e-mail corpus,
later occurs 13 times in the StE spelling 具later典 and four times in the spelling 具lata典.
This number includes only occurrences where the word means ‘bye’ and excludes
any uses as adjective or adverb.119 The use of this form is supported by the indigenous form likl muor, which means roughly the same as the adverb later, but
– unlike later – no longer has an elliptical quality to it as it is fully established as a
way of saying goodbye in JamC. A reasonable interpretation of the identity statement connected to the use of later is therefore that Jamaicans appreciate the form’s
compatibility with ISE. Using later instead of likl muor aligns users of the form with
the international English-speaking community, but at the same time represents a
use of urban mesolectal Jamaican slang that points toward its Creole translation, a
form situated only slightly lower in the Creole continuum. Using later as a closing
formula for conversations in any medium signals urban Jamaican identity without
renouncing international identity, and maintaining, in particular, alignment with
US-American popular culture. However, because it is so conveniently ambiguous,
there is no doubt that many users are unaware that it is not a completely international form, and that it has a specifically Jamaican quality to it. Since later is not
part of the basilectal JamC lexicon, many users may simply consider it an acrolectal, and by default ISE, form.
91
In the majority of cases (13 out of 17) the farewell later stands in message-final
position, i.e. is not followed by the writer’s name, which indicates that it is considered a sufficient closing formula for an e-mail. Some examples of this use are:
(32)
[…] I enjoyed chilling with you and your moms over
Christmas. Bridget really enjoyed your company. Thanks
again. Later
m# 010–02
(33)
[…] anyway im gonna get off now i have exams now but give
me a call, okay sweetie, well have a good day later
m# 024–01
These examples show the form making identity statements that are arguably unclear and almost certainly made unconsciously. They can hardly be considered instances of framing. The form’s identity value becomes interesting in combination
with other Patois closing forms, as in the following three ends of e-mail messages:
(34)
[…] Well i gone,
I’m gone/I’ll go now
so love and madness – later*
m# 022–01
(35)
[…] Do you have pauline’s email by any chance? Write back
soon and mek mi know what a gwaan.
let me know what’s happening.
Love you, later!
m# 001–04
These two examples show writers employing a very clear switch into Patois just before the message’s end, and later used as the ultimate closing. In (34), the switched
passage contains another frequent closing: I gone. This form, and its more Creole
version mi gaan, is used in the e-mails only three times. It is much more obviously Creole than later. Read as a whole, example (34) is a message ending which
characterizes its writer both as a Jamaican – which is the most likely purpose of
the codeswitch – and as a member of international, anglophone youth culture,
with which the phrase “love and madness” establishes a connection. “Love and
madness” is an ironic allusion to party culture, the term madness being frequently
used in titles of party events both in Jamaica and internationally.120 It is used to add
humor, as the idea of madness in the sense of party-induced ecstasy is certainly
quite an extreme thing to wish one’s interlocutor in the goodbye-formula of an email, so the joke here rests on malapropism. The form later, then, fits in neatly as
the final element in this list of goodbye-phrases. It supports both of the identity
statements made by the other two elements.
In (35), a whole clause is inserted which leaves no doubt as to its Creoleness.
It is, notably, the only unambiguous use of Patois in the whole e-mail message.
The rest of the message consists of a long list of questions about the addressee’s
current life,121 such as “How come you hate Martinique?” or “Did you say that you
were with somebody in your email? Who is it?” The phrase “mek mi know what
a gwaan,” then, is a summary of these questions which does not add anything
to what was said before, but through the use of Patois makes a link to Jamaica.
Thus, the addressee is reminded of her national identity that she shares with the
writer, and the thematic allusion to the activity of chatting in the phrase (which
can be read as ‘give me a general update’) contextualizes the many questions that
the writer has asked as out of harmless interest, not inappropriate curiosity. With
this important symbolic connection to Jamaican culture established, then, later is
a fitting closing in that it contains both a standard element, which ties in with the
general tone of the message and is appropriate given the writer’s and addressee’s
high level of education, and the Creole element because it hints at the underlying
Creole form likl muor.
(36) is an example which I give without discussion, as it demonstrates the
same functioning of later, which is again combined with a more clearly Creole
phrase that precedes it; in this case it is even repeated:
(36)
[…] Thanks for the email it is nice to be thought of
every now and again. Nuff love and enjoy
lots of love
NY for me ok.
P.S. Did your Daddy make you cut your hair???
5 Nuff LOve
Later
m# 026–07
(32) and (33) show later used ambiguously with regard to the identity statement it
makes; these examples are no true instances of framing. In combination with other
short Patois passages, later is more clearly Patois, and (34)–(36) are therefore better
examples of framing.
93
Closing formulas also contain some other rather subtle ways of signalling Jamaican identity. One writer, for example, uses the form 具lov典 at the end of the
majority of her e-mails (12 out of 16).122 While the word love itself is certainly a
very standard English way of ending a message in all major varieties of English, the
frequent choice of an alternate spelling can legitimately be interpreted as a way of
signalling Jamaican identity.
(37)
[…] will tell you more, but i am relocating.
lov Laura
m# 009–05
(38)
[…] Thanks much i received the transcript today.
bye lov laura
m# 012–04
In those messages where this form is the only use of Patois, it serves only as a subtle reminder to the writer and her reader that Patois is the shared native language,
which is related to, but different from, StE. Again, however, the alignment with
Jamaican culture can be much stronger if another, more clearly Patois form is used
along with it; in (38), it is a further reduced form of I gone/mi gaan:
(38)
[…] whats happening with him, is he still around the
place, I email him now and then but don’t know what he is
up to.
Gone, lov laura
m# 012–05
The framing pattern also frequently uses a kind of register which clearly points to
Jamaica without actually using JamC grammar. Jamaican popular culture has been
absorbing elements of the Rastafari religion for a few decades, which has appropriated JamC and developed a very distinct and prominent version of it that has come
to be known as Dread Talk. Rastafari evolved in Jamaica, even though nowadays
its followers are found in many countries the world over.
Practicing members of the Rastafari religion in Jamaica live in protest against
mainstream society.123 Many Rastas are parts of self-supporting squatter communities in the mountains. It is essential to the religion to despise worldly goods and
aspirations, and as a consequence, its members are marginalized and stigmatized
in Jamaican society.124 However, due to the success of some followers of the religion as musicians, most prominently Bob Marley, a great amount of covert prestige adheres to Rastafari, and particularly the language of young Jamaicans readily
absorbs select elements of Dread Talk. Pollard discusses the tremendous influence
that Dread Talk has had in recent decades on youth language in Jamaica due to the
great popularity of Reggae music:125
It is necessary to point out […] that the Reggae music which is perhaps the single
most important and most constant influence on Jamaican young people is music written essentially by Rastafari and contains lyrics that, for them, are serious
“messages”. While the Children of Israel create words and music, the Children
of Babylon are by no means deaf. So that the youth who in previous years spoke
[JamC] for peer group acceptance […] today effortlessly speak the same language
but deeply laced with [Dread Talk] phrases and lexical items. (Pollard 2000: 15)
In fact, many phrases are known far beyond Jamaica’s borders and have become
elements of general popular culture, cf. the phrase peace and love or, commonly, one
love (see below).
One of the many elements of Rasta talk that have permanently entered the
language of young Jamaicans is the use of yes as an informal greeting, with a meaning identical to hi. The following e-mail is an excellent example of framing. It relies
only on a greeting – yes – and a farewell – 具lov典 – to signal the writer’s Jamaican
identity and thus establish solidarity with his addressee, who is also Jamaican, but
has moved to Florida:
(39)
Yes Laura,
I am ok, but i am concerned still about a couple of
courses. Right now i am doing the only IR course i haVE
left, GT36M. […]
5 Will keep in touch.
lov,
Richard.
m# 009–01
The following message likewise is fully framed in one Rasta element as a greeting
and another, harder to classify slang word as a closing:
(40)
Yes king blessed126..... so you are another wolmerian127.....
can u reming me your name???
O.K. i remove the cat room and took it to another site
because nobody was logging on to it...... they only
5 listen to the mix cd’s and thats it....
Respect!!!
m# 004–03
95
The writer of the message and the addressee do not know each other in person.
The writer here replies to a message with which the addressee initiated contact
with him about a semi-commercial internet site about Jamaican music that he
runs, which contains a chat room. He is not a Rasta himself, yet in this e-mail
exchange with a practically unknown woman he uses Rasta talk elements in the
most prominent positions of the text to characterize himself. The self-image he
thus projects is one of a cool, up-to-date, and active member of Jamaican pop
culture, which in reality he probably is, having created an internet forum for fans
of dancehall music.
The identity statement connected with the use of respect is harder to define.
Even though of West Indian origin, the usage is now part of many nonstandard
varieties of New World black English. It is not only known from AAVE, but also,
for example, as a borrowed form in the French-based creole of Haiti, respè (Nazaire
2003). Unfortunately, little published research exists on this item. Lexicographers
have only recently moved the meaning of respect as a greeting or exclamation out
of the shadow of the regular noun meaning on which it is based. It is listed neither
in the OED nor in dictionaries of African-American slang (e.g. Major 1994) or of
American English slang (e.g. Chapman 1995; e.g. Spears 1995), nor in JamC dictionaries (Cassidy & LePage 1980; Patrick 1995). Only the New Partridge Dictionary
of Slang and Unconventional English has an entry for it (with the spelling variants
具respec, respect, respeck, rispeck典) and cites it as an abbreviation of the phrase
respect due, which is “used for registering approval of someone’s action or attitude”
and of “West Indian and UK black” origin (Dalzell & Victor 2006: 1609). At any
rate the use of the form draws on its internationally established connotations of
black subculture and coolness.
One Rasta talk element that has secured its place in popular Jamaican speech
more firmly than any other is the phrase one love. It is the title of one of Bob Marley’s reggae songs, which even educated Jamaicans such as Kathryn Shields-Brodber (p.c.) find should, or legitimately could, be declared the “unofficial national
anthem of Jamaica” because it expresses a typically Jamaican sentiment and is at
the same time so tremendously well-known internationally.128 It is contained in
the e-mail corpus three times, each time as a closing.
A key phrase underlying one love in Bob Marley’s song of the same title, and
which is used in its original sense only by practicing Rastas, is one peace, one love,
one i-nity [unity]. A use of one love constitutes an endorsement of the covert, popculture prestige of Rastafarianism and Reggae music, and a general alignment with
the Jamaican way of life and elements of its worldview, such as an all-embracing
love, a great joie-de-vivre, etc.
One love has acquired so much symbolic power that a reduced version of it
– one – has come to be used creatively on its own among non-Rasta students, even
without collocating nouns. Consider:
(41)
[…] As always my email box is always open (smile) and
your more than welcome to drop me an email at anytime.
Take it easy now, until next time.
Oneness
Stephanie
m# 001–06
At last consequence, one is used bare, as a phrase all on its own without another
noun or a derivational suffix:
(42)
[…] You know the way I feel right now, I dont want to
talk to you again. Thanks for reminding me. Mi gone. ONE
P.S. […]
m#
017–01
In this example, the writer combines his invocation of the one-love-slogan with the
more conservative Patois farewell mi gaan. The values thus invoked go beyond an
allusion to pop-culture and feelgood coolness, but draw on the ‘we’-code function
of Patois to restore a sense of solidarity with the addressee. Note that the closing
is preceded by a complaint and the (ironic) statement “I dont want to talk to you
again.” The use of the purely Patois farewell “Mi gone” functions as a repair, while
“ONE” serves as the closing to the whole message and lets the message end on a
general note of unity.
These creative uses of one (love) demonstrate the symbolic power that has
come to be attached to this popularized key Rasta phrase. Its relatively frequent,
but exclusive use in closing formulas proves that greetings and farewells are textual elements that have a particular propensity to be occupied by identity-related,
symbolic linguistic tokens which serve no other function (aside from marking the
end of the message text) than to signal the identification with a particular cultural
group, whose membership is usually shared with the addressee (or so perceived).
This observation is further supported by the frequent use of saliently Caribbean
English elements only in framing position. The interjection seen, pronounced /zi:n/
and spelled either 具zeen典 or 具seen典, expresses approval (cf. DCEU) and is used in
anglophone speech communities throughout the Caribbean.129 It occurs five times
97
in the e-mail corpus, three of which are occurrences within a message’s closing
move such as this:
(43)
[…] Yeah how nice, I only hope boredom does not kill me
to death, you know how I get bored easily.
Tek care and wirte soon, seen
Love, your one and only (I hope)
Kristy
m# 008–02
This writer incorporates one phonological, but not lexical, creolism, symbolized
orthographically – 具tek典 in tek care – and an element of Caribbean English that is
not necessarily Creole-derived, seen. Compared to full CS, these markers of Jamaican/Caribbean identity are rather subtle, yet unmistakable. They constitute framing because the message body contains no clear trace of JamC or Caribbean English. “Kill me to death” at the beginning of (43) may be semantically redundant and
somehow fit into an analysis of JamE as a second-language variety of English, but it
is hardly an intentional use of a regionally or socially distinctive linguistic form.
As a last example of framing, I present the entertaining closing of a message
that a male university student writes to a group of recipients: his sister, his mother,
and some friends of the family. He has spent several weeks in the US and has written one other message to the same group of recipients previous to this one, which
suggested that he missed home and was quite prepared to go back home to Jamaica
as soon as possible. The message from which I quote is written immediately before
his return flight, and he is in an extremely good mood. In the message he announces to the readers: “by the time unu read this mi done reach home already…
[…] u know wat that means…” (m# 029–02).
The rest of the message contains no information of practical relevance to the
readers, but serves to convey and illustrate his good mood and satisfaction about
ending his stay abroad and coming home. In so doing, he cites and adapts various
pieces of pop lyrics: “so jamdown expect to be rocked cause jake is coming home
haha....’yow, i role solo from state to state... haha’ and u know america found out
that i was the baddest... (watch belly and find out the res) in the US.”130 The closing
of the message reads:
(44)
[…] and if anyting i link u tomorrow
so one love
keep the faith
bless
peace
astalapasta
cheerio’s
fruit loops
bla bla bla
sign
the jam down representative
Jake
wid a CAPITAL J u zi mi
haha
m#
029–02
This closing only partly invokes existing and established farewell formulas (such as
one love) to which the purpose of identity creation could be attributed. The whole
passage consists of existing phrases, most of them not farewells in their original
sense, some of them adapted, and connected creatively. In this case, the message
frame is exploited to create the identity of a writer in a very good mood by a very
playful and creative use of linguistic resources.
Framing has been presented here in detail because it is a very frequent strategy
of integrating Patois elements for symbolic purposes, namely in order to remind
both the writer and the reader of a common cultural background. This is linguistic
convergence in its purest sense and matches LePage & Tabouret-Keller’s notion
that linguistic forms attributed to a certain social or cultural group are used in
order to create alignment and identification of the self with that particular group.
The examples show that framing strategies allow for a distinction between various aspects of Jamaicanness: depending on which register greetings and farewell are
taken from, writers can convey identification with more urban, internationally oriented, and ambiguously Creole aspects of Jamaican culture (later/lata), draw on the
more intimate functions of Patois as the ‘we’-code with more clearly Creole forms
(likl muor/mi gaan), align themselves specifically with an up-to-date, pop-culture
coolness with Rasta-derived forms that are restricted to young people’s use (yes, one
love etc.), or create a comprehensively positive sense of identification with Jamaica
and the Caribbean through the use of forms that are not clearly creole-derived,
although sometimes Rasta-derived, but regionally identifiable (one love, seen).
Those messages that employ Patois, or otherwise Jamaican or Caribbean linguistic forms, only in the message frame, exemplify the reduction of Patois to symbolic function in its most complete way. In these cases, Patois is no longer trusted
with the task of transmitting message content.
99
It should be mentioned that convergent linguistic behavior, and more specifically
framing, is used not only for highlighting Jamaican or Caribbean aspects of identities. Other social groups are also among those whose linguistic codes are employed for symbolic purposes in message frames. Spanish and African American
Vernacular English (AAVE) both occur occasionally either in CS or by the use of
selected features. First, here are two examples of CS into and out of Spanish, the
only ones contained in the corpus. In (45), a Jamaican student asks a professor of
Spanish for an extension on an essay in Spanish literature, because an opportunity
for a field trip of a few days to Guyana has arisen in another department.
(45)
[…] I hope that you will understand my case, since I only
had a few hours to plan for this trip, really. I will see
you in class next week Friday, that is if you do not kick
me out of your course.
Hasta que regrese yo!
Until I have returned [see you when I get back]!
James
m# 002-04
The strategy of construing himself as aligned with Spanish culture and literature
seems perfectly understandable and transparent given the situation, in which the
writer wishes to convince his professor not to doubt the writer’s determination to
continue his studies in Spanish literature despite some temporary difficulties.
The other example of CS into Spanish is based on an underlying motivation
which is also not very hard to decipher. Before the writing of this e-mail, a male and
a female student met for the first time. The male wrote a note to the female, containing his e-mail address and a sentence in Spanish. The female then initiated e-mail
contact, asking what the Spanish sentence meant. And the male’s response is this:
(46)
ok then madam i see you are a lady of your word and thats
a plus in my books ok.
what i said in the little note i gave you was basically,
“that i would love to be with you” mi gustacia mucho
I’d like a lot
5 estar contigo i hope it got you good its just another way
to be with you
of saying give a nigga a chance b4 you judge him. not you
but overall ok. so if you want you can call me @ xxx xxxx
Codeswitching and identity: how writers describe themselves through code choice 101
anytime ok peace. […] i also speak 5 more languages along
with spanish ok.
10 i have no idea what to say. you caught me off guard ok so
now we have accomplished the friend thing lets keep in
touch ok see ya.
m# 016–01
sj
translation
The use of Spanish – not exclusively in this message, but also in the initial written note that preceded the e-mail contact – was obviously intended as a device to
impress the female with foreign language proficiency, a concept, one might add,
which is not very original, but at least has the potential to produce a clear outcome
quickly. In fact, it should go as proof of its functionality that the female did react
and initiate the second e-mail contact. It is not entirely clear, however, whether
the writer’s assertion “i also speak 5 more languages along with spanish ok” is an
instance of reckless overuse of this principle, or if the writer here demonstrates the
ability to joke about his own transparent intentions.
One way or another, it is interesting that the use of Spanish is contrasted
sharply by the use of AAVE in the phrase “give a nigga a chance b4 you judge him.”
The only distinctly AAVE element in this sentence is, of course, the use of nigga
as meaning ‘person’ without any derogatory sense. The term is frequent among
students in Jamaica, but taken from AAVE, which is very present and accessible
to Jamaican students through pop music, films, and all other media. To young
Jamaicans, all artistic output by black US-Americans is of definite interest, next to
Jamaica’s own musical artists. The direct contrast between Spanish, which suggests
a multilingual, high-cultured self-image, and the very informal AAVE paraphrase
can in itself be understood as evidence that the writer intentionally uses stylistic
contrast to create humor and makes fun of his obvious intentions that transpired
in his earlier use of Spanish in the initial paper note.
While Spanish, the foreign language learned by most Jamaicans, is used only
for very specialized purposes and is very salient, AAVE elements are more frequent in the overall discourse, are much less salient, and very easily integrated into
the more acrolectal baseline code used by the majority of writers. It is only sometimes used to make racial identity statements; in other cases writers just adopt
AAVE elements in a similar function to elements of Dread Talk: they sound cool
and connect to pop music and culture, and they present a very informal and colloquial way of expression. The general absence of AAVE elements from framing
positions shows that the identity values connected with it are better served by the
Patois and Rasta codes.
AAVE forms that occur in message bodies of this and other e-mails include:
–
–
–
the construction my (your/his/her...) ass in the function of a personal pronoun,
as in: “[I] scared my ass [myself] silly on the slides” (m# 026–11), “his car got a
flat in the rain and we got our asses [ourselves] soaked geeting [sic] it changed,
but it was fun” (m# 026–11), and two other occurrences; note however that
these are all uses by the same writer;
the construction ADJ-ass as premodifyer in a noun phrase with a particularly derogatory meaning, as in: “cheap ass Sketel”131(m# 026–02), and “I got
closure re my shitty ass relationship and I have come to the grand conclusion
that I really dont hate men” (m# 026–04); these examples are again from the
same writer and her interlocutor, which suggests that a particular tolerance
for AAVE elements was established in their exchange. This would be fitting as
they were both temporarily in Florida during term break, although both are
Jamaican students in Kingston;
the shortened form of all right, 具aight典, which is part of the inventory of AAVE
and also the English of whites in the Southern US.
5.3 Social personae as resources in identity construction
5.3.1 Performativity in discourse
Antaki et al. (1996) study monolingual speakers and their management of social
identities in talk. They argue that in the course of any conversation, speakers either
assume, or are assigned, social identities which are conducive to all participants’
collaborative interests. For example, in their data a young medical doctor successively invokes various identities in one conversation with his friends. Despite a lot
of talk about treating illnesses, medical exams, etc., he is not assigned the identity
of ‘doctor’ until turn 279 of the conversation, when the term is actually used for
the first time. Before that, he has been attributed with other identities such as ‘recently-qualified-medical-student’ and ‘recently-qualified-medical-student-withaspirations-to-continue-in-his-career.’132
Sebba & Wootton (1998) work on the assumption that social identity is a “flexible resource in the dynamics of interaction” (Antaki et al. 1996: abstract) and employ it productively in their analysis of conversations among London Jamaicans.
They point out that this idea, developed on the basis of monolingual conversation
data, is a more general take on LePage & Tabouret-Keller’s idea that identity is
constantly being constructed, modified, and shifted in conversation by multilinguals, using the resource of code selection and the principle of convergence to
foreground selected identities (1985). As Sebba & Wootton point out (1998: 276),
the merit of Antaki et al. (1996) is to have clarified that performing linguistic acts
of identity – as defined by LePage & Tabouret-Keller – is just one way in which
speakers can create identities for themselves.
Identities of participants, they write,
are descriptions: they never just appear, they are always used; they only make
sense as part of an interactional structure (like a story or argument), and […]
they are highly flexible. The participants use their identities as warrants of authority for a variety of claims they make and challenge, and the identities they
invoke change as they are deployed to meet changing conversational demands.
(Antaki et al. 1996: 479)
As concerns the linguistic resources that speakers draw on in using such identities,
all aspects of stylistic variation may be employed.
From my point of view, the principal advantage of Antaki et al.’s perspective
is that in it, processes of identity creation do not simply rely on positive or negative attitudes to groups, created by the performance of a linguistic variety that is
perceived as connected to the group in question – or lack thereof. Instead of only
groups, Antaki et al. show that individual types can also be the target of identity
creation. In a more detailed and richer process of identity creation, conversation
connects speakers with social prototypes. Such prototypes are (ideally) recognized
by all participants and constitute part of their shared cultural knowledge. (I will
refer to them interchangeably as ‘personae,’ ‘types,’ and ‘roles.’)
To name some examples of such social types: in the example from Antaki et al.
cited above, the young medical doctor is assigned the role of ‘doctor,’ and before that,
several other identities that highlight different aspects of his professional development. Outside of professional and career-related aspects of identity, Sebba & Wootton show the operation of the social type of a Jamaican middle-aged woman, which,
in their data, is used by adolescent girls in their conversational identity creation.
Theoretical forebears to this concept of how dynamic identities are “used” in talk
– or, more specifically, “made relevant” by speakers or “oriented to” by all participants (Antaki et al. 1996; Antaki & Widdicombe 1998a) – are found in the work
of early ethnomethodologists. Antaki & Widdicombe (1998a) explicitly invoke
Garfinkel (1967) as the first to connect the analysis of social behavior with ethnographically distilled participants’ categories. The existing concept of ‘performance,’ as in the work of Hymes and Bauman (e.g. Hymes 1974; Bauman 1986), also
comes to mind, but does not seem to accurately describe the way that identities are
suggested and used in the data: what Bauman describes as performance, or Hymes
as ‘full performance’ (1974: 444), is
a way of speaking, the essence of which resides in the assumption of responsibility
to an audience for a display of communicative skill, highlighting the way in which
communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content. (Bauman
1986: 3)
This concept of performance is closely tied to storytelling and oral literature. The
focus on the means of communication “beyond its referential content” is also a central aspect of the present analysis of identity performances in CMC, but the actual
mechanisms of making the formal aspects of communication relevant are different
from the rather strongly ritualized acts of storytelling that Bauman analyzes.
The notion of performativity is more fitting in the context of a study of indexicality and identity construction. Although both performance and performativity
are notions that describe acts of individuals who position themselves in relation
to socially pre-defined roles, by taking them or otherwise, the latter captures more
accurately the way that Antaki et al. think of ‘using’ identities. In comparison to
full performance, performativity is a less complete assumption of a role and its
audience-related responsibilities. It is thus less starkly defined than performance,
from which it derives. For example, in performativity there are no established or
ritualized co-occurrences of setting, content, and linguistic form, which are normally part of a performance’s definition. The concept goes back to a conceptual
reworking of John L. Austin’s (1962) category of ‘performative utterances’ (which
form part of his speech act theory) by Judith Butler (1990; 1993). However, it rests
not on Butler’s strongest and most well-known claim that all aspects of human
identity are discursively constructed, including those that may normally be assumed to be acquired by birth such as sex and gender, but more generally on the
way Butler describes the constant process of constructing and referencing identity
through talk (cf. Hall 2003: 373).
As Ben Rampton shows (1998a), a tremendously useful set of ideas by cultural
theorist Mikhail Bakhtin can help us to understand the difference between CS
in performativity and other types of CS. Rampton introduces Bakhtin’s ‘doublevoicing’ in an effort to redress a problem in Gumperz’s influential framework: the
exaggerated importance placed on metaphorical switching. Due to the problems
that many critics have seen with ‘situational switching’ in Gumperz’s work (see
3.1), the functions of CS that Gumperz calls ‘metaphorical’ are at the center of
many analysts’ work on CS. These functions are usually local, i.e. each switch has
its own separate function, and work quite straightforwardly as contextualization
cues, supporting the denotational message content. This ignores precisely the kind
of CS behavior that I describe in this section: that in which codes carry certain
identity-related values that are not just relevant at the moment of a switch, but
on the discourse-level, i.e. a greater meaning complex is generated by the total-
ity of switches in a given unit of discourse. Also, metaphorical switching fails to
grasp the way in which CS can generate irony or humor. In Bakhtin’s terminology,
metaphorical switching is used in ‘single-voiced discourse’: it usually functions as
“direct, unmediated discourse directed exclusively toward its referential object, as
an expression of the speaker’s ultimate semantic authority” (Bakhtin 1984: 199).
The use of a marked code can sometimes amount to the use of somebody
else’s discourse. In the case of Rampton’s material, this is self-explanatory: the phenomenon he describes as ‘crossing’ means cross-ethnic CS behavior, or the use of
codes other than those that are generally felt to be the speaker’s own (as in the case
of white English adolescents using Creole). More generally, the use of somebody
else’s voice (i.e. another discourse, part of which is based in the selection of code),
or another social group’s voice or the voice of a recognized stereotypical identity, is called ‘double-voicing’ in Bakhtin’s work (1984: 189–200). I will here focus
on examples of double-voicing that employ stereotypical social identities. These
are usually perceived as different from one’s own, as few people see themselves as
stereotypical.
If the second identity that is foregrounded through use of its voice is supported by the speaker, taken on with clear, positive identification and used as a
straightforward aid in his or her own discursive intentions (i.e. if the second voice
is “directed” or “oriented” toward the same goal as the speaker’s, cf. Bakhtin 1984:
199), this is ‘unidirectional double-voicing.’ If on the other hand speakers use the
voices of identities that they are very clearly opposed to in real life, and that are
oriented away from the speaker’s own, this is called ‘vari-directional double-voicing.’133 This is present not only in irony, but also (as we will see) in the case of
identities that strongly diverge from the speaker’s own.
The main difference between the use of Patois in CS in the types discussed
until now on the one hand, and CS in identity construction on the other, is that the
first is used mostly in single-voiced and the latter in double-voiced discourse.134
That is to say, in single-voicing, Patois is part of the writer’s own, bi-codal voice,
whereas in double-voicing, CS makes identities relevant that are not fully equal to
the writer’s own (though in unidirectional double-voicing there may be overlap).
Consequently, the inferential reconstruction of the discursive meanings becomes
more complex, as Patois use in double-voicing builds meanings less straightforwardly and relies more on implicatures than that in single-voicing.
The construction and use of social identities in discourse is a complex semiotic
process with several factors bearing on the conversational function of social personae. In order to focus my analysis below, I will begin by describing some of the
social types that seem to be of particular importance among the informant group
because they are used repeatedly. Then I will show in as much detail as possible
how the social personae are discursively employed for identity construction, and
what the discursive and communicative outcomes are.
First, I will point out three factors that are relevant to this process and show
how I will shape my analysis accordingly.
1. As my examples will show, speakers/writers construct connections between themselves and the various social personae in different ways. Using a social type in the description (or self-description) of a speaker by
a simple positive connection (or endorsement) is the most basic kind of
relation, and not necessarily the most frequent type. But a social type can
also be used negatively in identity creation, by conveying disapproval in
some way. Speakers may also assume a role ironically and thus signal disapproval implicitly. In many of the examples presented below, identities
are taken on by writers with a certain amount of irony. This shows that the
use of CS in creating social identities is a realm of planned and intentional
contrastive code use. Thus, the analysis must take into consideration the
stances that writers take in their linguistic acts of identity in order to accurately assess the rhetorical functions of any given resource, in the present
case, of the JamC code.
2. Just as the stance which writers assume toward an identity can vary, the
rhetorical and communicative purposes for which they do so can be very
different. I will point out for each of the examples below the communicative gain which lies in the use of a social persona for the writer.
3. A third influencing factor lies in the communicative channels which individuals can use to create a certain kind of persona. In face-to-face conversation, the number of channels is greater than in e-mail: kinesics and
proxemics are standard ingredients of talk that “are so critical in expressing personal opinions and attitudes and moderating social relationships”
(Crystal 2001).135 These are absent from the medium of e-mail, which can
nonetheless draw on resources such as CS, stylistic variation, choice of
theme, or alternative orthographic choices to construct a certain persona.
Since my interest is in the changing functions of Creole in the new medium of e-mail, I will focus on those instances of the use of social personae
that rely centrally on CS to create them.
5.3.2 The data: identity work employing CS
To begin with, I will present some examples that at first sight seem to be functionally similar to some of those that were discussed as sequential CS. More specifically, they resemble the type ‘CS for voicing negative attitudes or emotions.’
The writer of the following excerpt is in France as a teaching assistant following her university studies in Jamaica. Her report about life in Paris is interlaced
with switches into Creole for the most subjective parts points of her report.
(47)
[…]
Work is o.k. the teachers are very lovely but some of the
students can be very nasty. Totally the opposite of our
J’can students. Boy i thought our pickney dem neva hav
Boy I thought our kids had
5 nuh rispek, but dem french pickney yah beet dem clear.
no respect, but these French kids here clearly beat them.
The food here, i am still getting used to. It’s not bad
but bwoy is not everything good for the system. For
boy, not all of it is good for the system.
Christmas i had oysters can u believe it and ostrich
meat. Boy mi neva knuo seh ostrich kuda eat.
But
Boy, I didn’t know you could eat ostrich meat. But
10 it neva taste too bad, bearing in mind seh
it didn’t taste too bad, bearing in mind that
mi did half tru di meat before dem tell mi a wa.
I was half done with the meat before they told me what it was.
It tasts kinda like beef.
[…]
m# 001–02
There is a functional overlap for the use of Creole in this message with the more
contrastive type of switch for transporting ‘negative attitudes or emotions.’ The
codeswitches in this passage might have gone along with a certain degree of emotionalization on the part of the author in the writing process. However, it is just as
possible that she has given this report in other e-mails a number of times and it
no longer causes great involvement for her – we can only speculate on this. At any
rate, the codeswitches here on closer inspection seem to be insufficiently explained
as mere highlighters serving to intensify the marked passages.
As contextualization cues for negative attitudes or emotions, codeswitches
into a marked code help to make the message content more salient to all participants. These switches set emotional passages off from the speaker’s/writer’s main
discourse and mark them as subjective statements, so that other participants are
not tempted to reflect on the passages’ objective significance. Also, the use of a ‘we’code for negative attitudes adds a familiar, private, and less official quality to what
is said, which helps to mediate the negative content and avoid offending listeners.
While the use of the ‘we’-code in the switched passages in (47) arguably has
this effect, one should not forget that hardly any of the negative evaluations of
life in Paris and its schools stand a chance of personally offending the reader, a
Jamaican-born graduate student at UWI Mona, Kingston, who has never been to
Europe. The writer criticizes neither her reader, nor anyone close to him, nor any
idea or thing that he cares about, so the intended effect of the use of CS as a contextualizer is not the one it typically has in this function: to mark passages which
need to be taken with a grain of salt, and thus to reduce the potential of a passage
to cause offence. Thus, while an interpretation of the codeswitches in (47) as simply contrastive contextualization cues is neither fully wrong nor unjustified, it does
not seem entirely satisfying either. Using instead Antaki et al.’s model of social
identities, the explanatory scope is widened to a greater variety of contextual factors and does not stop at a consideration of message content and the contrasting of
codes. As Sebba & Wootton point out with regard to the social identity model,
such an explanation is independent of given notions of ‘we-code’ and ‘they-code’.
Rather, such an account relies on ethnographic information revealing the values put
by users on the codes they use. (1998: 281)
In the case at hand, the value placed on the Patois code by the writer is a connection to social types that both she and the reader know from Jamaica, people who
speak Patois in conversation. The marked passages go together with the conversational act of complaining about life and the world, a rhetorical mode that can lend
coherence to oral conversations in real life. Performing this conversational mode
in an e-mail, then, serves to make a connection with the members of earlier generations who used Patois exclusively in conversation, and who have not yet made
the change to using StE as a baseline code, like these users of e-mail have. Thus, it is
also a connection to less educated, more local, simpler, and very widely recognized
social types found in Jamaican daily life.
What may be the reasons for the writer’s use of CS, or rather, for using Patois
in alluding to these Jamaican types? In using personae that are known to and recognized by her reader, the writer manages to direct the reader’s attitude toward her
narrative: the reader is allowed a plane of identification with the writer’s experi-
ence, and although he does not actually share her experience, the role in which she
talks about them allows him to share her view on them.
There is a good amount of humor in this passage, and the narrative technique
sketched here is probably not employed in the interest of a very realistic depiction of facts and events. The writer quite selectively tells of only a few outstanding
items, covering the topical areas of ‘work’ and ‘food’ within the few lines of this
excerpt. The humor of the passage derives partly from the knowledge that life in
Paris must necessarily be richer and more complex than sketched in the e-mailed
story, but that the selective attitude projected by the writer is comfortably simple
and relaxingly efficient in giving just a quick overview of the overall situation.
For further illustration, I quote from another message written from abroad,
this time from New York by a male undergraduate at UWI in Mona, Jamaica.
(48)
[…] I just walk the whole of Manhattan today (well it
sure felt like it). i also went to Harlem, against Yvon’s
wishes who thinks that its “not safe”. she was kinna
right, its a dump. Is a real rass shame what negro mek
It really is a damn shame what black
people have let
5 Harlem come to. wit all the money people like “sean john”
Harlem come to. With all the money people like “Sean John”136f
mek dem cah fix it up?!! Jus imagine, the place have so
are making, can’t they fix it up? Just think, the place has so
much history behind it. You will never find white people
much history behind it.
neglecting their historical landmarks dis way!! Never!!
[…]
m# 019–04
Again, in the marked passages the writer takes on another role not only by switching into Patois, but also by assuming the stance of a Jamaican in conversation, which
is again marked by a readiness to focus on the the negative aspects of a situation
– both overtly and through rhetorical questions (“dem cah fix it up?,” l. 6).
The purpose of using a stereotypical Jamaican identity in this message is much
the same as in (47). It facilitates communication. Even if he is only half-serious
about his complaints (cf. the hyperbole of suggesting to use Sean Comb’s private assets to renovate Harlem, ll. 5–6), he manages to convey to his reader the basic sense
of bafflement over the bad state that this famous part of town is apparently in.
In these two examples, we see contrastive functions of CS overlapping with
the use of Patois in the creation of a stereotypical style, which in turn is used in the
performance of the identity of a typical Jamaican in conversation.
The use of Patois-based identities can also occur in a much more straightforward
fashion. Some of the social types that are created through the use of Patois are even
clearer and more sharply defined than that of ‘rural Jamaicans in conversation,’ exemplified in (47) and (48). In what follows, I will present the types of the ‘country
bumpkin abroad,’ the ‘rude bway’ and the ‘robust Jamaican woman.’
The ‘country bumpkin abroad’ is the figure of an uneducated Jamaican who is
accustomed only to his or her domestic way of life, and who is confronted with the
ways of farin for the first time. Example (12) in my section on metaphorical CS already showed traces of a writer using this personality. Needless to say, all e-mails in
the corpus are written by individuals who have been abroad before (though possibly,
in some cases, not to the country they are reporting from in the corpus material).
In (49), a Jamaican university student talks about his first weeks as a graduate
student at the University of Cambridge in England, his first stay in Europe. The
topics he addresses are, first, a date with another student, a trip to a concert in
London, his coursework at the university, and the experience of seeing snow for
the first time.
(49)
[…] First we went to listen to a concerto for violin
cello and piano (sorry fi all those who don’t know what
(sorry to all those who don’t know what
that mean) and also to the performance of the University
that means)
Chorus (of which she is a member) and the orchestra. In
5 the Christmas I went to a concert they were having in
London at this famous concert hall, the place big, world
without end. But, me decide seh mi haffi live it up while
I have decided that I have to live it up while
me inna England an join ‘society’ people and activity
I’m in England and join the people of ‘society’ and their activities.
:-D.
10 […] Got back my first grade from the Cambridge people and
frankly me not too pleased, but if a go talk to dem,
I’m not too pleased, but if I went and talked to them,
dem nah go understand because a some ‘good’ Jamaican wud
they wouldn’t understand because what I’d tell them is a
mi a go tell them. The work hard bad and I have to
‘good’ Jamaican word. Work is really hard
battle with the writings of some people who out fi mad mi
who are out to drive me crazy
15 with things like: “To recall the Subject, is to transcend
both time and space and occupy the margins of spatiotemporal reality, while turning the theory in, back on
itself to form the trajectory from which the ontological
and epistomological instantiations of the ancestral
20 reverberations are hurled.” SOMEBODY TALK TO DEM FI MI.
Somebody go talk to them for me.
For they seem to be speaking not in the tongues of men
but of angels! But things could be worse!
Me an de snow ting having problem though. Because some
Me and the snow thing are having problems, though. Some
place inna England no see no snow fi bout twenty years,
places in England haven’t seen any snow in about 20 years,
25 an me not too excited bout seeing it either. And haing137
and I’m not too excited about seeing it either.
never seen the white stuff before, you could forgive me
when me see frost and think is snow. Is a good thing me
I saw frost, but thought it was snow. It’s a good thing I
never say it nobody because dem woulda laugh after mi.
never told anybody, because they would have laughed at me.
[…]
m# 002–20
To be sure, the written use of Creole for this writer is exceptional, planned, and
intentional. He supplied 20 messages for the corpus, 19 of which use no Creole at
all (with the exception of one proverb: “Dem gi mi baskit fi carry water [they asked
me to do the impossible]” (m# 002–10). In fact, most of the e-mails he supplied are
written in particularly standard English, without any of the Creole influences that
characterize many West Indian students’ English writing (Mair 1992; Craig 1997),
for example:
111
(50)
Hi Dr. Singh,
I read with dismay your message re the obviously “bad
news”. Your coming down with the Chicken Pox did neither
of us any good because it meant not having the only class
5 which I look forward to every week not only because of
the content but also due to the style/manner in which it
is delivered. […]
sj
Re: Some bad news, temporarily (I hope).
m# 002–02
The use of Patois in (49) is, again, one of several ways in which the writer characterizes himself. His use of the Jamaican code does far more than just cast him as
Jamaican: in connection with the topical environments in which it is used, Patois is
part of the writer’s character work in his role as the ‘country bumpkin.’ Note which
contents are addressed in the boldfaced (i.e. Patois) passages:
– the addressees’ assumed ignorance of what a concerto for piano and violoncello is (ll. 2–3),
– personal reasons for going to classical concerts (ll. 7–8),
– displeasure at the Cambridge professors’ grading for the writer’s coursework (ll. 11–13),
– a personal evaluation of the people who write academic texts such as the
one quoted in ll. 15–20 (l. 14 and l. 20),
– confusion about snow in general (ll. 23–25), and
– embarrassment at having confused white frost for snow (ll. 27–28).
Gumperz’s type of CS for ‘subjectivization vs. objectivization’ is an applicable category for some of these codeswitches, since all Patois passages contain subjective
statements, while facts and objective statements are given in English.138 But the
evaluations given in Patois also construct a cohesive stance that the writer takes
vis-à-vis the different news items about life in the foreign country that he reports,
and this stance is that of a ‘country bumpkin.’ It is marked by an ability to rhetorically give a positive twist to the challenges of being abroad. In narration, hardship
and confusion are met with the narrator’s spite, and losses are often recast as gains.
The professors who gave the writer a bad grade receive his scorn and turn into addressees for “good Jamaican words,” i.e. quite possibly profanity in Patois – but only
theoretically and only in this narrative (ll. 12–13). The visit to the classical concerto
is exploited as a means of demonstrating familiarity with the ways of the educated
world, and to snub those at home who are, supposedly, ignorant even of what a
concerto is (ll. 2–3). In a move to recreate solidarity with the readers, the reasons
for the visit to the concert are made transparent (ll. 7–8): while in England, the
writer thought it fit to “live it up” and join “society” – a quite extraordinary chance
which is certainly not available to just anyone in Jamaica. Likewise, white frost
confuses the writer, who takes it for snow, but he holds his ground by simply not
telling the locals, and in telling this he again sets himself up for identification with
the readers in Jamaica who do not have the benefit of this experience abroad.
Of course, the stance of the sly ‘country bumpkin’ that the writer quite consistently assumes is not taken on seriously. The appeal and humor of this rhetorical mode lies in the points where it departs from reality. The writer clearly uses
the identity playfully. The passages in which he returns to StE prove this, as they
contradict other aspects of the persona. His unproblematic quoting of some scholarly outpouring (ll. 15–20) suggests, despite the spelling error it contains, that the
writer is not uneducated and insecure in his new environment. In fact, the writer
himself made up the “quote.” And his comment in ll. 21–22, containing a reference to a very prominent passage in the New Testament,139 even represents a short
instantiation of the persona of a pastor, which in daily Jamaican life is certainly
stereotypical as well.
The narrative mode of the ‘country bumpkin’ is commonly known and accepted, as the data demonstrate. A very typical ingredient of this rhetorical mode
is the way that hardships and challenges are reinterpreted as successes in narrative.
Facts are not so much changed as they are made to look like consequences of the
protagonist’s intentions. In the character inventory of Black Atlantic folk tales, the
trickster hero is a common prototype and has many prominent realizations. Literary and anthropological studies have worked extensively on the trickster hero in
African-American and Caribbean oral tradition and his sources in West-African
narrative traditions (cf. Tanna 1983; Dance 1985; Dakubu 1990; Arnold 2000).
This way of seeing oneself as the weaker party in conflict with a greater force, but
using one’s cunning as a force to counter it is fundamental to the tradition of Anansi stories, the folk hero of many tales in Jamaican “oraliterature.”140 Therefore, the
readers of this message will know how to take a statement such as that in ll. 7–8: on
the surface, the writer is playing the card of a man-of-the-world who is exploring
Europe on a chance that few of those at home will ever have. But all involved know
to detect the irony with which the boastful tone of condescension is assumed.
And irony also characterizes the other instances of the ‘country bumpkin’-stance:
both writer and readers know that by now, any educated Jamaican is aware of the
existence of violoncellos, pianos, and concertos for both (and all addressees of this
message are educated). Likewise, both writer and readers are perfectly able to read
and understand texts of the genre caricatured in ll. 15–20, and all know that the
academic texts that graduates have to read in Cambridge are no more difficult than
those on stock at the UWI library in Mona, Jamaica. The pose of exasperation at
the complex academic language which is struck as part of the ‘country bumpkin’character, then, can hardly be serious, but is used ironically.
The use of irony in (49) is the key to placing this instance of identity construction within the Bakhtinian framework. Whereas examples (47) and (48) used the
second voices of (somewhat more vaguely defined) social types completely in line
with their own rhetorical interest, the voice of the ‘country bumpkin’ in (49) is directed away from the writer’s own. That is to say, (47) and (48) use unidirectional
double-voicing, while (49) uses vari-directional double-voicing. The second voice
in (49) is assumed ironically and characterizes the speaker in ways that are directly
opposed to his true identity (e.g. the feigned inability to grasp intellectual discourse, thinking that the addressees would not know what a concerto is, etc.). This
is done not in order to deceive the readers, but to achieve a richer, more complex
semiosis through the obvious irony. In the examples that follow within this section
((50)–(58)), double-voicing is also used vari-directionally.
Since all involved are well aware of the lack of seriousness underlying the use
of the ‘country bumpkin’ persona, the question must be what its merits are for the
writer and the realization of his communicative intentions: why does he do what
he is doing?
The use in narration of roles that are recognized parts of the popular inventory of social personae facilitates communication. The writer’s agenda in this message is to present a number of new facts to the readers in his report about his
life abroad. It makes it easier for readers to focus on these new facts if the writer
assumes a known rhetorical mode, i.e. a humorous mode of narration employing
a well-known persona from popular mythology. The use of a humorous character
with which both readers (and the writer) can identify creates an implicit interaction between writer and readers. As a method of making narrative lively and keeping it interesting, this may be well-chosen, considering the alternative of a mere
enumeration of facts and news, given monocodally in English.
A last example reiterates very compactly one essential element of ‘country
bumpkin’ personae: a propensity to boast about the successes attained abroad.
(51)
[…] but anyway massive i will be back on the rock in
exactly.... 16 days.... that would be the 29th.... haha
see when big man did go a foriegn him learn how to count
you see, when Big Man [=the writer himself] went abroad, he learned how
to count
hahaha..... anyway just thought i’d tell u guys that ill
5 be home soon and im expecting GIFTS!!!! lots and lots of
gifts...... […]
m# 029–01
The writer was on a stay in the USA for a few weeks during university holiday. In reality, this undergraduate student could be expected to be able to count and calculate
the difference between dates as a matter of course. In the Creole passage however,
he ironically characterizes himself as the ‘country bumpkin’ who has had unheardof successes abroad, superseding the achievements of those at home by far.
The purpose of the use of a role in this excerpt is different from examples
(47)–(48). Since no complex news is given, the primary purpose of the use of role
talk does not lie in lending the narrative shape. It rather contributes to the general
depiction of the present situation which the writer gives in this excerpt: in essence
he is only announcing his return to his close friends and family members. The
corpus contains additional material by this writer which suggests that he was quite
bored, possibly even homesick, during his few weeks abroad. His claim that he
anticipates a great welcome on his return, including “lots and lots of gifts” (ll. 5–6),
is very likely not meant seriously, but springs from an honest sense of anticipation and relief about the end of the stay abroad. Primarily then, the persona of the
‘country bumpkin’ here creates a humorous item which adds to the upbeat mood
of the message. Thus, it is a communicative aid to self-expression, but not – as in
the previous examples – an element in the construction of a narrative frame to
simplify the communication of facts that are unknown to readers.
Outside of the e-mail corpus, this persona can be found as well. The website
jamaicans.com, which includes the discussion forums that supplied some of the
discussion forum data, also runs a monthly column written by an author with the
nom de plume of “Country Gal A Foreign.” The columns, which are written for the
public, are always fully in Patois. As an example, the issue of November 2004 has the
URL <http://www.jamaicans.com/culture/articles_culture/raincountrygal.shtml>.
Other identities have been shown to be operative in Jamaican discourse. Mair
(2003b) features a pilot study of Jamaican CMC, based on observations of internet discussion forums. He shows how one participant uses Patois in disrupting
an ongoing discussion in a joking performance of the ‘rude bway’-role. In it, he
claims for himself the street smartness of a man who grew up in the worst parts
of Kingston, and who won’t hesitate to use his gun. This participant does not talk
about his real identity here, he merely engages in role-play. Other participants in
the discussion call his bluff in later contributions.
The social type of ‘rude bway’ is extremely prominent in contemporary Jamaican culture. There are plenty of references to it in dancehall lyrics, and in fact numerous dancehall songs devoted entirely to the topic of the ‘rude bway.’ The rude
115
bway movement came into being and continues to exist as an important alternative
to Rastafari. Both are predominantly male subcultures (although Rastafarian communities have female members, the majority of publicly known Rastafarian contributors to popular discourse, mainly through reggae and dancehall music, are male).
In addition to the Rastafari, another influence that shaped the dancehall after
Independence was the emergence of a rebellious youth movement of disenfranchised urban males – rude boys. Beginning around 1961, and blossoming three
years later, the rude-boy movement erupted as a distinct force among the unemployed male youths of Kingston. (Stolzoff 2000: 80)
Among the many differences between rude bways and Rastas is the relatively
smaller importance of religion among rude bways. Both groups have produced a
number of reggae and dancehall artists, but while Rastafarianism cultivates its own
religious philosophy, “the rudies drew haphazardly on Rastafarian thinking and
ways of being” (Stolzoff 2000: 81) and on the whole cultivated an image of urban
roughness, readiness for conflict with the police, and distrust of the legal system.
This is illustrated by an extract from the song “Rude Boy” by Shabba Ranks:141
Ruud bwai an poliis a no fren
The rude boy and the police are no friends
Mi kuda neva bi a poliis,
I could never be a policeman
Agens mi moda mi kudna swier
I could never bear witness against my own mother
[…] If a man a moles mi
If someone is molesting me
An mi family
And my family
Mi naa ron fi poliis
I wouldn’t run to the police
Ar sikuoriti
Or the security forces
Mi uda chek fi
I would check with
Mi ruud bwai kompini
My rude boy posse
The following quote from a personal homepage reveals the essential attributes of
the ‘rude bway’-image, and shows at the same time the prominence that the type
has gained in the diaspora. The author, who on his website calls himself “chico enrico,” lives and grew up in Scotland, but does not disclose whether he is Jamaican
himself. He writes about signs of rude bway culture in Glasgow:
[…] also, what i can only prosume [sic] was ‘rude bwoy’ graffitti (as it was in the
same ‘tag script’ as some other intelligible scrawlings, and illustrations of stick
men figures sporting massive erections, smoking huge spliffs and brandishing
semi automatic weapons) used to be in the toilet cubicle of a cafe in camden.
[…]142
In more academic terms, the ‘rude bway’-image features among its most important ingredients the readiness to use violence and an infatuation with shotguns,
marihuana, and sex. The latter is often reinforced by a very strong element of
homophobic rhetoric.143 Linguistically, the persona is associated with Patois that
includes free and uncensored references to all three elements.
The image is used for self-characterization on an anonymous website by a
young male Jamaican who apparently grew up in New York.144 He uses the ‘rude
bway’ persona in the self-introduction area of his website, i.e. in one paragraph
near the top of the page below a photo of himself. This is the passage:
Big up Jamaica to the fullest, all u fuckin dicks who aint w/ the Jamaican crew will
learn fi run from the blue steel whe deh inna yuh face Teflon inna batteman an
fasciwhole who cyan learn fi deal wid a rude bway.145
The persona is essential to this author’s self-presentation. Nine weeks after this first
quote was first gleaned from the web, he had changed his introductory paragraph
to:
Hey YO, yuh dun know who dis is. Rude boy from di 2–3–8. Str8 innah BRONX,
New York. Yo, Mi deh yah, an mi naah go noweh. Suh if you waan par, come par.
Yuh wan war, come war. AK bullet mek a batty-man fly far!146
On the surface, the author threatens gun-supported violence147 to anyone who does
not support “the Jamaican crew” – presumably, a street gang of Jamaican youths
in New York. Such “dicks” are broadly equated to homosexuals. If the whole website is read as a text, however, it becomes clear that the passage is intended as an
identity statement in which the author aligns himself with the most internationally
recognized Jamaican male cultural type. Along with explicit hints such as the use
of the words Jamaica and rude bway, the use of Patois is central to the creation of
the ‘rude bway’ persona.
This does not mean that he actually partakes in street fighting or other types
of physical violence, even if he claims this at various points in his lyrics and poems
(e.g., “Like the KKK/ I slay niggaz everyday”). Cooper (1994) points out three
aspects of Jamaican popular culture that are often misunderstood by (American
or European) foreigners: explicitly homophobic song-lyrics, such as Buju Banton’s
1993 “Boom By-By” (a song on which Devonish 1996a comments in much the
same spirit), misogyny as encountered in the same song, and the glorification of
guns as in Shabba Ranks’s “Gun Pon Me” (1991) or the film The Harder They Come
(1973). According to Cooper, the concrete (“literal”) is often used to signal the abstract (“lyrical”) in dancehall lyrics. She shows that the gunshots in the onomatopoetic refrain of “Boom By-By,” a song that on the surface calls for the killing of all
homosexuals, are not literally meant to represent the shots that kill gays, but actually – in the lyrical sense – “a gun salute to heterosexuality itself ” (444).148 Devonish (1996a) presents an identical argument. Cooper admits that such readings of
song lyrics may be difficult and controversial, and that the lyrics of “Boom By-By”
certainly contain an indictment of homosexuality, i.e. the “abstraction” (439). But
with proper knowledge of local culture, it is understood that the lyrics are not
necessarily an actual call to murder of homosexuals.
The author of the website under discussion clearly sees himself as a poet, so that
the same freedom of interpretation can be applied to his casting of himself as a guntoting ‘rude bway’ as Cooper and Devonish are willing to grant Buju Banton.149
It is remarkable that outside of this paragraph, the author does not use any unambiguously Patois features anywhere on the website. (The poems and “rhymes”
are all written in StE and AAVE.) This is quite in line with Rocholl (2003), who
observed in a study of a sample of Jamaican personal webpages that Patois is used
on most publicly available personal webpages by Jamaican university students, but
that its use was confined to symbolic positions such as headlines and self-introductions – not for the communication of any actual content. Compared with what
I describe above as ‘framing’ in e-mails, this observation shows even more drastically and consistently the reduction of Patois to symbolic function in some text
types. The most likely reason why Patois in e-mail still has not been as rigorously
and completely reduced to symbolic functions as it seems to have been in personal
webpages is that in e-mail communication, addressees are controlled. If addressee
and writer are both bilingual in the same two codes, then both codes can, in principle, carry communicative load. Authors of websites need to provide for a wider
audience, which may include monolinguals who are not proficient in Patois.
Finally, Sebba & Wootton (1998) point to another recurrent persona which is created and used in their conversation material from London Jamaican adolescents.
They find evidence at several points in their data “that for women, Creole has as-
sociations with a robust and assertive, but morally conservative, female persona”
(281).150 Their evidence includes adolescent females using Patois in this function
in different ways: in one conversation, two girls imitate women of their mothers’
generation and their disdain toward the liberally short skirts, worn even without
a slip, of some school girls. “This was clearly a ‘performance,’” the authors stress
(285, note 12). The performance included “feigned/overdone shock,” as the transcript notes, so the speakers’ attitude toward the persona they create is marked at
least partly by irony.
In another conversation, the authors show that by increasing frequency of
codeswitches into Patois, one female speaker gradually “comes to ‘inhabit’ her
[London Jamaican] persona of ‘a woman who rejects casual sex’” (281). In this
conversation the persona is not taken on in performance, but is part of the speaker’s sincere defense of her position in a heated argument (the rejection of promiscuous behavior).
In these two instances, a prototypical female persona is used by speakers as a
help to make a moral point, even though it is different in many aspects from the
identities of the speakers themselves. In the first instance, it is not totally clear from
the given excerpt which goal the speakers pursue in the conversation: the ironically refracted performance of the conservative female persona could be taken as
a distanced, indirect endorsement of the surface content of the conversation, i.e.
the two speakers might in principle be opposed to wearing short skirts themselves.
However, their performance might as well be intended to ridicule the conservative
position that they attribute to these mother-figures, an activity that is common
among adolescents. In the second instance, however, there is complete overlap
between the conversational goals of the speaker and the moral values suggested by
the persona she uses.
Prototypical female personae with character traits similar to those indentified in
Sebba & Wootton’s material are also used by the e-mail writers. My data show this
correlation between the Patois code and self-assertive, morally conservative femininity to be operative among my informant group of university students as well.
One informant, a female undergraduate student, supplied a complete, uninterrupted exchange of e-mails between herself and a former boyfriend,151 comprising
four messages and a volume of 1611 words in total. This long and uninterrupted
exchange allows the observation of interesting interpersonal dynamics, in which
the female informant makes use of the ‘robust female’ persona.
Kwasi works as a male model and has been in South Africa on an assignment for several weeks.152 He initiates the e-mail exchange. In his two messages,
he does not use any CS except for one set phrase, a Creole proverb: “nah tek sand
to the beach!” ‘don’t take sand to the beach,’ i.e. don’t take steel to Pittsburgh, or
coals to Newcastle (m# 011–03). In terms of contents, his messages revolve around
the topic of his life as a model, the modern and metropolitan foods that models
choose (ostrich meat and sushi), and, most centrally, his unconcealed and genuine
pleasure about his own good looks and sexual attractiveness (“I just did a new
test.153 I think there hot,” m# 011–01):
(52)
[…]
It still surprises me to see the chicks that I ‘pull’.
people I would have never gone after are like drawn to
me. This french model came up to me the other night in a
club and said she thought I was so sexy. […]
m# 011–03
It is probably legitimate to assume that Kwasi’s discourse is as thematically selfcontained and self-focused as it appears because his addressee used to be his girlfriend. For an individual like Kwasi, who places such clear priority on the carnal
potential underlying interactions with the opposite sex, not much is to be expected
from an exchange with an ex-girlfriend, with whom a relationship has already
been achieved. Also, he is likely to have an interest in demonstrating to HQ his independent happiness in her absence. In the face of this display of self-satisfaction,
HQ starts a retort in quite the same vein, but shifts her discursive mode halfway
through the message:
(53)
Hey.... I know you haven’t heard from me in a while. I’ve
just finished the assignments I had due this month, now
I’m getting ready for my exams. They start around the
23rd, and end on the 9th of May.
5 I feel llike I’m falling back in school. The works seems
too much. I’m gonna stick in there though.
So, you and Jo made up? Glad to hear. You REALLY missed
a good weekend last week. I don’t htink I’ve ever had so
much fun. I’m also sure that “I” was the highlight of
10 everyone’s weekend... at least on the first two
days. You need to see the shorts that I wore on those two
nights.... people were like “damn, you hot”, I literally
stopped traffic. My friends put me in the road just so
all 18 of them could cross it..... and then you know
15 me.... love the attention.
There’s not much I can tell you, you had to be there. By
the way, did I tell you, that Jazz (from XXX.com)
has branded me? She calls me CHINEY PHAT.154
She even got me a shirt printed with the name on the
20 back, and gave it to me to wear in the country. She says
she might want me to do some work for her...
take pics and stuff like that... little stuff.
My life for the most part is alright.... love life sucks
a little. I’m not unhappy, just frustrated. I don’t know
25 for how muchc longer I can do this ‘no commitment’ thing,
this unspoken ‘togetherness’. Oh well, in time I guess.
I’m leaving soon anyway.
I’m looking so cute nowadays, even if I do say so myself.
Someone asked me if I’ve been working out. I don’t want
30 to be skinny anymore.
By the way, you are such a waste!!! How come you told me
you’d call and you haven’t.Yu finga bruk? Why bother to
Did you break a/your finger(s)?
say it if you ain’t gonna do it? Anyway, ah suh man
that’s what men
stay... always a promise tings an’ nah deliver.
are like… always promising things and never delivering
35 Well, I’m still going to wait on the call..... until
then....
HQ
m# 011–02
Until l. 15, the author characterizes herself as tough in the face of challenges (ll.
1–6), a social “highlight” (l. 9), good looking to the point of being able to stop traffic (ll. 11–14), and not overly interested in the news that were contained in Kwasi’s
message, who mentioned he was going to visit his friend Joe (l. 7).
However, when she shifts focus to her practical successes in the arena of love,
there is a break in the until then quite flawless accounts of herself (ll. 23–27). The
writer here positions herself in strong contrast to Kwasi, who makes clear in his
messages that he entertains relationships with several girlfriends simultaneously,
which are of the type that HQ criticizes as being based on “no commitment” and
“unspoken togetherness.” After this passage, she resumes the former mode of selfpraise, but this time with a critical edge: “even if I do say so myself ” (l. 28), which
signals a distancing from the type of discourse that Kwasi initiated. Consequently,
toward the end of the message she finally breaks out of her self-concern in l. 31
and directs her attention to her addressee – albeit in the form of a reproach. She
complains about Kwasi’s failure to call her on the phone despite his promise to do
so. The Patois injections used in ll. 32–34 are stock phrases from the book of the
‘robust female’ persona. The sarcastic rhetorical question “Yu finga bruk?” represents a standard ingredient of such speeches. Although her reproach includes
a potential weakness – the disappointment at not having gotten the phone call,
which might be taken as a sign of sympathy for the negligent caller – it yields to a
harangue based on the difference between the sexes; in this case, about the moral
inadequacy of men.
By the end of the second e-mail of this exchange, HQ has thus finally opened
the floor to the topic of the mutual relationship. Kwasi takes the hint. By way of
a reply, he first recounts a sexual fantasy about HQ which he claims to have had
the previous night. He briefly sketches the state of affairs with each of his active
girlfriends, four of them in total. It turns out that none of them is actually available
for him at the moment due to various problems. (However, two of them have indicated an interest to visit his home country, Jamaica, with him, which he supposes
would be “some hectic shit” due to all of his ex-girlfriends they would meet in
Jamaica.) After reiterating his fantasy of the previous night, he makes the decisive
offer of his message (in l. 52 of the message):
(54)
[…]
here the deal. can u promise me this one. After ur exams,
would u let me steal u for a weekend. just u and me, no
demands, whatever happens happens. just promise to be
sexy! Nah, on a real, promise me a wekend in the counrty,
with no strings attached before u go ur way and before i
go mind. just a wild and fun weekend.
[…]
m# 011–03
To this, HQ answers – in the final message of the exchange (m# 011–04) – that she
does not know her schedule yet for the week in question. Her answer to Kwasi’s offer is quite ambiguous altogether. Her last sentence before the farewell passage is:
(55)
[…]
If you come early give me a shout.... I don’t normally
make move, especially a spontaneous country flex, without
‘my boys’155.... but we’ll see...
[…]
The real reason for her reserve is her present boyfriend: “It doesn’t hurt that you’re
so far away. Ah love him yu si.” However, as the quotes given here show, she is
not entirely uninterested either, not in Kwasi nor in spending the weekend in the
country with him.
The persona of the ‘robust female’ is employed in several places for staging reluctance and moral superiority. For example, in reply to the idea of Kwasi’s present
girlfriends coming to Jamaica and meeting all his ex-girlfriends – among them HQ
– she uses the persona in creating an imaginary wall of female solidarity against
Kwasi’s promiscuity:
(56)
[…]
Yeah man, bring yu girl dem come down, mi waan meet
bring your girls out here, I want to meet
dem........... beer passa passa woulda gwaan. I’d love to
them
there’d be plenty of beer involved.
see how you’d get yourself out of that one.
[…]
Later, she issues another reproach from a morally superior plane:
(57)
[…]
The other day I was thinking how this bastard couldn’t
even bring a girl back a souvenir, how yu stay so. Mi
how can you behave like that. I’ve
neva travel go a Africa yet. I want something authentic
never been to Africa.
from your ‘homeland’.156 […]
It is not even clear yet whether Kwasi will or will not bring a souvenir from Africa
for HQ, and yet she puts in a provisory wigging based on the assumption that he
will fail to do so. Since the central purpose of her message is to parry the offer of a
“wild and fun weekend” in the country, the request for a souvenir could be understood as an indication of interest, with the slip into the pose of the ‘robust female’
meant to cover up precisely this weakness.
In the exchange, Patois and CS strategies are employed exclusively by HQ, while
Kwasi uses only English, save for some very few, possibly unintentional, mesolectal
features. This reflects the interpersonal dynamics between the two interlocutors:
Kwasi casts himself as a metropolitan man of the world, a model in Johannesburg
who can choose between New York and London as his next sites of employment,
eats modern low-fat foods, and has numerous girlfriends in all four corners of the
world. HQ in reality comes from a well-to-do family and has traveled the world
extensively (except, incidentally, to Africa). Nonetheless, in this exchange she is
left with the role of the Jamaican who stayed at home, who has not seen Africa yet,
etc., i.e. she represents the less sophisticated, more conservative opposite of Kwasi’s
character attributes. Her use of Patois, most of which occurs in performances of
the ‘robust female’ character, is the sophisticated realization of this role that has
transpired for her in the interpersonal dynamics of the interaction.
The example shows that the identities that writers take on with the help of
Patois do not have to belong to the inventory of a writer’s own social roles that he
or she may have “brought along”157 into the communicative process. Patois enters
as the linguistic resource into the creation of a speaking style, which in turn serves
to suggest the identity that is used conversationally. These identities happen to
contradict the writer’s personal profile (in this case, age and the degree of conservatism are clearly not the speakers’ own) and which are taken on ironically at
additional rhetorical benefit. This way of using identities in conversation is best
described as role play.
The communicative benefit resulting from the use of a social persona may not
always be fully determined in analysis. In some instances, the use of roles and
personae may simply be interpreted as an entertaining activity that writers engage
in for its own sake. The purpose, in these instances, will then be a rather vague
construct along the lines of “creating a positive atmosphere.” In the case of the following two messages, the informant who supplied the messages pointed out to me
that this particular variety of Jamaican English, using some very salient markers of
a strong Creole influence, is a “friendship language” between herself and the other
participant, a half-sister (hence the difference in last names). Note that in the second message, Tania’s reply, there is one codeswitch into “real” Patois.
(58)
sj
dutty chenk158 tania!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
good afternoon ms burns, i does like di way u hav dashed
me away. u doesnt call, u doesnt email me, u does nuttin
anymore. u didnt even send me a happy birthday!! i does
5 like di way u is flexin. thank u ‘friend’.
very upset friend, sherika.
m# 034–01
(59)
why hello ms. Holm and good day to you too maam
for your Hinformation, you are di one who does not answer
my hemails when hi send dem to you. hi been wanting to
know your fone numba if hit change hor nat! but now u
5 doesn’t write hor nutting hand den u come cussing me
hoff!
look here now sah.. cho....
Now look here
u waan mi nuh come home fi di crismus?
Would you like me to not come home for Christmas?
mind you know...
10 i will links you hin the upcoming week.
den we will chat!.. what is you fone numba????
Tania
m# 034–02
The situation between these writers is familiar from messages excerpted earlier: one
accuses the other of negligence in maintaining contact. The other, in her answer,
denies the charges. The baseline code, in which Sherika initiates the exchange, is a
stylized variety of English as it may be spoken in Jamaica by less educated speakers
making an imperfect attempt at the acrolect.159 Sherika caricatures this variety by
focusing on one central marker: the invariant use of the –s-form of the verb in all
present tense positions. Tania steps it up a bit further in her reply by using the –sform even for the infinitive (l. 10), using a Ø-past form (l. 4), and, most saliently of
all, by applying /h/-insertion to a great number of words beginning with a vowel
(“hinformation,” l. 2, “hemails,” l. 3, etc.).160
In the Creole insertion, she threatens instead to even stay away for Christmas
if Sherika does not withdraw her charges. A sequential interpretation can hence
sufficiently interpret the function of this insertional codeswitch as marking off this
passage as more serious and dramatic than the surrounding material. Of course,
the whole exchange is meant jokingly, and language use here is particularly creative, playful, and consciously constructed. This observation is in line with the fact
that Tania, in l. 7 of her message, makes use of the Jamaican ejaculation cho, which
is the only incidence of this word in the whole corpus. This is at first surprising,
since it is very frequent in spoken Jamaican. However, it regularly co-occurs with
kiss-teeth, a paralinguistic sound produced with the mouth and used to signal disdain.161 In writing, the two are seldom used together, mainly because of the difficulty of finding a graphic correlate for the gesture kiss-teeth. In her novel White
Teeth (2001), Zadie Smith uses both kiss-teeth and cho several times to characterize
her Jamaican characters. She has first, second and third-generation immigrants to
England use them as identity markers, and also depicts crossing among adolescents by having Millat, a son of Indian immigrants, use the code (167, 231).162
Even though cho has been “conventionalized and given minimal lexical content” by the Jamaican speech community (Patrick & Figueroa 2002: 390), the metalinguistic labels for the usually neighboring sound – either kiss-teeth or suck-teeth
– are used “only [in] literary works […] with any frequency” (384). These terms
hardly enter dialogue. This means that the sound denoted by kiss-teeth/suck-teeth
does not transfer easily into informal writing. The reason that even cho occurs so
rarely in the corpus is probably twofold: since cho is a rather spontaneous ejaculation, its use may be felt inappropriate in e-mail language, which is essentially nonspontaneous. Also, writers may find it inappropriate to use it on its own (since it
is so strongly tied to the kiss-teeth sound in spoken usage), and thus tend to leave
kiss-teeth/suck-teeth out of their written discourse altogether. The fact that Tania
does employ cho underlines her willingness to use language experimentally.163
The deliberate representation in writing of features of creole influence on English in the creation of a very distinctive linguistic style, which performs the function of a friendship code for the two participants, is an instance of what Devonish (1996b) has referred to as the “linguistic security” of Jamaican students. He
compared spellings of JamC words in public writing by university students and
by non-academic Jamaicans and found the students’ approaches to Creole writing
much more experimental and much less conservative than other writers’.
Students are less likely to be regarded as unfamiliar with the writing conventions
of English. They are free, therefore, to experiment with a spelling of the Creole
form which more closely approximates pronunciation. (Devonish 1996b: 108)
5.3.3 Summary
This discussion of identity construction which involves the use of Patois in CS to
create socially recognized personae has shown the following:
1. Several stereotypical personae are used among more than one set of interlocutors which therefore seem to be recognized and operative on the
social level.
2. These personae can be created in CMC discourse using a variety of rhetorical devices. My analysis has focused on the use of Patois, but certainly
other aspects such as textual, situational, and social contexts are also relevant in signaling to interlocutors which personae are referenced.
3. The analysis of Patois use in the creation of styles and personae is potentially the most productive branch of this study because it involves studying the correspondence between the social meanings and local discourse
functions of Patois.
4. While Sebba & Wootton (1998) was the initial model for this analysis, a
broader and more detailed picture of the functions of Patois in the data is
obtained in this study by extending the analytical viewpoint to the communicative value that is gained in each instance of Patois use in identity work.
5.4 CS in narrative
In narrative, CS can be employed in functions that combine the functions discussed as sequential and as identity-related CS. I discuss it here as a separate phenomenon because even though it is located functionally at the intersection of the
two broad types discussed above, it represents a way of employing ‘we’-code and
‘they’-code contrastively that is the farthest removed from the way Gumperz originally described the traditional distribution of functions among ‘we’- and ‘they’codes (Sebba & Wootton 1998: 282). As I will show, the analysis of CS in narrative
makes it necessary to reconsider traditional views on the functional distribution
between ‘we’- and ‘they’-codes.
The assignation of ‘we’- and ‘they’-labels according to a traditional distribution such as the one outlined in the table below is difficult in many senses when
applied to COJEC.
Many linguistic situations fit this description in some aspects, but show fundamental differences in others. For example, the characteristic of ethnic specificity of a
code can only apply if the bilingual minority, who uses it as a ‘we’-code, is ethnically
distinct from the (presumably) monolingual surrounding community, which speaks
the majority language. Thus, this characteristic applies to Creole among Caribbeans
in London (LJ), but not to Creole in Jamaica. Secondly, in many situations, ‘we’-code
and minority language are not identical. Thirdly, non-native languages can assume
‘we’-functions, as among adolescents who acquire an in-group language.164
The second and third areas of complication are of particular interest for the
data at hand. Sebba & Wootton show that among British-born Caribbeans, complications with the ‘we’-’they’-distinction are exactly of this nature, and once again,
there are striking parallels between CS practices among young London Jamaicans
and in e-mails by Jamaican-born writers.
Table 5. Some oppositions conventionally associated with ‘we’- and ‘they’-codes
‘we’-code
‘they’-code
used for ingroup communication
used dominantly in the family
preferred for intimate conversation
ethnically specific
minority language
low (at best, covert) prestige
native language
preferred in interaction
used for outgroup communication
used dominantly in the workplace/school
preferred for official purposes
ethnically non-specific
majority language
high, overt prestige
usually: second language
used only when necessary
Among children of Caribbean immigrants to England, London English is the first
language and functions as ‘we’-code in the process of separation from the older
generations, whose native language is Creole. Also, LE is the unmarked code, used
dominantly in any setting, including emotional, private, and intra-family conversations – another break from the traditional model. Nonetheless, LJ is not fully
marginalized, but retains the function of a marked, ethnically exclusive code (Sebba 1993) that can function as ‘we’-code in most settings, as Mair remarks:
In in-group communication, [Caribbean Creoles] constitute an additional ethnic
‘we’-code, and in communication with outgroups they are a semiotic resource used
to perform ethnicity and to negotiate community boundaries. (Mair 2003b: 247)
To add further to the confusion, this role of LJ as ‘we’-code is neither stable nor
obligatory. In narrative, the data attest strategies that can invert the functional
distribution of ‘we’ vs. ‘they’-codes among Patois and English. London Jamaicans
may just as well use the LE/LJ-division to signal role differences in narration. In
one conversation from Sebba & Wootton’s data, a member of the same race as the
narrator – an Afro-Caribbean – is excluded from the ‘we’-concept in a story about
him. The narrator tells of that man’s attempt to steal an item from a store where the
narrator was working the till. CS is consistently employed in his story, giving all
the candidate thief ’s actions and words in LJ, and using LE to create a sense of ‘we’
among the London Jamaican storyteller and his London Jamaican listeners.
Notice the parallels in the first five lines of this e-mail taken from COJEC:
(60)
Yow, dat rass gyal is so getting on my nerves, I know seh
I know that
that [explet.165] girl
her mother brought her up betta than how shi turn out......
better than how she has turned out
I called JP’s phone last night and she answered
it - so I asked her to open the door for me- DO166 RASS GYAL
the [explet.] girl
5 CRACK DI DOOR AND WALK OFF!! I just said thank you.
opened the door and walked off!
I went to JP’s house after school today and when I saw
her car I just turned around and went home, quite
frankly, I don’t care but I really can’t deal with the
tention thing so I’m going to stop going to JP’s house
10 for a while. I so wanted to call you last night to tell
you about the jokes I was getting last night between her
and Cristy. Did I give you the joke about what Jay said
about Cristy?
I went to the house the other night when Jay came back
15 and I asked why him neva tell me seh other people were at
he hadn’t told me that
the house (Sara & Cristy), he started to laugh and tell
Jon how the wifey and the wanna be are here, the
understudy - I laugh til I weak.
I laughed until I was weak.
[…]
m# 011–05
In ll. 1–5, the writer assigns the marked code to the actions and words of one
character: the protagonist of her story, a girl she obviously despises. The function
of this strategy is clear: it creates distance between the narrator and her nemesis.
The writer is so conscientious about this strategy that she even uses the rare form
of a clause-internal switch that marks only one noun phrase – the one denoting the
object of her hate (“dat rass gyal,” l. 1).
The switch at the end of l. 1 does not fit the pattern, however. It can be functionally analyzed as a switch intended to mark a quotation, taking exactly the same
form as the switch in l. 15: in a construction
NP + V(of utterance) + (Odir) + complementizer + clause
the boundaries of the marked insertion (in Patois) lie before the NP167 and after the
complementizer (back to English), i.e.:
a.
(surr. text) + 얍 NP + V(of utterance) + (Odir) + complementizer 얍 + clause
+ (surr. text)
As may be recalled from my discussion of CS for quotations and the examples
given there, this is an unusual pattern of switching, as it leaves out the contentbearing clause of the quotation. A more expectable and frequent pattern is:
b.
(surr. text) + 얍 NP + V(of utterance) + (Odir) + complementizer + clause 얍
+ (surr. text)
Many instances are also constructed according to this pattern:
c.
(surr. text) + NP + V(of utterance) + (Odir) + 얍 complementizer + clause 얍
+ (surr. text)
Finally, a few instances of d. are also found:
d.
(surr. text) + NP + V(of utterance) + (Odir) + complementizer + 얍 clause 얍
+ (surr. text)
Meanwhile, a. occurs only in the message excerpted in (60).
That is to say, the writer in sample (60) applies an idiosyncratic CS pattern in
switching for quotations. She excludes the content clause of the quote from the
marked passage, including instead only the functional components of the construction – the subject NP, the verb (i.e., the quotative), and the complementizer.
Thus, switching pattern a. arguably represents the most symbolic use of CS as a
contextualization cue for quotations, in which Patois, the marked code, is trusted
with the least amount of message content. The pattern focuses on the functional
elements that introduce quoted speech, and marks them in order to heighten their
import. For the actual content of the quote, however, the writer returns to the unmarked, or baseline, code.
This observation is relevant to the discussion of the functions of CS in narrative in
the example at hand in two ways: it shows that for the writer of example (60), the
functions of Patois are very clearly symbolical, and arguably even more so than for
most other writers in the corpus, and it allows us to understand the significance of
the codeswitch in l. 2 of the excerpt.
Because the writer uses the codeswitch at the end of l. 1 to highlight just the
functional elements introducing the quotation, but not on the actual content
clause itself, she gives herself the chance to incorporate another codeswitch within
the content clause (l. 2). And with this switch, her narrative approach of connecting Patois with the character of the unrefined enemy resurfaces.
In total, then, the writer very consequentially reserves Patois for accounts of
the other woman in ll. 1–5. This strategy is interrupted at one point by the use of
CS for quotations, for which she uses an unusually condensed strategy.
Why does the writer connect the clearly irritating individual who forms the
subject of her story with Patois, which often functions as the ‘we’-code, the language of intimate exchanges, of friendship, and other positive values? These values
are part of what Patois means to its users – and yet, other values that adhere to it
as well may be foregrounded at times. Sebba & Wootton extrapolate the specific
demands that narrative make on speakers/writers: in narrative, “the creation of
identities for actors is a necessary part of the narrative strategy” (1998: 283), i.e.
narrators are not primarily concerned with their own identities and those of their
interlocutors, but need to account for more players than usual.
Rickford & Traugott (1985) have pointed out that social attitudes toward Creole languages, as with other vernacular and nonstandard languages, can be quite
paradoxical. In her narrative use of Patois, this writer exploits the negative values
it has in society – captured by Rickford & Traugott as its low overt prestige. By
associating her own narrative voice with standard English (with high overt prestige) and her enemy with the socially low code, she symbolically positions the two
characters on a social slope on which the writer herself looks down on the other.168
This interpretation seems all the more fitting as one of the things she criticizes
about the other woman is her lack of good manners: she just “crack[ed] the door
and walk[ed] off ” (l. 5) when the narrator arrived at JP’s house, which is not the
way that visitors should be greeted in the higher, well-mannered ranks of society.
Thus, the writer demonstrates the Creole’s functional flexibility. By l. 18, the author has shifted her focus back to the Creole’s role as the code of the private, the emotional, and the involved, and applies it in an account of herself: “I laugh til I weak.”
This example showed code contrasts being employed to create a conceptual division between ‘we’ and ‘they’ that involved the use of the marked code to designate
certain identities. Unlike the examples from my previous section on CS and social
identities, however, identities used in this strategy are less specific, and their designation is a necessity posed by the act of narration: the differentiation of actors in
the story that is being told.
Given that Sebba & Wootton define this strategy of exploiting code contrasts
in narrative quite clearly, and it appears so similarly in my data, it might come as
a surprise that COJEC does not contain any more cases like this. It is simply a fact
that there are few instances of narrative involving several individual active characters which would have to be distinguished. Many of the stories that do contain more
than one active character apparently place less emphasis on contrasting the characters among each other, or use other means than code selection to achieve this.
In spoken conversations, more examples of this CS strategy may be observed.
I have made some experimental recordings of conversations among university students in Mona, amounting to about two hours of material and including plenty of CS,
in which a similar use of CS in narrative is present in about four different places.
Crucially, what this example shows is that to create a sense of ‘we’ using code
contrasts, writers do not exclusively depend on using Patois as the ‘we’-code. In
some cases, the opposite code, English, may fulfill this function just as adequately.
chapter 6
Summary of the analysis and discussion
The analysis in chapters 3 to 5 has shown that the Creole and English codes are in
a clear functional distribution of unmarked and marked code, respectively. This
marks an important change compared to their use in speech in Jamaica, where CS
is the unmarked choice.
Thus, this aspect of Mair’s observations about the functional shift of Jamaican
Creole in the new electronic media can be supported (Mair 2003b). The functional
shift runs parallel to the one that Patois has undergone in Caribbean diaspora
communities such as London (Sebba 1993). There, it has been reduced to the role
of exclusively marked code, or even the status of a symbol. One of the most prominent symbolic functions of Patois in England is that of a racial ‘we’-code. This
function is one that could not be found in CMC due to the different types of communities in which Patois functions in CMC and in London: the first is a virtual
community with no non-Jamaican overhearers, while the latter is a dominantly
white society where conversations among blacks are among members of a minority, which frequently resorts to a ‘we’-code for the sake of distinction.
The marginalization of Patois is not as far advanced in CMC as it is in London.
In CMC, the reduced functional load of Patois compared to speech in Jamaica is
mainly due to the difficulty of writing Patois compared with English. Writers are
schooled in writing StE, not Creole, and exposure to written forms of Patois in
Jamaica is still limited, despite its continually growing prestige in society since national independence (Shields-Brodber 1997). Nonetheless, analyses of Creole orthography (Hinrichs 2004; Deuber & Hinrichs 2006) show that writers are appropriating StE spelling for the task of writing Patois efficiently and distinguishably.
Thus, there is no indication of a decreasing functional load of Creole in CMC. On
the contrary, CMC has been shown to play an important role in strengthening the
status of officially stigmatized languages (Eisenlohr 2004). It is thus possible that
the use of Patois (alongside English) in CMC will continue to expand and contribute to a further increase of the creole’s prestige in Jamaica. Meanwhile, Patois in
London has a much more difficult stance since its continuing use depends at least
partially on the continuing influx of immigrants from the Caribbean. As Sebba
(1993) points out, LJ is a second language for most British-born Caribbeans, so in
the light of the minority status of Caribbeans in London, LJ has to be considered
in attrition unless native speakers of JamC continue to arrive.
As for the specific role of Patois in CMC, I have shown that it performs a
wealth of functions, many of them known from previous work on CS in conversation. The analysis has shown the wide range of values that CS can add. Functions
range from ‘contrastive’ to ‘inherent’ meanings (Auer 1992), or from purely highlighting functions of CS to those that are based on complex implicatures drawing
on the social and cultural meanings of Patois. What is noticeable is the wealth and
diversity of switches in the latter functions in the data. The switches presented
in chapter 5, i.e. examples (30)–(60), show that it is particularly this potential of
Patois to make salient certain cultural values and personae that writers exploit. It
may well be that this strategy of constructing discourse, which relies strongly on
implicature, which can be derived from CS in context through fairly complicated
inferencing – is especially at home in the written medium. These uses of Patois
involve the highest degree of planned, rhetorical use. As Myers-Scotton (1997:
219) suggests, CS is always used at a cognitive cost, which users expend in the
hope of gaining additional communicative value. Because CMC basically involves
planned, non-spontaneous, rhetorical language, it is fitting that these types of conscious and intentional CS use prevail in the medium.
The more implicature is connected with CS use, the less stable are correlations
on the macro level between codes and meanings. I have shown that the problems
of ‘we’- and ‘they’-code designation discussed by Sebba & Wootton (1998) is pervasive in the data. Patois is certainly the putative ‘we’-code according to certain
aspects of its macro-sociolinguistic status, but depending on the local functions of
CS, this functional distribution between English and Patois may be reversed, as in
(60). Also, the discussion of examples (47)–(59) showed that the use of personae
involving CS does not nearly always mean a direct identification with the persona
in the sense of convergence that the Acts of Identity-framework is based on.
Chapter 5 on the relations between CS, identity, and narrative has shown that
functional overlap is frequent in the analysis of switching. Combinations of functions are especially possible between those at the level of an individual switch
(chapters 3 and 4) and those that operate at a higher level of analysis, as in chapters
4 and 5: the uses of CS in the creation of identities and narrative roles show that CS
can create meaning on the level of the text, when several inserted marked passages
combine to form a style with contextually specific meanings.
Methodologically, the analysis has aimed at identifying CS meanings in an interpretative, qualitative approach, drawing critically on existing theoretical work.
Interpretations were supported by ethnographic and cultural evidence.
Summary of the analysis and discussion 135
Figure 6. Major contributions to CS research have addressed different types of CS-functions, covering different portions of the continuum from ‘contrastive’ to ‘inherent’ types
(cf. Auer 1992).*
* Both the CS-meanings:functions cited in the lower portion and the publications cited in the
upper half of the diagram are representative examples out of the very large body of literature
on CS research, chosen to illustrate the fact that many theoretical approaches in the field are
mutually additive rather than addressing the same phenomena.
As I have shown, most theoretical work on CS captures only a portion of the types
of switches that occur in the data, or a certain limited section on the continuum
from ‘contrastive’ to ‘inherent’ CS functions, as sketched in the illustration (Figure
6). Thus, the use of a heuristic approach in analysis has yielded an integrated perspective on a wide range of CS meanings.
Those models that make an explanatory claim to a broader span of the continuum (...) Auer’s CA-approach and Myers-Scotton’s MM (...) have not proven
unconditionally helpful in this analysis either, both for the same reason: they are
geared at dialogic, oral communication. The CA approach rests fundamentally on
the analysis of code choices and their communicative effects as reflected in the
hearer’s reply, and the MM is too static to adequately account for the effects of
medium on code choice.169
Likewise, Gumperz’s ‘we’/’they’-code-distinction has been shown to be in operation in some instances, but not nearly unconditionally. This led Sebba & Wootton (1998) to conclude that the ‘we’/’they’-distinction as a concept is subsumed in
the general process of using CS in locally relevant identity work (284). I disagree
with this formulation as it is in danger of suggesting the ‘identities in talk’-paradigm as the new catch-all framework that can explain all CS behavior. In some
instances of CS, located at the ‘contrastive’ end of the continuum, identity work is
not at the fore of conversational activity. To say that it is would be stretching the
concept of identity to insignificance: speakers and writers are not “doing” aspects
of identity with every utterance. However, for a lot of CS behavior, the idea of
indexing identities and personae has been shown to have considerable purchase
as it incorporates the fundamental notions of dynamic identities and their local,
context-based significance.
The ‘we’/’they’-code-distinction provides suitable terminology for a broad,
preliminary classification of codes on the macro-level of the whole speech community. However, it remains very abstract and fails to capture some of the more
relevant local dynamics of CS. In the Jamaican case, the group of educated Creole
speakers, who have native or near-native proficiency in both JamC and JamE, use
CS in the function that in Gumperz’s model is performed by the ‘we’-code. As
I have shown in the introduction (cf. 1.3.1), CS is coming to be the unmarked
choice in speech among this group. However, within the Jamaican social spectrum, the strategy itself also serves a ‘we’-function for this group as it serves to
distinguish this group from uneducated Creole speakers with an imperfect command of English on the one hand, and from the monolingual, mostly white, small
elite of upper-class English speakers on the other.
Trying to analyze the local meanings of switches as accurately as possible instead
of using them in support of existing frameworks has meant that several approaches
to multilingual communication were applied to the data in an explorative, heuristic approach. The methodological result was, to borrow Harris & Rampton’s formulation, an “eclectic mixture” (2002: 44) involving the ideas of Gumperz, Hymes,
LePage & Tabouret-Keller, Sebba & Wootton, Antaki & Widdicombe, Bakhtin,
Rampton, Eckert, and of course Auer and Myers-Scotton. This was done as a result of opening analysis up to what is irregular and incongruous by the standards
of existing, closed frameworks, particularly rhetorical and performative CS (cf.
Rampton’s appeal to this effect, 1998a: 290).
In addition to the data, ethnographic information about interlocutors and
their interpersonal and cultural context is indispensable in this interpretive work.
This is especially so when dealing with CMC data. Mair notes:
In view of the frequently conscious and strategic use of Creoles in the diaspora,170 an interdisciplinary or cultural-studies approach is probably better suited
to a study of language in the Caribbean diaspora than a traditional sociolinguistic
framework, with its emphasis on documenting correlations between dependent
Summary of the analysis and discussion 137
linguistic variables and independent social variable in unreflected and subconscious linguistic practice. (2003b: 247)
This is all the more true for interaction through CMC due to the less spontaneous
and more planned nature of language in CMC compared to speech.
The goal in using this analytical approach was to achieve a more complete
depiction of the wealth of meanings of CS, guided by participants’ perspective and
allowing for a better understanding of the role of JamC as a symbol and a resource
in creating context-dependent meaning. Thus, the study has transferred some of
the fundamental theoretical tenets of Rampton’s ‘late modern ethnography’ to the
study of EWL. Likewise, it marks a first step toward sociolinguistic research of
the Third Wave à la Eckert for the field of EWL studies, where analyses have so
far been mostly concentrated on feature-based descriptions of varieties. In Third
Wave sociolinguistics, varieties, having been described structurally, are viewed as
emic resources that users draw on in dynamic, creative processes of conversational
meaning construction, and analytical practice explores the connection between
use of linguistic styles and participant-centered categories of identity and sociocultural meaning.
chapter 7
Conclusions
7.1 The changing functions of an old language in a new medium
As JamC has moved into the new written text types of the internet, where it is
used, just as in speech, in alternation and contrast with JamE, the functional division between the two codes has shifted. In speech in Jamaica, the situation can
be described as ‘codeswitching as the unmarked choice’ in the terminology of
the Markedness Model (MM, e.g. Myers-Scotton 1998) for a steadily increasing
number of domains,171 including informal conversation among peers. In informal
communication via e-mail and discussion forums among Jamaicans, the function
of unmarked choice has shifted to the English code, leaving Patois with the function of a marked code.
The reason for this functional shift is medium-related: the written medium
is intricately linked to the use of English in Jamaica, as English is the language
of literacy instruction and the vast majority of written material in Jamaica is in
English. Thus, even though Jamaicans are able to appropriate writing technology
and the orthography of standard English to produce a written Creole (cf. Hinrichs
2004), and even though the university students who supplied the e-mail in the
primary corpus have a high degree of proficiency in written English and hence
a considerable “linguistic security” (Devonish 1996b: 108) that enables them to
explore experimental Creole writing, they are ultimately more familiar with the
conventions and rules of written English. Thus, because the cognitive cost of writing Creole is greater, it becomes the code that is used in marked function in the
written medium. This tallies well with the most recent revised version of the MM,
which stresses that all CS behavior is based on rational choices (Myers-Scotton &
Bolonyai 2001) by which speakers aim to optimize the relationship between costs
and communicative outcome.
The MM also views code choices first and foremost as identity work: they
serve to negotiate perceptions of self, achieved through the indexing of “rights
and obligations” sets (RO sets), which are different for each code involved. Thus,
if a conversation is going on in an unmarked code and one speaker switches to
the marked code, “they are saying, ‘I perceive my position differently from what is
expected or unmarked, and I index my negotiation of a different position by my
marked choice’” (Myers-Scotton 1993a: 480). In my view, the shift of functional
divisions between JamC and JamE in speech versus CMC does not indicate an
overall change of preferences in favor of the RO sets indexed by English. While the
RO sets that English and Creole index in Jamaican communication are certainly
not identical (see Shields-Brodber 1992 for a study of both; see Shields-Brodber
1997), there is no evidence that CMC endorses the identity values of Creole any
less than speech.
It is true that the rhetorical functions of Creole are often symbolic, and that
the communicative value it adds is often greater and more specific than for English
because it is the code that is associated with meanings of local culture. However,
I see no evidence of CMC writers distancing themselves from Creole RO sets,
beyond the degree that is determined by the relatively greater ease of writing in
English. The same subjects who in speech use CS as the unmarked choice are the
writers of CMC, where English is the unmarked choice.172
The great range of rhetorical functions in which Creole occurs in Jamaican
CMC indicates that these native speakers of Creole have no intention of relinquishing the great communicative potential that lies in using it. The fact that English becomes the unmarked choice by virtue of its quantitative dominance over
Creole in CMC does not indicate a preference for the identity values that are attached to its RO set, only that it is the more comfortable code in the written domain. This conflict between the MM’s basic tenets and the data demonstrates the
model’s limitation in the detailed description of code functions in discourse. In
its attempt to provide a framework for the pragmatic analysis of all human CS behavior in a relatively few basic strokes, it rests on certain static generalizations that
block the view for the specific characteristics of individual data sets. Particularly
the notion of indexing RO sets falls short of being helpful in detailed descriptions
of CS processes. Indexing would seem to cover a broad range of possible stances
that speakers/writers take toward the marked discourse that they integrate. These
would include all facets of single-voiced and double-voiced discourse, and as I
have shown in chapter 5, communicative meanings differ greatly depending on
these stances that subjects assume.
The range of functions in which CS practices employ Patois in the data is considerable. It ranges from relatively simple contrastive uses in highlighter function that
rest fully on the contrast between English and Patois, but in which the sequence
of codes is near meaningless, to highly complex implicatures involving the use of
social stereotypes in vari-directional double-voicing and relying on complex processes of context-dependent inferencing in their creation of meaning. This magnitude of functional variability for JamC is intricately tied to the fact that its users
– certainly in the primary corpus – are L1 speakers of JamC with a native knowledge of Jamaican culture. This will emerge from my comparison of the present
Conclusions 141
findings to those of Hewitt, Sutcliffe, Sebba, Rampton and others for BrC in the
Jamaican diaspora in the next section (7.2).
To directly address the first research question, the analysis has tested the accuracy
of Mair’s observation on the changing functions of JamC in the new electronic text
types of the internet, a reductive process formulaically encapsulated in the title of
his 2003 publication, “language, code, and symbol” (Mair 2003b). In CMC, Jamaicans quantitatively reduce Creole use compared to oral communication due to the
constraints of the written medium on Creole use, and – instead of identifying any
less with the RO sets of Creole – condense the cultural meanings of Creole and its
potential to create meaning contextually to its marked-code functions. However,
it should be remembered that the symbolic value of Creole varies from switch to
switch, and on the most contrastive end of switches, it can amount to practically
nothing. Also, the second stage (‘code’) in Mair’s epithet, which reflects the functions of JamC in oral communication in modern times – what I have labeled the
situation of ‘codeswitching as the unmarked choice’ using the terminology of the
MM – is functionally superior to the last one (‘symbol’) mostly in a quantitative
sense. Both in oral communication and in CMC, JamC is used sometimes symbolically and sometimes in direct expression, in Bakhtin’s terminology: sometimes
in direct, single-voiced discourse as the speaker’s own voice and sometimes in
double-voicing. The differences lie in the proportions of symbolic use as opposed to
the overall occurrences of Creole, which may be greater in CMC than in oral communication – this can only be conjectured until further research takes on the task
of actually quantifying the symbolic use of Patois in oral communication versus
writing in CMC in large, matching corpora. In any event, one should be cautious
of the simplification that lies in any reductive categorization of gradient transition
in language use.
It is certain that in informal CMC, Jamaicans use the resources of Creole and
English in a functional mixture that is different from oral communication in Jamaica. The next section addresses the parallels between these new trends in CMC
and in the Jamaican diaspora (e.g. Britain), which Mair suggests are also part of
the ‘symbol’ stage in the functional development of JamC.
7.2 Comparing Creole use in the Jamaican diaspora and in CMC
BrC is characteristically acquired by English-born Jamaicans and other Caribbeans, as well as other blacks and, less typically, members of other ethnic groups,
as an additional code during adolescence,173 albeit rarely to the degree of proficiency of Jamaican L1 Creole-speakers.174 In fact, proficiency varies greatly among BrC
users due to varying access to and contact with Creole, ranging from speakers who
know no more than the most salient phonological markers and a few characteristic
lexemes to those who are competent in distinctly Creole grammatical features.
Black British identity is now a fully recognized cultural concept, although it
has not existed for longer than the past few decades.175 Scholars who have written
on BrC unanimously176 report a primary racial component in the conversational
meanings of BrC use, indicating a rather focused symbolic value of BrC in comparison with JamC. Mair observes:
In in-group communication [BrC] constitute[s] and additional ethnic “we”-code,
and in communication with outgroups [it is] a semiotic resource used to perform
ethnicity and to negotiate community boundaries. (Mair 2003b: 247)
Patrick (2004a) indicates that increasing competence (and performance) in BrC is
usually accompanied by an increasingly strong statement of black identity :
as phonological markers of BrC are often the easiest to acquire, and present the
weakest claim to British Black identity, as [sic] the range of speech including them
is much wider than the range including only core grammatical features. (231)
Sebba (1993) and Sebba & Wootton (1998) summarize the discourse functions
of BrC as connected with different types of a “black British persona” (e.g. Sebba
1993: 137).
Sebba & Tate (2002) concentrate on how black British Caribbeans construct
local and global identities in discourse using the BrC-English contrast. They conclude that compared to English, BrC “most connects ‘globally’ – to other speakers
of Creole, to the British youth culture which now accepts Creole/patois as an element, and to the world-wide Black music culture” (75).
This comparatively narrow range of functions includes the new one of BrC
as a generally available element of youth culture in Britain, which can be seen
as secondary to its use by black British Caribbeans. As emerges from Rampton’s
studies of the functions of BrC in linguistic crossing,177 the symbolic functions of
BrC in crossing – e.g., for clarity’s sake, by whites – must be distinguished from
those of BrC in conversation among black British Caribbeans. Crossing is always
double-voicing, whereas black British Caribbeans can also use BrC as their “own”
code in single-voiced discourse. Crossing does not draw on the primary symbolic
meaning of BrC, but alludes to these in a process in which this primary meaning becomes a metaphor. In this metaphor, black British identity is the secundum
comparatum, but blackness is not part of the tertium comparationis. Rather, the
allusion to youth culture and the global appeal of Jamaican music play into it.
Harris & Rampton summarize the findings of Rampton’s fieldwork on crossing:
“Creole stood for an excitement and excellence in vernacular and mass-mediated
Conclusions 143
youth culture which many kids aspired to” (2002: 43). Contrasted with the historically retrospective connotations of Indian English, reminiscent of past English
imperialism, Harris & Rampton also find that BrC functions, and indeed was referred to by informants, as a “future language.”
In summary, black racial identity appears to be a primary constituent of the
symbolic functions of BrC. Even in the more metaphorical applications of BrC in
crossing, where blackness necessarily moves to the back, an element of opposition
to white mainstream culture, which itself connotes racial conflict, is essential. On
the whole, BrC has a specialized set of symbolic functions grouped around the
concept of (positive) minority identities within a larger mainstream society.
None of these central functions of BrC can be attested for Patois in CMC.
Owing to the fact that all but two informants of the e-mail corpus are black (the
others are Chinese-Jamaican), which reflects the uncontested dominance of AfroJamaicans in the country’s overall demography (about 91% of all Jamaicans are
black according to CIA 2004), the topic of race is rarely touched in the e-mails. At
one rare occasion, black Jamaicans are contrasted with Queen Elizabeth II:
(61)
[…] Anyway, Jamaica nice same way.
Missus Qeen Elizibeth come to visit we the other day
and of course they were having dinner at Jamaica house
with all the dignitaries and specially invited guest
5 when ....BAPS!!!!, the light lock-off pon dem. JPSCo178
went out on them.
say is not their fault is the electrician who wire up
who wired
the place and that them put too much electrical plug
the place up and that they put too many plugs
pon one circuit. Of course BBC News had it live and
on one of the circuits.
me & Flor nuh stop laugh and hold we belly ah say how
didn‘t stop laughing and held our bellies saying how
10 the Quen mussi a wondah if a assasinate the black
the Queen must have wondered if the black
bugger dem plan to assasinate har.
buggers were planning to assassinate her.
Life pon the Rock179 is never without amusement. […]
m# 012–20
However, it is not so clear whether there might be a straightforward connection
between Patois and blackness here. Notably, the crucial passage (ll. 10–11) of the
narrative does not deal with the writer’s sense of race, but ironically reconstructs
the Queen’s view of the events and the mostly black Jamaicans around her. One
cannot be sure whether the persona that the writer indexes in ll. 10–11 is the fundamentally Jamaican one shared by himself, his partner, and the Jamaicans present
at the Queen’s reception, or perhaps the persona of an elderly lady in midst of the
turmoil and confusion of a power out, wondering if she will survive the occasion.
Arguably, this ambiguity is a source of contrastive humor. Really, the whole racial
idea is not centrally connected to the writer’s code choice. The writer’s dominant
CS strategy in this excerpt is: switching into Patois for the most animated and central sequences of the narrative. For the rest of the rare occasions in which race is
mentioned in the primary corpus, it equally holds true that the indexing of racial
identity through CS does not emerge as a primary strategy.
On the theoretical plane this demonstrates the fundamental dependence of
a code’s meaning on context. In Great Britain, the social context has led to BrC
acquiring a recurrent set of functions involving the creation of black British solidarity and protest against white mainstream culture. BrC is an additional “second
dialect” for its speakers and therefore used for a rather focused set of discourse
functions. By comparison, JamC is still a first language for the e-mail writers of my
primary corpus. No comparable social group divisions underlie Jamaican e-mail
writing; competence in Patois unites these subgroups of the Jamaican spectrum
rather than having come to symbolize their division, as in the first stages of Caribbean immigration to Great Britain. The range of functions that Patois performs in
CMC is thus greater and richer than that of BrC.
The practical relevance to the research question is in the recognition that the
use of Patois in CMC is once more shown to be an expansion, not a retreat of the
Creole. The quantitative shift in code use in favor of English from speech to CMC
is caused by qualities of the written medium: the absence of fixed writing conventions for Patois increases the cognitive cost of writing it and thus turns it into the
marked code by a quantitative measure. But the fact that writers are L1 speakers of
JamC makes for the Creole assuming great and varied expressive power that it is
impossible to generalize to the extent that we saw for BrC.
As Patrick (2004a) and Sebba (1993) make clear, competence in BrC and its
continuing acquisition by new British speakers ultimately depends strongly on the
availability of contact with native speakers, and thus for the most part on continuing influx of Caribbean immigrants to Great Britain. Thus, BrC as a variety is
considerably less stable or, in language-ecological terms,180 more endangered, than
JamC in CMC. While the latter will continue to assert itself as conventions for its
written form continue to emerge, and will keep being used for functions including,
Conclusions 145
but extending beyond, the symbolical, the prior is reduced in usage due to the lack
of any neighboring domains in which it is used as L1.
Seen in this light, the parallel between BrC and JamC in CMC appears almost
coincidental: both are marked codes because the cognitive cost of using them is
higher than that of using the unmarked code, the local variety of English. But
while in CMC this is due to a receding set of difficulties having to do with writing
technology, in Great Britain it is caused by the limited, second-dialect competence
of speakers in Creole. The parallel between the functional developments of Creole
in CMC and in the Jamaican diaspora in Great Britain is therefore incomplete in
significant respects. Table 6 provides a synopsis of some key aspects of Creole use
in the three situations.
Table 6. A comparison of the status and function of Patois in three different situations.
Jamaica (speech)
Diaspora
(speech, e.g. in London)
CMC
Creole writing
mostly experimental, whereas English
writing skills are
trained in school
level of Creole
competence
L1
second dialect status
(often imperfect
competence)
unmarked choice
CS
English
English
stable co-existence with
English
depends heavily on continuing influx of Caribbeans to diaspora communities
symbolic use is
stabilizing, range
of CS functions
expanding – new
habitat for
Creole?
prospects of
Creole’s
survival
7.3 Advances in the study of English as a World Language
With this study, I propose a new direction for the study of English as a World Language (EWL), both in terms of the questions to ask and the methodologies to apply.
The combination of research on the interactional sociolinguistics of postcolonial
EWL settings with the data and methodology of computer-mediated discourse
analysis promises relevant and necessary results about the local, situated social
functions of varieties in the typically multilingual settings where World Englishes
occur. They will contribute to existing work on EWL, which has produced mostly
feature-based, structural descriptions of varieties, often characterized as differences from the major varieties that make up ISE.
The difficult issue of modeling variation between standard and vernacular varieties in the Caribbean stands at the center of studies such as Patrick (1999) for
Jamaica and Winer (1993) for Trinidad & Tobago. In fact, this task remains one of
the main concerns for EWL and creole studies. Based on their research in Jamaica,
Mair & Sand (2003) state:
The chief problem for a linguistic description of Caribbean English usage today is
to model the relationship between English and the various English-lexifier creoles
of the region. In view of the far-reaching differences in syntax and sound pattern,
it would be quite plausible, for example, to consider English and “patois” […] two
distinct languages. However, this is not the view of most Jamaicans, who tend to
think of themselves as English-speaking and therefore regard patois as some kind
of English.
As my study shows, this seeming paradox between linguistic, structural description and speakers’ perceptions of the sociolinguistic situation is productively resolved by analyzing the discourse functions, rather than the form, of varieties,
with a focus on the communicative effects of variation.
The traditional approach to World Englishes and variation, which correlates
social variables – seen as independent and given – with linguistic variables, seen
as dependent, is limited in several respects. As Mair argues in the introduction to a
conference volume on “The Politics of English as a World Language,” the approach
leaves no room for questions such as these:
if the statistical profiles of quantitative-correlational sociolinguistics define average speaker behaviour, what is the range of variation available to an individual
speaker in a specific context?
if quantitative-correlational sociolinguistics focuses on the unreflected and spontaneous language behaviour of nonstandard speakers, what is the status of the
conscious and considered use of nonstandard forms by intellectuals, politicians
and writers?
what is the role of individual speakers’ and writers’ “acts of identity” in actively
creating, enacting or performing social, ethnic and gendered identities? (Mair
2003c: xii)
In other words, studies of discourse in interaction as communicative practice
– such as this – move beyond the description of the structures of existing codes,
into the ontological examination of the why and how of their uses. In so doing,
they draw on the findings of the existing descriptive studies. This contributes to a
better understanding of variation, including a more realistic picture of the mean-
Conclusions 147
ings of CS, and it is particularly well suited to the study of global variation in EWL
research:
So we might well ask whether, in the study of new varieties of English, it isn’t time
linguists recognized the fact that long before ‘Jamaican creole’ [sic], ‘West African
English’ or ‘Indian English’ end up as decontextualized constructs in linguistic
descriptions, they exist as communicative practices available to real people who
pursue their mundane aims in specific communities and in very specific historical and social contexts. What is needed is, thus, no more and no less than a discourse-based and dynamic model of varieties of English, which puts the context,
the speaker and his/her intentions, and history back into the picture – and, even
more importantly, also the fact that any given variety of English in the modern
world never exists in isolation but in close contact with standard English and, in
the postcolonial context, most likely also with numerous indigenous languages
and local vernaculars. (Mair 2003c: xiii)
As I have reported in the introduction, this push of EWL studies into major qualitative research projects has been on the horizon for several years. Pioneering work
on EWL and globalization has been done by Jan Blommaert, an Africanist and
sociolinguist. In a context-sensitive and discourse-based approach to variation,
he has shown that the chief issue in studies of the European ex-colonial languages in Africa is not the emergence of new varieties of these languages, not even
their gradual indigenization through language contact but, rather, their functioning as the medium for “grassroots literacy” (Blommaert 1999; 2001). In the same
research paradigm, Alastair Pennycook has analyzed phenomena of local recontextualization of linguistic and cultural forms that are spreading globally (cf. his
analysis of the worldwide spread of rap and hip-hop music and related linguistic
forms, 2003b; but also 2003a). He has proposed ‘postcolonial performativity’ as a
speaker-driven model for the analysis of variation in World Englishes (Pennycook
2000; 2003a, see also below).
In Great Britain, Mark Sebba and Ben Rampton have presented exemplary
studies with their work on BrC and language crossing, respectively. Peter L. Patrick
has called for a similar advance in the study of Jamaican sociolinguistics (Patrick
2004b: 437). In terms of the reorientation in analytic interest in the direction of
the meanings of linguistic forms and variation in the usage of individuals, this development runs parallel to a broader shift in sociolinguistics (the “reconstructivist
turn,” Auer 2005), and specifically to what Eckert has termed “Third Wave Variation Studies” in the context of North American sociolinguistics (see also section
5.1 on recent advances in sociolinguistic theory and methodology).
EWL research is gaining important insights from discourse-oriented studies of
multilingual and multicodal CMC data. For Jamaican CMC, the overall functional
shift in code distributions has been characterized as a quantitative reduction in the
use of the officially stigmatized code, which on the macro-level nonetheless means
a significant expansion of its usage domains into the graphic code. In the Jamaican
case, this development picks up the steady increase of prestige and expansion of
usage domains for JamC that Shields-Brodber (1997) has noted for JamC since
the 1960s as a consequence of Jamaican independence. Other studies report quite
similar developments for the vernacular code in CMC from multicodal situations,
cf. Siebenhaar (2005) for Swiss German/Standard German, Sahel (2004) for Moroccan Arabic/Standard Arabic, Androutsopoulos & Ziegler (2003) and Christen,
Tophinke and Ziegler (2005) for various German dialects and Standard German.
Eisenlohr (2004) reports on a considerable range of projects by “language activists and linguists” that aim at reversing language shift where small languages are
receding, and at “revitalizing the practice of lesser-used languages” (21). These
projects capitalize on the technological potential of the internet to connect speaker
communities that can often be scattered across the globe, and on the possibilities
provided by the perceived low formality constraints on the internet.
In most such situations, the stigmatized, experimental, and novel aspects of the
nonstandard code in writing are employed in contrast with the standard code, and
serve as additional expressive resources which give writers the chance of greater
expressive wealth than in monolingual settings. By comparison with Jamaicans,
monolingual StE speakers have considerably reduced resources of nonstandard
forms at their disposal for use in writing.
The use of vernacular codes in written CS practices is an important marker
of informality, since in most traditional (i.e. pre-CMC) written discourse, norms
required stylistic homogeneity. The drift toward informality in discourse that is
generally observable in CMC – and is marked by many other linguistic informalisms besides CS181 – can be understood as a larger trend toward informalization on
all levels of interaction throughout western societies since the twentieth century
(cf. Misztal 2000, discussed below).
Future ethnographic studies of interaction in micro-communities, and especially
CMC, can hope to make relevant contributions to some of the most pertinent
discussions that are currently taking place in EWL research. The consequences
of globalization for linguistic micro-ecologies in which a large standard language
coexists with one or several local vernacular languages (or codes) engage many
researchers in lively debate. One of the core issues under discussion is whether
English is a ‘killer language’ that pushes lesser-used languages to the margins, and
whether the internet – often seen as the key site of the globalization of communication – is an accelerating agent in this process. Many scholars working on the
sociolinguistics of globalization approach the issue from the basic assumption of
Conclusions 149
a linguistic and social inequality caused by globalization (cf. e.g. Blommaert 2005:
68–95). This view transpires in formulations such as Lewin & Donner’s:
Unfortunately for most of the world, the dominant language on the internet is
English, whether for email messages […] or postings to Usenet newsgroups […]”
(2002: 29)
or Koutsogiannis’s critique of too-liberal attitudes in the study of CMC in EWL
contexts:
The danger here is that we may be led to an apolitical relativism […] focusing
exclusively on a description of what is happening in the contact zone [i.e. where
local and global languages meet on the internet] and missing the effects of power
and the point that electronic environments are not neutral literacy practice environments. (Koutsogiannis & Mitwikopoulou 2004: 86)
Other researchers of EWL and globalization acknowledge trends of homogenization – such as shifts within some varieties toward AmE norm-orientation, as have
been observed for the lexis and phonology of New Zealand English – but at the
same time point out semantic and attitudinal differences in the local uptake of
“global” variants (Meyerhoff & Niedzielski 2003).
The ideological discourse underlying such studies is the topic of several of
Alastair Pennycook’s recent publications (2000; 2003a; 2003b). The discussion of
the role of English as the big international language that pushes aside lesser-used
languages in various sites, including the internet, is led with a strong ideological
bias on several fronts. Pennycook gives a succinct account of the key positions in
the discussion of the global position of English. In his summary, they are:
Colonial-celebration, a traditional view that sees the spread of English as inherently
good for the world; laissez-faire liberalism, which views the spread of English as
natural, neutral and beneficial, as long as it can coexist in a complementary relationship with other languages; language ecology, which focuses on the potential
harms and dangers of the introduction of English to multilingual contexts; linguistic imperialism, which points to the interrelationships between English and global capitalism, “McDonaldization” and other international homogenising trends;
language rights, which attempts to introduce a moral imperative to support other
languages in face of the threat imposed by English; and postcolonial performativity,
which seeks to understand through contextualised sociologies of local language
acts how English is constantly implicated in moments of hegemony, resistance
and appropriation. (Pennycook 2000: 108)
The most extreme of these notions (if we omit colonial-celebration for lack of elaboration and sophistication) are laissez-faire liberalism, with David Crystal and his
English as a Global Language as a prominent representative (1997b), and linguistic
imperialism, a term that also serves as title for Phillipson’s programmatic publication (1992). Neither of them presents a detailed account of the effects of globalization on postcolonial EWL sociologies or the role of the internet in this. For example, Crystal in the second edition of English as a Global Language (2003) cheerfully
reports in the chapter on “Communications” that not only are more mail items
shipped through the US Postal Service each year than in all non-English speaking
countries together, so that about 40% of the world’s mail must be in English; he
also presents the internet as welcome proof of the global dominance of English.
The chapter concludes:
The biggest potential setback to English as a global language, it has been said with
more than a little irony, would have taken place a generation ago – if Bill Gates had
grown up speaking Chinese” (122)
The hedge and the reference to “irony” hardly mask the fact that Crystal will have
nothing to do with any concerns or reservations about the overpowering presence
of English in the world.
Phillipson, a critic of Crystal’s liberalism, is greatly concerned about the strong
position of English in the world,182 and claims that its spread has been deliberately
advanced by several institutional agents such as the British Council and the interests
of powerful entities including political and economical forces. According to Pennycook, Phillipson’s model has the shortcoming that it makes even the use of English
look like a consequence of linguistic imperialism. “Such a position, it might be said,
lacks a sense of agency, resistance, or appropriation” (Pennycook 2000: 114).
While all positions agree that the status of English in the world is strong and
has at times been deliberately advanced, there is disagreement on how to model the
effects of English on the use of other, local codes, both at present and in the future.
Pennycook’s own proposed model in the debate, ‘postcolonial performativity,’ holds that research needs to consider local contexts of English use in order to
understand the functions of English. Only through qualitative studies such as this
can EWL studies gain the necessary insights to do so, and to account for the uses
and reuses of English in its many varieties, i.e. to adequately explain the emergence of world varieties of English without the abstractions of either an uncritical,
apolitical liberalism or the considerable generalizations inherent in the linguisticimperialism-position as regards speaker’s motivations for code choices.
Thus, while the spread of English to Jamaica was certainly occasioned by British imperialism, the phenomenon of its use nowadays would be ill-served if described merely as a consequence of imperialism. English fulfills essential communicative needs of Jamaicans, and is complemented by Creole, which is the prime
choice for other communicative needs. In CMC, neither imperialism nor the English language itself is the reason for the shift in the functional division between
Conclusions 151
JamC and JamE in comparison with speech. Rather, the specific sociolinguistic
and language-political local context can provide the adequate background for an
understanding of this phenomenon (cf. 7.1 and 7.2 above).
The role of qualitative investigation is critical to these questions. The local communicative functions of codes and code alternation cannot be explained through
statistical analysis. Other studies besides this have demonstrated as much.
For example, Rampton’s research on crossing deals with switches into codes to
which speakers “do not have unproblematic access” (Auer 1998a: 287) and which
therefore make up a statistically insignificant portion of the overall discourse.
However, these uses in adolescent speech solve communicative tasks in highly
creative ways that are fundamentally relevant to the understanding of how the
various ethnically marked codes function in urban multiethnic Britain.183
As more micro-level ethnographic studies of other EWL settings come forth,
understanding of the contributions of different factors to the role of English is
likely to grow considerably.
7.4 Relevance for CMC studies
Informality features on practically all levels of analysis have been the object of the
bulk of linguistic CMC studies published until now (cf. my introduction on CMC
studies in 1.3.2 for an overview), which have for the most part dealt with monolingual data. Both in a first wave of more impressionistic studies and in the more
recent applications of quantitative techniques to CMC data, informality markers
were shown to be a strong presence in many CMC texts, and certainly in private
and informal CMC writing.
On the discourse level, features that are rare in traditional, non-CMC text
types include inconsistency of register; for data from multicodal settings, codeswitching is an innovative feature of (informal) CMC. This study has also shown
that the effects of CMC on language use are as liberating in multicodal settings as
they are in monolingual settings.
However, the possibility of using several contrasting codes provides Jamaicans with a wealth of expressive resources that is considerably greater than that at
the disposal of monolinguals writing CMC. Particularly in the types of CS which
are addressed by research on identity-in-talk (Antaki et al. 1996; Antaki & Widdicombe 1998b), a model applied here in section 5.3, the Jamaican informants
were shown to have appropriated frequent CS as a traditional feature of speech
to their writing in processes of meaning creation that are simply not available to
monolinguals in similar plasticity, except in crossing. Because Jamaicans have ac-
cess to both JamC and JamE as codes of their “own” and therefore share detailed
and layered knowledge of the codes’ respective potential socio-cultural meanings,
they use them to index elaborately defined social personae without having to make
such definitions explicit.
The linguistic informality of CMC stands in the larger context of an ongoing informality drift throughout Western society. CMC language has only been around
since the second half of the 1990s, but in sociologic study, a sustained trend toward informalization on all levels of social interaction is seen as a phenomenon
of “modern life” (Misztal 2000: 7; for all practical purposes, this means life in the
twentieth century to the present). It is a reaction to a strong, opposite trend toward
formalization. As Barbara Misztal argues, in a world where business and legal relations are steadily getting more complex, creating threats of greater complexity,
anonymity, unpredictability, and uncertainty, both formalization and informalization contribute, and are indeed vital, to an improvement of social life.
As the uncertainty and unpredictability of the modern context increase, the creation of conditions for cooperation and integration requires both the structural
preconditions and the familiarity of informal relations. Only the balanced relationship between informality and formality of interaction practices can secure a potentially more imaginative solution to today’s problems of coordination, solidarity
and innovation. (Misztal 2000: 7, emphasis added)
Misztal models social realms in three basic types (see Table 7). Essential to this
model of social relations is the abandonment of an established dichotomy of sociologic theory: the distinction between the ‘public’ and the ‘private.’
The mid-level of ‘exchange’ is introduced as an intermediate stage between ‘encounters,’ the most public realm, and ‘pure relationships,’ the most private realm.
The ‘exchange’ level, according to Misztal, has increased tremendously in significance in modern times; it is the realm of quotidian, semi-official interaction in
which practically all trade business is carried out. ‘Exchange’ relations are based
on informal understanding and, centrally, on ‘reciprocity,’ which means that individuals extending favors to others can eventually expect return favors.
While in the ongoing shift, the role of informality is increasing in all domains of
interaction, the proper balance with formality looks different across social realms.
For example, while the ‘style of interaction’ in ‘pure relationships’ is least formal
(‘intimacy’), it is no less rule-governed than ‘encounters,’ even though normative
regulations are qualitatively different from those in ‘encounters.’
Conclusions 153
Table 7. Three realms of social interaction (Misztal 2000: 71)
Encounters
Exchange
Pure relationships
persons
roles
individuals
self-presentations
particular goals and
aspirations
co-identification
non-codified general
rules
rules and norms,
sometimes codified
individualized rules of
conduct
Style of interaction
civility
sociability
intimacy
Content of relation
respect
reciprocity
responsibility
Partners’ identity
Motivation
Normative regulation
The function of informality in all realms is that of creating social trust and understanding among interactants. In order to assess the intentions and trustworthiness of the opposite side in any interaction, particularly in interactions with large
corporations, often perceived as faceless, the personal contact between individuals
with a certain degree of freedom of interpretation of their roles184 is necessary.
In this context, the new electronic media (and CMC as part of them) function
both as a site and a catalyst of informality. Misztal acknowledges that the “effects of
electronic computerized communication on the nature of interaction are difficult
to overlook” (2000: 171), even though numerous studies have addressed various
aspects of them. However, guessing from the effects that the introduction of the
telephone had on social interaction, they may well turn out to be revolutionary (in
keeping with Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that each new technology is initially
understood in terms of its predecessors).
The introduction of the telephone did more than enable people to communicate
over long distances. It made possible the separation between production and administration, as well as the creation of national markets in stocks and commodities.
It had an impact on urban structures and caused mass migration to suburbia; it
challenged existing class relations by extending the boundary of who may speak to
whom. It reduced isolation and danger for rural families, while city dwellers used it
as a babysitter. It also altered modes of courtship and possibilities of romance […]
Recently the enormous expansion of the mobile phones […] allows for better use of
time and helps to overcome the rigidity of our timetables as we now communicate
even when we are walking to work, driving a car or shopping. (173)
The effect of CMC on all of these areas is simply not yet evident. In addition, access to the internet in Jamaica is still limited for the majority of the population,
so that fundamental impacts of the technology upon society on the scale of those
cited above for the telephone could not have been observed there yet. However, the
new modes of informal interaction which are emerging in CMC, and which linguistic study has so frequently described, suggest that CMC will “offer some new
opportunities for more flexible, interactive, decentralized and democratic modes
of communication” (178).
The transfer of Misztal’s observations to the Jamaican context is not entirely unproblematic. Misztal describes modern life in the industrialized, Western World,
while Jamaica is a third-world country. Linguistically, the drift toward informality
can definitely be attested for the Jamaican context, based on the steadily expanding number of domains in which Creole is used (which include CMC); changes in
social relations having to do with concurrent trends of formalization and informalization are likely happening in Jamaica as well – almost inevitably, considering
the strong influence of US culture on the island – but they differ in quality from
those in industrialized societies in various respects.
Major differences between Jamaica and the US185 result from the countries’
differing socioeconomic status. Anthropological research carried out between
1967 and 1972 revealed that informants, when asked to describe the sum total of
their kinship, claimed networks that were more than twice as big as those determined for white Americans, averaging 284 members (Smith 1988: 49). This difference was found to be due partly to a more loosely defined concept of kinship in
Jamaica. Women often counted the fathers of their children and their kinship as
part of their own kinship networks, even when those men had only fathered the
children and gone on to contributing nothing else to their upbringing. There were
also categories of network members called “cousins,” “aunts,” and “uncles,” which
included non-cognatic relations in significant numbers.
Most importantly, however, Jamaican kinship structures were found to be
much less based on the Western concept of the nuclear family. There was, and is
today, in Jamaica an overwhelming majority of children growing up in single-parent households, with most people claiming extraordinarily large numbers (compared with industrialized societies) of half-brothers and half-sisters (in a small
informal survey during my research at UWI, several students claimed more than
twenty such relations, invariably referred to as “brothers” and “sisters”). In anthropology and sociology, the rise of the two-parent household is generally considered
to be offset by an increase in a society’s socioeconomic status.186
Based on these findings by Smith (1988), Horst & Miller (2005) investigate the
impact of the cell phone upon social networks in Jamaica. Many rural parts of
Jamaica were never connected to telephone landlines by Cable & Wireless, the
company that held the monopoly over telecommunications in Jamaica for practically all of the twentieth century (Maurer 2001). The uptake of the cell phone
since the late 1990s has been immense. Horst & Miller cite an average number
Conclusions 155
of three registered and active cell phones per Jamaican household for late 2004,
with a trend of continuing increase that is sustained particularly by low-income
Jamaicans (2005: 756).
Horst & Miller show in their anthropological study how low-income individuals in Jamaica use the cell phone in novel strategies of social networking, which the
authors call “link-up.” Like kinship networks, these informal networks are distinct
from those known from industrialized societies. They are extensive and include
kinship, but other persons as well, and they are fundamentally based on informal
understanding. A significant number of all phone calls made in the context of linkup – for some informants up to 30% – are placed solely for the purpose of keeping
in touch with others, and thus maintaining one’s personal network. The functions
of link-up networks vary and include the management of sexual relations. Rather
importantly, however, they function as an economic coping strategy. Within established link-up networks, it is perfectly acceptable to ask for favors when they are
needed, including the use of material goods, babysitting, the supply of food, and
gifts of money. These favors can form a substantial base of an individual’s subsistence, and are central to the upkeep of many children of single mothers.
Since the majority of their members are non-kin relations, link-up networks
would be seen as functioning in the ‘exchange’ realm of Misztal’s model of social
interaction. In Misztal’s model, the central content of such relations is reciprocity.187 However, Horst & Miller are adamant that reciprocity is not the underlying
principle for participation in link-up networks, i.e. individuals who give something do not (always) return favors:
The issue was not, as many Jamaican journalists contend, why people felt free to
ask […], but more importantly why individuals who seemed to have no particular
obligation or reason to give, actually agreed to do so. (Horst & Miller 2005: 762)
Horst & Miller argue that subsistence is not the primary object of link-up networks; rather, the creation of extensive informal networks is a goal in its own right.
However, it should be said that the precarious economic situation of most low-income individuals is a given in a third-world country like Jamaica, and probably a
precondition to the emergence of non-reciprocity in these networks. Because individuals have to worry about survival for themselves and their children on a daily
basis, the function of subsistence, which in the US is typically incumbent upon the
intimate network only, is shared with a new type of larger, very informal network
of the link-up kind. Furthermore, the distinction between kinship and friends in
link-up networks is practically irrelevant. By contrast, such a lack of distinction
in personal network building is unthinkable in US society. In Jamaica it is made
possible through kinship network structures that are fundamentally different from
American ones to begin with (Smith 1988).
To sum up, the emergence of new kinds of informal networks in Jamaica is connected to the introduction of one of the new electronic media of telecommunications, the cell phone. The trend superficially fits Misztal’s observation of a larger
tendency toward informalization in western, industrialized societies, but takes a
very specific form due to essential differences between Jamaica’s socioeconomic
situation and that of first-world countries.
The e-mails from my primary corpus are sometimes also used in networking strategies that can be understood as link-up: there are numerous messages
that have no other content or purpose except to keep in contact (e.g. examples
(17)–(20) in section 4.1), and the asking of favors of friends seems acceptable and
occurs repeatedly (e.g. example (15) in section 4.1; note however that no requests
for money or vital goods are documented in the data). The informants of the email corpus are partly from low-income backgrounds, but on average in more
materially stable situations than the subjects of Horst & Miller’s study.
Thus, a look toward sociology and anthropology helps us place the phenomenon of written CS in these Jamaican e-mail data within the context of both regional and global trends: as a prime feature of informality in discourse, it is part of the
emergence of new types of informal networks, which must be seen as co-occurring
with a basic trend in modern times toward ever greater reliance on formalization.
These two trends can combine to create a high quality of social interaction.
Great potential for future research on informality, including informality in CMC
discourse, lies in the contrastive examination of the identity-related uses of style-,
code-, and register-variation in monolingual and multicodal CMC, and in the exploration of the contrast between speech and CMC with regard to the general sociolinguistic functions of CS, especially in terms of an identity-in-talk-approach.
As I have argued in 7.1 above, it is especially in CMC that analytical practice of CS
can benefit from an interdisciplinary viewpoint that builds on the ideas and findings of linguistics and other disciplines from the humanities and social sciences,
such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and literary studies.
References
Alfonzetti, G. 1998. “The conversational dimension in code-switching between Italian and dialect in Sicily.” Code-Switching in Conversation. Language, Interaction and Identity, P. Auer (ed.),
180–211. London/New York: Routledge.
Allsopp, R. (ed.). 1996. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Androutsopoulos, J. 2006. “Language choice and code-switching in German-based diasporic
web forums.” The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture and Communication Online, B. Danet
and S.C. Herring (eds.). Oxford: Oxford UP.
Androutsopoulos, J. and Schmidt, G. 2002. “SMS-Kommunikation: Ethnographische Gattungsanalyse am Beispiel einer Kleingruppe.” Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 36: 49–79.
Androutsopoulos, J. and Ziegler, E. 2003. “Sprachvariation und Internet: Regionalismen in einer Chat-Gemeinschaft.” ‘Standardfragen’: Soziolinguistische Perspektiven auf Sprachgeschichte,
Sprachkontakt und Sprachvariation, J. Androutsopoulos and E. Ziegler (eds.), 251–280. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Antaki, C., Condor, S. and Levine, M. 1996. “Social identities in talk: Speakers‘ own orientations”. British Journal of Social Psychology 35 (4): 473–492.
Antaki, C. and Widdicombe, S. 1998a. “Identity as an achievement and as a tool.” Identity in Talk,
C. Antaki and S. Widdicombe (eds.), 1–14. London: Sage.
Antaki, C. and Widdicombe, S. (eds.). 1998b. Identity in Talk. London: Sage.
Arnold, A.J. 2000. “Spider and Rabbit: Tricksters as mediators of Caribbean cultural identity.”
Colonizer and Colonized, T. D’haen and P. Krüs (eds.), 269–276. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Auer, P. 1984. Bilingual Conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Auer, P. 1992. “Introduction: John Gumperz’ approach to contextualization.” The Contextualization of Language, P. Auer and A. di Luzio (eds.), 1–37. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Auer, P. 1995. “The pragmatics of code-switching: A sequential approach.” One Speaker, Two
Languages: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching, L. Milroy and P. Muysken (eds.),
115–135. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Auer, P. 1998a. “Introduction to chapter 12.” Code-Switching in Conversation. Language, Interaction
and Identity, P. Auer (ed.), 287–289. London/New York: Routledge.
Auer, P. 1998b. “Introduction: ‘Bilingual conversation’ revisited.” Code-Switching in Conversation.
Language, Interaction and Identity, P. Auer (ed.), 1–24. London/New York: Routledge.
Auer, P. 1999. “From codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects: Toward a dynamic typology of bilingual speech.” International Journal of Bilingualism 3 (4): 309–332.
Auer, P. 2005. “A postscript: Code-switching and social identity.” Journal of Pragmatics 37 (3):
403–410.
Auer, P. and Di Luzio, A. (eds.). 1992. The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Bailey, B.L. 1966. Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Bakhtin, M. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis/London: U of Minnesota P.
Baron, N.S. 1984. “Computer mediated communication as a force in language change.” Visible
Language 18 (2): 118–141.
Baron, N.S. 1998. “Letters by phone or speech by other means: The linguistics of email.” Language
and Communication 18: 133–170.
Bauman, R. 1986. Story, Performance, and Event. Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Beasley, P. 1996. “Vive la différence! Performance poetry.” Critical Quarterly 38 (4): 28–38.
Beckwith, M.W. 1924. Jamaica Anansi Stories. New York: Stechert.
Bell, A. 1984. “Language style as audience design.” Language in Society 13: 145–204.
Bell, A. 2001. “Back in style: Reworking audience design.” Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, P.
Eckert and J.R. Rickford (eds.), 119–126. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Bennett, L. 1966. Jamaica Labrish: Jamaica Dialect Poems. Kingston: Sangster.
Betti, S. 2003. “’He escrito te quiero en la pequeña pantalla’ (del móvil).” Cuadernos Cervantes de
la Lengua Española 44 (9): 70–75.
Biber, D. 1988. Variation Across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Biber, D., Johanson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken
and Written English. London: Longman.
Bickerton, D. 1975. Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Bickerton, D. 1977. “Pidginization and creolization: Language acquisition and language universals.” Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, A. Valdman, J. Reinecke and I.F. Hancock (eds.), 49–69.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Bilby, K. 1995. “Jamaica.” Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae, P. Manuel,
K. Bilby and M. Largey (eds.), 143–182. London: Temple UP.
Blom, J.-P. and Gumperz, J.J. 1972. “Social meaning in linguistic structure: Code-switching in
Norway.” Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, J.J. Gumperz and
D. Hymes (eds.), 407–434. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Blommaert, J. 1999. “Reconstructing the sociolinguistic image of Africa: Grassroots writing in
Shaba (Congo).” Text 19: 175–200.
Blommaert, J. 2001. “The other side of history: Grassroots literacy and autobiography in Shaba,
Congo.” General Linguistics 28: 133–155.
Blommaert, J. 2005. Discourse. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. 1987. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Bungarten, T. 1979. “Das Korpus als empirische Grundlage in der Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft.” Empirische Textwissenschaft, H. Bergenholtz and B. Schaeder (eds.), 28–51.
Königstein: Scriptor.
Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London/New York:
Routledge.
Butler, J. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London/New York:
Routledge.
Cameron, D. 1990. “Demythologizing Sociolinguistics. Why language does not reflect society.”
Ideologies of Language, Joseph and Taylor (eds.), 73–93. London/New York: Routledge.
Cassidy, F.G. 1961. Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica. London: Macmillan.
Cassidy, F.G. and LePage, R.B. (eds.). 1980. Dictionary of Jamaican English. 2nd edition. Cambridge: CUP.
References 159
Central Intelligence Agency 2004. “The World Factbook.” Retrieved 15 December, 2004, from
<http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook>.
Chapman, R.L. 1995. The Macmillan Dictionary of American Slang. London: Macmillan.
Christen, H., Tophinke, D. and Ziegler, E. 2005. “Chat und regionale Identität.” Akten der Konferenz “Bayerische Dialektologie”, N. Wolf (ed.), 425–439. Heidelberg: Winter.
Christie, P. 2003. Language in Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak.
CIA 2004. “The World Factbook.” Retrieved 15 December, 2004, from <http://www.cia.gov/
cia/publications/factbook>.
Collot, M. and Belmore, N. 1996. “Electronic language: A new variety of English.” ComputerMediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, S.C. Herring (ed.),
13–29. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Cooper, C. 1994. “’Lyrical Gun’: Metaphor and Role Play in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.” Massachusetts Review 35 (3/4): 429–447.
Cooper, C. 1995. Noises in the Blood. Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular
Culture. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP.
Cooper, C. 2000. “(W)uman Tong(ue): Writing a Bilingual Newspaper Column in ‘Postcolonial’ Jamaica.” Society for Caribbean Linguistics 13th Biennial Conference. Conference Presentations
91–96. Mona, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P.
Cooper, C. 2004. Sound Clash. Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Craig, D.R. 1997. “The English of West Indian university students.” Englishes Around the World, II:
Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australasia, E.W. Schneider (ed.), 11–24. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Crystal, D. 1997a. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Crystal, D. 1997b. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Crystal, D. 2001. Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Dakubu, M.E.K. 1990. “Why Spider is King of stories: The message in the medium of a West
African tale.” African Langugaes and Cultures 3 (1): 22–56.
Dalzell, T. and Victor, T. (eds.). 2006. The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional
English. London/New York: Routledge.
Dance, D.C. 1985. Folklore from Contemporary Jamaicans. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P.
Davis, B.H. and Brewer, J.P. 1997. Electronic Discourse: Linguistic Individuals in Virtual Space. Albany, NY: State U of NY P.
DeCamp, D. 1971. “Towards a generative analysis of a post-creole speech continuum.” Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, D. Hymes (ed.), 349–370. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
DeCosmo, J.L. 1995. “Dub poetry: Legacy of Roots Reggae.” Griot 14 (2): 33–41.
Deuber, D. 2005. Nigerian Pidgin in Lagos: Language Contact, Variation and Change in an African Urban Setting. London: Battlebridge.
Deuber, D. and Hinrichs, L. 2006. “Jamaican Creole and Nigerian Pidgin orthography: Widening gaps between ‘experts’ and ‘users’?” World Englishes 25.
Devonish, H. 1983. “Towards the establishment of an Institute for Creole Language Standardisation and Development in the Caribbean.” Studies in Caribbean Language, L.D. Carrington
(ed.), 300–316. St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago: Society for Caribbean Linguistics.
Devonish, H. 1986. Language and Liberation. Creole Language Politics in the Caribbean. London:
Karia.
Devonish, H. 1996a. “Kom ground Jamiekan dans haal liriks: Memba se plie wi a plie - Contextualizing Jamaican Dance Hall music: Jamaican language at play in a speech event.” English
World-Wide 17 (2): 213–237.
Devonish, H. 1996b. “Vernacular languages and writing technology transfer: The Jamaican
case.” Caribbean Language Issues: Old and New. Papers in Honour of Professor Mervyn Alleyne on
the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, P. Christie (ed.), 101–111. Mona, Jamaica: U of the West
Indies P.
Devonish, H. 1998. “On the existence of autonomous varieties in ‘creole continuum’ situations.”
Studies in Caribbean Linguistics II, P. Christie et al. (ed.), 1–12. St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago: Society for Caribbean Linguistics.
Devonish, H. 2001. “Language rights in the draft Charter of Rights in the Jamaican Constitution: a proposal,” Presented at: University of the West Indies, Linguistic Research Seminar,
Mona, Jamaica. 20 February 2001.
Devonish, H. 2003. “Language advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia in the ‘Anglophone’ Caribbean.” The Politics of English as a World Language. New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies,
C. Mair (ed.), 157–177. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Devonish, H. and Harry, O.G. 2004. “Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English: phonology.” A
Handbook of Varieties of English, I: Phonology, B. Kortmann and E.W. Schneider (eds.), 450–
480. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Dürscheid, C. 2002. “E-Mail und SMS – ein Vergleich.” Kommunikationsform E-Mail, A. Ziegler
and C. Dürscheid (eds.). Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Eckert, P. 2001. “Style and Social Meaning.” Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, P. Eckert and
J.R. Rickford (eds.), 119–126. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Eckert, P. 2005. “Variation, convention, and social meaning. Keynote address at the Annual
Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.” from <http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/
EckertLSA2005.pdf>.
Edwards, W.F. 1983. “Code selection and shifting in Guyana.” Language in Society 12 (3):
295–311.
Eisenlohr, P. 2004. “Language revitalization and new technologies: Cultures of electronic mediation and the refiguring of communities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 21–45.
Elmer-Dewitt, P. 1994. “Bards of the Internet.” Time, 04 July 1994, 66–67.
Ferguson, C. 1959. “Diglossia.” Word 15: 325–340.
Fishman, J. 1967. “Bilingualism with and without diglossia, diglossia with and without bilingualism.” Journal of Social Studies 23: 29–38.
Foster, C. 1999. Roots Rock Reggae: An Oral History of Reggae Music from Ska to Dancehall. New
York: Billboard.
Gains, J. 1999. “Electronic Mail – a new style of communication or just a new medium: An investigation into the text features of email.” English for Specific Purposes 18 (1): 81–101.
Galán Rodríguez, C. 2001. “SMS: ¿Un nuevo modelo de lenguaje?” Español Actual: Revista de
Español Vivo 76: 93–103.
Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Georgakopoulou, A. 1997. “Self-presentation and interactional alliances in e-mail discourse:
the style- and code-switches of Greek messages.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics
7 (2): 141–164.
Georgakopoulou, A. 2004. “To tell or not to tell? Email stories between on- and off-line interactions.” Language @ Internet 1, from <http://www.digijournals.de/languageatinternet/articles/36>.
References 161
Gibson, K. 1996. “Observations on have and had in Barbadian and Guyanese mesolectal English.” Caribbean Language Issues: Old and New. Papers in Honour of Professor Mervyn Alleyne on the
Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, P. Christie (ed.), 41–47. Barbados: U of the West Indies P.
Goffman, E. 1971. Relations in Public. London: Allen Lane.
Graedler, A.-L. 1999. “Where English and Norwegian meet: Codeswitching in written texts.” Out
of Corpora. Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson, H. Hasselgård and S. Oksefjell (eds.), 327–343.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Greenbaum, S. 1996. “Introducing ICE.” Comparing English Worldwide: The International Corpus of
English, S. Greenbaum (ed.), 3–12. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Grice, H.P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Gumperz, J.J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Habekost, C. 1993. Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of African-Caribbean Dub Poetry.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Hale, C. and Scanlon, J. 1999. Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. New
York: Broadway Books.
Hall, K. 2003. “Exceptional speakers: Contested and problematized gender identities.” The
Handbook of Language and Gender, J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds.), 353–380. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Hall, R.A. 1962. “The life-cycle of pidgin languages.” Lingua 11: 151–156.
Hall, R.A. 1966. Pidgin and Creole Languages. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Harris, R. and Rampton, B. 2002. “Creole metaphors in cultural analysis. On the limits and possibilities of (socio-)linguistics.” Critique of Anthropology 22 (1): 31–51.
Hellinger, M. 1985. Englisch-orientierte Pidgin- und Kreolsprachen: Entstehung, Geschichte und
sprachlicher Wandel. Darmstadt: WBG.
Herring, S.C. 1996. “Two variants of an electronic message scheme.” Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, S.C. Herring (ed.), 81–106. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Herring, S.C. 2004. “Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online
behavior.” Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, S.A. Barab, R. Kling and
J.H. Gray (eds.), 338–376. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Hewitt, R. 1986. White Talk Black Talk: Inter-Racial Friendship and Communication Amongst
Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Hinnenkamp, V. 1989. Interaktionale Soziolinguistik und interkulturelle Kommunikation. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Hinrichs, L. 2004. “Emerging orthographic conventions in written Creole: Computer-mediated
communication in Jamaica.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 29 (1): 81–109.
Hippolyte, I. 2004. “Collapsing the ‘oral-literary’ continuum.” interventions 6 (1): 82–100.
Höflich, J.R. 2003. “Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel: Brief – E-Mail – SMS.” Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel. Brief, E-Mail, SMS, J.R. Höflich (ed.), 39–61. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Holm, J.A. 1988. Pidgins and Creoles, I: Theory and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Horst, H. and Miller, D. 2005. “From Kinship to Link-up: Cell phones and social networking in
Jamaica.” Current Anthropology 46 (5): 755–778.
Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G.K. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Hymes, D. 1974. “Ways of speaking.” Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, R. Bauman and
J. Sherzer (eds.), 433–451. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Irvine, A. 2004. “A good command of the English language: Phonological variation in the Jamaican mesolect.” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 19 (1): 41–76.
Jefferey, C. and van Rooy, B. 2004. “Emphasizer now in Colloquial South African English.” World
Englishes 23 (2): 269–280.
Johanson, S. 1991. “Times change, and so do corpora.” English Corpus Linguistics, K. Aijmer and
B. Altenberg (eds.), 305–314. London: Longman.
Kachru, B.B. 1985. “Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language
in the outer circle.” English in the World. Teaching and Learning the Languages and Literatures,
R. Quirk and H.G. Widdowson (eds.), 11–36. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Karim, K.H. (ed.). 2003. The Media of Diaspora. Mapping the Globe. Routledge Research in Transnationalism. London/New York: Routledge.
Knäble, N. 2001. “Codeswitching in Jamaican Radio Shows.” Teachers’ state examination thesis,
English Department, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
Koch, P. and Oesterreicher, W. 1985. “Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit
und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte.” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 39: 15–43.
Koutsogiannis, D. and Mitwikopoulou, B. 2004. “The internet as a glocal discourse environment. A commentary on ‘Second language socialization in a bilingual chat room’ by Wan
Shun Eva Lam and ‘Second language cyberhetoric: A study of Chinese L2 writers in an
online Usenet group’ by Joel Bloch.” Language Learning and Technology 8 (3): 83–89.
Labov, W. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington: Center of Applied
Linguistics.
Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.
Labov, W. 1989. “Exact description of the speech community: Short A in Philadelphia.” Language
Change and Variation, R. Fasold and D. Schiffrin (eds.), 1–57. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Labov, W. 2001. “The anatomy of style-shifting.” Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, P. Eckert and
J.R. Rickford (eds.), 85–108. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Lalla, B. and D’Costa, J. 1990. Language in Exile. Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole. Tuscaloosa,
AL: U of Alabama P.
Lattey, E. and Tracey, R. 2001. “Language contact in the individual: A case study based on letters from a German immigrant in New Jersey.” Global Eurolinguistics. European Languages in
North America – Migration, Maintenance and Death, P.S. Ureland (ed.), 413–433. Tübingen:
Niemeyer.
Lawton, D. 1980. “Language attitudes, discreteness and code-shifting in Jamaican Creole.” English World-Wide 1 (2): 211–226.
LePage, R.B. and Tabouret-Keller, A. 1985. Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Language and
Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Lewin, B.A. and Donner, J. 2002. “Communication in internet message boards.” English Today
18 (3): 29–37.
Mair, C. 1991. “Quantitative or qualitative corpus analysis? Infinitival complement clauses in the
Survey of English Usage corpus.” English Computer Corpora, S. Johanson and A. Stenström
(eds.), 67–80. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Mair, C. 1992. “Problems in the compilation of a corpus of standard Caribbean English: A pilot
study.” New Directions in English Language Corpora. Methodology, Results, Software Developments,
G. Leitner (ed.), 75–96. Berlin: de Gruyter.
References 163
Mair, C. 2002. “Creolisms in an emerging standard: Written English in Jamaica.” English WorldWide 23 (1): 31–58.
Mair, C. 2003a. “Acts of Identity - interaction-based sociolinguistics and cultural studies: An
introduction.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28 (2): 195–199.
Mair, C. 2003b. “Language, code and symbol: The changing roles of Jamaican Creole in diaspora
communities.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28 (2): 231–248.
Mair, C. 2003c. “Linguistics, literature and the postcolonial Englishes. An Introduction.” The
Politics of English as a World Language. New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, C. Mair
(ed.), ix–xxi. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Mair, C., Hundt, M., Leech, G. and Smith, N. 2002. “Short-term diachronic shifts in part-ofspeech frequencies: A comparison of the tagged LOB and F-LOB corpora.” International
Journal of Corpus Linguistics 7: 245–264.
Mair, C. and Sand, A. 1998. “Caribbean English: Structure and status of an emerging variety.” Anglistentag 1997: Giessen – Proceedings, R. Borgmeier, H. Grabes and A. Jucker (eds.),
187–198. Trier: WVT.
Mair, C. and Sand, A. 2003. “The English language in Jamaica.” Retrieved 14 May, 2005, from
<http://www.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/institut/lsmair/ice-ja/intro.htm>.
Major, C. (ed.). 1994. Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. London/New York:
Penguin.
Mason, M. and Allen, J. 2003. “Computing in Creole languages. The web stimulates growth and
development of historically oral languages.” MultiLingual Computing & Technology 14, from
<http://www.multilingual.com>.
Maurer, B. 2001. “Islands in the net: Rewiring technological and financial circuits in the ‘offshore’ Caribbean.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (3): 467–501.
Maynor, N. 1994. “The Language of Electronic Mail: Written Speech?” Centennial Usage Studies,
G.D. Little and M. Montgomery (eds.), 48–54. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P.
Meeuwis, M. and Blommaert, J. 1994. “The ‘Markedness Model’ and the absence of society:
Remarks on codeswitching.” Multilingua 13 (4): 387–423.
Mendoza-Denton, N. 2002. “Language and identity.” The Handbook of Language Variation and
Change, J.K. Chambers, P. Trudgill and N. Schilling-Estes (eds.), 475–499. Oxford: Blackwell.
Meyerhoff, M. 2004. “Communities of practice.” The Handbook of Language Variation and Change,
J.K. Chambers, P. Trudgill and N. Schilling-Estes (eds.), 526–548. Oxford: Blackwell.
Meyerhoff, M. and Niedzielski, N. 2003. “The globalisation of vernacular variation.” Journal of
Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 534–555.
Miller, D. and Slater, D. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.
Misztal, B. 2000. Informality. Social Theory and Contemporary Practice. London/New York:
Routledge.
Montes-Alcalá, C. 2000. “Attitudes towards oral and written codeswitching in Spanish-English
bilingual youths.” Research on Spanish in the United States. Linguistic Issues and Challenges, A.
Roca (ed.), 217–227. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.
Montes-Alcalá, C. 2001. “Oral vs. written code-switching contexts in English-Spanish bilingual
narratives.” La lingüística aplicada a finales del siglo XX. Ensayos y propuestas, d.l. Cruz (ed.), 715–
720. Alcalá de Henares (Madrid): Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá de Henares.
Montes-Alcalá, C. 2005. “¡Mándame un e-mail! Cambio de códigos español-inglés online.”
Contacto y contextos lingüísticos: El español en los Estados Unidos y en contacto con otras lenguas,
L. Ortiz and M. Lacorte (eds.), 173–185. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.
Morris, M. 1993a. “Gender in some performance poems.” Critical Quarterly 35 (1): 78–84.
Morris, M. 1993b. “Is English we speaking.” English Today 36 (4): 18–26.
Morris, M. 1996. “Mutabaruka.” Critical Quarterly 38 (4): 39–49.
Morris, M. 1997. “A note on ‘Dub Poetry’.” Wasafiri: Journal of Caribbean, African, Asian and
Associated Literatures and Film 26 (3): 66–69.
Mufwene, S.S. 2001. The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Mühleisen, S. 2002. Creole Discourse. Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean
English-Lexicon Creoles. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Mühlhäusler, P. 2003. Language Environment – Environment of Language: A Course in Ecolinguistics. London: Battlebridge.
Muysken, P. 2000. Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Myers-Scotton, C. 1983a. “Comment: Markedness and code choice.” International Journal of the
Sociology of Language 44: 115–136.
Myers-Scotton, C. 1983b. “The negotiation of identities in conversation: A theory of markedness
and code choice.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 44: 115–136.
Myers-Scotton, C. 1992. “Constructing the frame in intrasentential codeswitching.” Multilingua
11 (1): 101–127.
Myers-Scotton, C. 1993a. “Common and uncommon ground: Social and structural factors in
codeswitching.” Language in Society 22: 475–503.
Myers-Scotton, C. 1993b. Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Myers-Scotton, C. 1997. “Code-switching.” The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, F. Coulmas (ed.),
217–237. Oxford: Blackwell.
Myers-Scotton, C. 1998. “A theoretical introduction to the Markedness Model.” Codes and Consequences: Choosing Linguistic Varieties, C. Myers-Scotton (ed.), 18–38. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Myers-Scotton, C. 2002. “Frequency and intentionality in (un)marked choices in codeswitching:
‘This is a 24-hour country’.” International Journal of Bilingualism 6 (2): 205–219.
Myers-Scotton, C. and Bolonyai, A. 2001. “Calculating speakers: Codeswitching in a rational
choice model.” Language in Society 30 (1): 1–28.
ONS 2001. “Census 2001.” Retrieved 16 May, 2005, from <http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/>.
Palfreyman, D. and al Khalil, M. 2003. “‘A Funky Language for Teenzz to Use’: Representing
Gulf Arabic in instant messaging.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9, from
<http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue1/palfreyman.html>.
Paolillo, J. 2001. “Language variation on Internet Relay Chat: A social network approach.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 5 (2): 180–213.
Patrick, P.L. 1995. “Recent Jamaican words in sociolinguistic context.” American Speech 70 (3):
227–264.
Patrick, P.L. 1997. “Style and register in Jamaican Patwa.” Englishes around the World, II: Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australasia, E.W. Schneider (ed.), 41–56. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Patrick, P.L. 1999. Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
References 165
Patrick, P.L. 2004a. “British Creole: phonology.” A Handbook of Varieties of English, I: Phonology,
E.W. Schneider and B. Kortmann (eds.), 231–243. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Patrick, P.L. 2004b. “Jamaican Creole morphology and syntax.” A Handbook of Varieties of English, II: Morphology and Syntax, B. Kortmann and E.W. Schneider (eds.), 407–438. Berlin:
de Gruyter.
Patrick, P.L. and Figueroa, E. 2002. “Kiss-Teeth.” American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage
77 (4): 383–397.
Patrick, P.L. and McElhinny, B. 1993. “Speakin’ and spokin’ in Jamaica: Conflict and consensus
in sociolinguistics.” Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society,
February 12–15, 1993, J. Guenter (ed.), 280–290. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society.
Pennycook, A. 2000. “English, politics, ideology: From colonial celebration to postcolonial performativity.” Ideology, politics and language policies, T. Ricento (ed.), 107–120. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Pennycook, A. 2003a. “Beyond homogeny and heterogeny. English as a global and worldly language.” The Politics of English as a World Language. New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies,
C. Mair (ed.), 3–17. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Pennycook, A. 2003b. “Global Englishes, Rip Slyme, and performativity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 513–533.
Phillips, M. and Phillips, T. 1999. Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain. London:
HarperCollins.
Phillipson, R. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Phillipson, R. and Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 1996. “English only worldwide or language ecology?”
TESOL Quarterly 30 (3): 429–452.
Pollard, V. 1978. “Code-switching in Jamaica Creole: Some educational implications.” Caribbean
Journal of Education 5 (1): 16–31.
Pollard, V. 1998. “Code switching and code mixing: Language in the Jamaican classroom.” Caribbean Journal of Education 20 (1): 9–20.
Pollard, V. 2000. Dread Talk. The Language of Rastafari. Montreal et al.: McGill-Queen’s UP.
Poplack, S. and Tagliamonte, S. 2001. African American English in the Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pride, J.B. 1979. “A transactional view of speech functions and code-switching.” Language and
Society, W.C. McCormack and S.A. Wurm (eds.), 27–53. The Hague: de Gruyter.
Prudent, L.-F. 1981. “Diglossie et interlecte.” Languages 61: 13–38.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English
Language. London: Longman.
Rampton, B. 1995. Crossing. London: Longman.
Rampton, B. 1998a. “Language crossing and the redefinition of reality.” Code-Switching in Conversation. Language, Interaction and Identity, P. Auer (ed.), 290–317. London/New York:
Routledge.
Rampton, B. 1998b. “Speech community.” Handbook of Pragmatics, J. Verschueren, J.-O. Östman,
J. Blommaert and C. Bulcaen (eds.). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Rampton, B. 1999. “Sociolinguistics and cultural studies: New ethnicities, liminality and interaction.” Social Semiotics 9 (3): 355–373.
Reinecke, J.E. and Tokimasa, A. 1934. “The English dialect of Hawaii.” American Speech 9 (1/2):
48–58.
Rickford, J.R. 1987. Dimensions of a Creole Continuum: Stanford UP.
Rickford, J.R. and Blake, R. 1990. “Copula contraction and absence in Barbadian English, Samana English and VBE.” Proceedings of the 16th Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February
16–19, 1990, K. Hall et al. (ed.), 257–268. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society.
Rickford, J.R. and Traugott, E. 1985. “Symbol of powerlessness and degeneracy, or symbol of
solidarity and truth? Paradoxical attitudes towards pidgins and creoles.” The English Language Today, S. Greenbaum (ed.). Oxford: Pergamon.
Rieger, B. 1979. “Repräsentativität: von der Unangemessenheit eines Begriffs zur Kennzeichnung eines Problems linguistischer Korpusbildung.” Empirische Textwissenschaft,
H. Bergenholtz and B. Schaeder (eds.), 52–70. Königstein: Scriptor.
Roberts, P. 1988. West Indians and Their Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Rocholl, L. 2003. “Language and identity on personal home pages by Jamaicans”. University of
Freiburg. Ms., 22 pp.
Romaine, S. 1988. Pidgin and Creole Languages. London: Longman.
Sadler, M.F. 1906. The First & Second Epistles to the Corinthians. London: George Bell.
Safire, W. 1998. “All phat! and a bag of chips.” New York Times Magazine, 12 May 1998, 12.
Sahel, S. 2004. “Die Rolle der Neuen Medien bei der Entstehung von neuen Schriftformen – der
Fall einer diglossischen Sprachgemeinschaft,” presented at: Annual Meeting of the Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik e.V., Wuppertal. 24 September 2004.
Sand, A. 1999. Linguistic Variation in Jamaica: A Corpus-based Study of Radio and Newspaper
Usage. Tübingen: G. Narr.
Sand, A. 2004. “Shared morpho-syntactic features in contact varieties of English: article use.”
World Englishes 23 (2): 281–298.
Satyanath, S. 1991. “Variation and change: (daz) in Guyanese.” PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Saville-Troike, M. 1989. The Ethnography of Communication – an Introduction. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Schendl, H. 2000. “Syntactic Constraints on code-switching in medieval texts.” Placing Middle
English in Context, I. Taavitsainen (ed.), 67–86. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Schilling-Estes, N. 1998. “Investigating ‘self-conscious’ speech: The performance register in Ocracoke English.” Language in Society 27: 53–83.
Schlobinski, P., Fortmann, N., Groß, O., Hogg, F., Horstmann, F. and Theel, R. 2001. “Simsen.
Eine Pilotstudie zu sprachlichen und kommunikativen Aspekten in der SMS-Kommunikation.” Networx 22, from <http://www.websprache.net/networx7/docs/networx-22.pdf>.
Schmied, J. 1997. “Beyond recipes, beyond maks, beyond Africa: Texts, text-types, text collections and African realities.” Englishes Around the World, II: Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australasia,
Asia, E.W. Schneider (ed.), 141–158. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schmied, J. 2004. “Cultural discourse in the Corpus of East African English and beyond: Possibilities and problems of lexical and collocational research in a one million word corpus.”
World Englishes 23 (2): 251–260.
Schuchhardt, H. 1914. Die Sprache der Saramakkaneger in Surinam. Amsterdam: Müller.
Sebba, M. 1993. London Jamaican: Language Systems in Interaction. London: Longman.
Sebba, M. 2003. “Spelling Rebellion.” Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities, J. Androutsopoulos
and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.), 151–172. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Sebba, M. 2004. “British Creole: morphology and syntax.” A Handbook of Varieties of English, II: Morphology and Syntax, B. Kortmann and E.W. Schneider (eds.), 196–208. Berlin: de Gruyter.
References 167
Sebba, M. and Dray, S. 2005. “Constructing and using a corpus of Written British Creole.” Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, I: Synchronic Databases, J.C. Beal, K.P. Corrigan and
H. Moisl (eds.), London: Macmillan.
Sebba, M., Kedge, S. and Dray, S. 1999. “The Corpus of Written British Creole: a User’s Guide.”
from <http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mark/cwbc/cwbcman.htm>.
Sebba, M. and Tate, S. 2002. “’Global’ and ‘Local’ identities in the discourses of British-born
Caribbeans.” International Journal of Bilingualism 6 (1): 75–89.
Sebba, M. and Wootton, T. 1998. “We, they and identity: Sequential versus identity-related explanation in code-switching.” Code-Switching in Conversation. Language, Interaction and Identity, P. Auer (ed.), 262–286. London/New York: Routledge.
Sedlatschek, A. 2005. “Variation and Change in Contemporary Indian English: A Corpus Based
Description.” PhD thesis, English Department, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
Shields-Brodber, K. 1989. “Standard English in Jamaica: A case of competing models.” English
World-Wide 10 (1): 41–53.
Shields-Brodber, K. 1992. “Dynamism and assertiveness in the public voice: Turn-taking and
code-switching in radio talk shows in Jamaica.” Pragmatics 2 (4): 487–504.
Shields-Brodber, K. 1997. “Requiem for English in an ‘English-Speaking’ community: The case
of Jamaica.” Englishes around the World, II: Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australasia, E.W. Schneider
(ed.), 57–67. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Shields, K. 1989. “Standard English in Jamaica: A case of competing models.” English World-Wide
10 (1): 41–53.
Siebenhaar, B. 2005. “Varietätenwahl und Code-Switching in Deutschschweizer Chatkanälen.“
Networx 43, from <http://www.mediensprache.net/networx/networx-43.pdf>.
Silverman, D. 2001. Interpreting Qualitative Data. Methods for Analyzing Talk, Text and Interaction. London et al.: Sage.
Silverstein, M. 1992. “The uses and utility of ideology: Some reflections.” Pragmatics 2 (3):
311–323.
Smith, R.T. 1988. Kinship and Class in the West Indies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Smith, Z. 2001. White Teeth. London et al.: Penguin.
Spears, R.A. 1995. NTC’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions: The Most
Practical Reference for the Informal Expressions of Contemporary American English.
Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company.
Spitzmüller, J. 2006. “Spricht da jemand? Konzeption und Repräsentation in virtuellen Räumen.”
Aktualnije problemi germanistiki i romanistiki, G. Kramorenko (ed.), 33–56. Smolensk: SGPU.
Stewart, W.A. 1964. ”Urban negro speech: Sociolinguistic factors affecting English teaching.”
Social Dialects and Language Learning: Proceedings of the Bloomingotn, Indiana Conference,
R.W. Shuy (ed.), 10–18. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Stolt, B. 1964. Die Sprachmischung in Luthers Tischreden: Studien zum Problem der Zweisprachigkeit. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.
Stolzoff, N. 2000. Wake the Town and Tell the People. Dancehall Culture in Jamaica. Durham,
NC: Duke UP.
Sutcliffe, D. 1982. British Black English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tanna, L. 1983. “Anansi – Jamaica’s Trickster Hero.” Jamaica Journal 16 (2): 20–30.
Tannen, D. (ed.). 1993. Framing in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Turner, V. and Turner, E. 1982. “Performing Ethnography.” The Drama Review 26 (2): 33–50.
UBS 1990. “Position paper on proposed production of audio scriptures in Jamaican Creole
(Patois)”. Kingston, Jamaica, Bible Society of the West Indies.
Walker, J. 1997. “Review of C. Myers-Scotton (1995), Social Motivations for Code-Switching.”
Language 73 (4): 841–844.
Wassink, A.B. 1999. “Historic low prestige and seeds of change: Attitudes toward Jamaican Creole.” Language in Society 28 (1): 57–92.
Wassink, A.B. and Dyer, J. 2004. “Language ideology and the transmission of phonological
change: Changing indexicality in two situations of language contact.” Journal of English Linguistics 32 (1): 3–30.
Wells, J.C. 1973. Jamaican Pronunciation in London. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English, III: Beyond the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Winer, L. 1993. Trinidad and Tobago. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Winford, D. 1993. “Variability in the use of perfect have in Trinidadian English: A problem of
categorial and semantic mismatch.” Language Variation and Change 4: 311–357.
World Bank Group 2005. “Data and statistics: Country classification.” Retrieved 12 May, 2005,
from <http://www.worldbank.org/data/countryclass/countryclass.html>.
Yasmeen, R. 2006. “Bilingual E-Mails.” M.A. thesis, Department of English, University of Karachi, Karachi, Pakistan.
Yates, S.J. 1996. “Oral and written aspects of computer conferencing: a corpus based study.” Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, S.C. Herring
(ed.), 30–46. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Appendix
1.
Anonymization of the primary corpus
Table 8. Codes used for real names and critical information
Original information
Replaced by letter code*
Female first names
FF
Male first names
MM
Last names
LL
Non-gender specific first names that could not be disambiguated based on context (e.g. some nick names)
UU
Place names (replaced only when critical to preserving
anonymity)
PP
Other information critical to anonymity (e.g. phone
numbers and e-mail addresses)
XX
*
In this anonymization practice, all –s-genitives following names in the original were preserved (e.g., “Tina’s” was anonymized to “FF’s”).
2. The primary corpus data
m#
sj
001–01
FF why are you so wukliss?!? Ok, i realise that you have run off to Paris, but that
doesn’t mean seh yu fi dash weh yu ole time fren dem!! Laax man!! Anyway, i am
doing good. Last semester i recieved the linguistic theory prize and just today i
sent in an application for an MPhil in linguistics. (I will probably be doing law instead though). FF and i are doing quite fine also. As you know she is doing an MSc.
in economics and she seems to be good at that. Overall i am ok. have you spoken to
FF? If not you should send her an email... wukliss! FF and FF and everybody else
seems to be doing ok. FF had a bad semester last year (but nuh tell har seh mi tell
yuh) but i hope she can make it up for this one. I spoke to FF and she said that she
can’t wait to come back to jamaica, is that the same for you? Or have you found a
nice frenchman who has changed your mid about returning to jamaica? Hmmm,
i wonder ;-) You must write back and tell me though. I will be waiting so till then
take care! How is the teaching, weather, system, food, people? Write back and tell
me all about them. Love you!
m#
sj
001–02
Yes mi fren, mi more dan wukliss; i couldn’t agree with u more. U see i do not have
much access to internet and when i do i have to pay for the time spent. Also, i have
to go into paris whenever i need to check and send mail, so i hope u can forgive
mu wuklissness.
Congratulations are in order; to me that’s no surprise u a good bwoy inna lingwistiks. Plus u an FF a bi fren. But that’s good though MM. Keep it up; it seems like
u’re going after the first class. All the best with ur application, i pray that u’ll get
thru for ur first luv; LAW.
Well FF would do good at anything especially if it’s all about Maths, so i know she’s
buttering up the Econ. Tell her hello for me.
Well Paris so far is fine but cold, and like FF, yes, i am dying to be home. No MM
mi neva cum yah fi luk no man. Plus, gimme a J’can man any day. Dem man yah
smoke to much, man. Dem bret smell like urine, mi caan tek i at aal. Neways, mi
kuul and of course i am holding on to my God, there’s no other way and no other
choice, especially seeing that i am so far away.
Work is o.k. the teachers are very lovely but some of the students can be very nasty.
Totally the opposite of our J’can students. Boy i thought our pickney dem neva hav
nuh rispek, but dem french pickney yah beet dem clear.
he food here, i am still getting used to. It’s not bad but bwoy is not everything good
for the system. For Christmas i had oysters can u believe it and ostrich meat. Boy
mi neva knuo seh ostrich kuda eat. But it neva taste too bad, bearing in mind seh
mi did half tru di meat before dem tell mi a wa. It tasts kinda like beef.
The weather was very cold earlier in October but it’s not so bad; it’s above 10 degrees now. What a difference! Anyway, all is well and i am giving thanks. Please tell
FF seh mi wid link har soon. Tell FF, FF and FF hello for me.
FF.
p.s. All the best with L331
Appendix 171
m#
sj
001–03
HAPPY BIRTHDAY FASSSY 21 YUH LEGAL NOW. LOLOL. MI a mussi 30 yuh
a mix mi up wid MM mi a 24 yah now mi tun 25 next month. YEah mi dun wid
school all get first class honors. MI deh yah a wait pon mi work permit but INS a
joke star suh mi nuh know how long mi affi wait cause a everything weh happen
Sep 11. Mi caan even leff the country either cause if mi leff mi application ago get
dismissed suh mi affi stay put. MI start get bored yah now cause mi caan work (no
permit) and mi naaw guh school. Mi a move guh South Carolina the end of the
month still suh the change will be good. Yeah mi ago chill wid one a mi fren them
weh mi use to par wid a UTECH. Him come up pon a programme and the company file fi him fi five years and gi him a house and a transp suh him ask him boss
if mi can jams wid him and them seh yeah mi juss affi pay 300 a month and that
includes utilities suh mi juss a wait till the end of the month fi leff Miami.
Mi did call Mommy wah day yah tell har mi bored and mi a come back a Jamaica
shi ask mi if mi mad seh mi fi wait pon mi work permit and deal wid the farrin
experience. Suh mi juss a stay put till that come. As International students yuh allowed to work a year after yuh dun yuh course of study well yuh can start before
but mi choose fi wait till mi dun but cause a everything weh happen Sep 11 them
a check everything suh them have a back up suh mi nuh know when it a come. MI
did apply fi get it fi start Jan 7 but mi nuh si it yet. A hope when them sen it them
nuh tek off nuh time.
Mi glad fi hear seh school a gwaan good fi yuh fada that nice keep up the good
work. Hail Aunty fi I. Suh weh yuh breda deh pon? MI did hear seh him a guh
some trade school or something tu that sort I know its something to do with drawing. Suh how the girls pon yuh ends sah? YUh married yet? Everyone mi know a
married. It look like is a trend.
Yo this email a get too long although mi nuh have nuttin else fi du but inna the
latahs hope yuh enjoy yuh birthday. Bless
All the best till wi link
m#
sj
001–04
How come you hate martinique? I thought you would love the little experience
to get away from jamaica for awhile and go to a new caribbean country. I guess
i would be a little home sick too, because i have never spent more than a month
outside of jamaica. Thank you for the congratulations. FF and i are very much still
together. It has been one year and 3 months now (October 18th is the anniversary)
and we are still going strong. Apart from the problems that a regular couple has we
are ok and looking forward to getting married in the future. She is doing her MSc
in economics right now. More than likely i will be back this september coming to
do either my LLB (law) or an MPhil in linguistics. I have applied for them both so
i guess one should come through. I will save what i can save of the notes an ting,
but you should know that i don’t really take good notes and i don’t buy textbook.
Did you say that you were with somebody in your email? Who is this? Is it a person
from Martinique? Do you have FF’s email by any chance? Write back soon and
mek mi know what a gwaan. Love you, later!
m#
sj
001–05
well i thought i would have enjoyed martnique too but after a while i jus got really
unhappy because of culture shock and the atmosphere here. i jus dont feel at home
and i jus want to come home. it’s a beautiful island and stuff but it’s too small for
me and the system is jus not good and the people are weird. anyway, i guess i must
have mentioned somethign about someone to have sparked your interest. well i
did meet this one guy, you know me, his name is MM. he’s a christian an stuff an
i really like him but nothing can gwaan cause i still lvoe MM, he lvoes someone
else in martnique, even though he really likes me and i’m leaving in a few months.
furthermore, we both agree that we would be better off as friends and friendship
is more important than a relationship that we dont know if GOd wants. so he’s
jus my real good friend. anyway, i am so happy to hear about you an FF. you ebtta
invite me to the wedding cause i know i will cry having to give you away to woman
that you deserve :( but i am happy nonetheless.
yes i know you dont take great notes and i forgot that you dont buy textbooks but
liek you said save what you can. i really miss you though and i cant believe i will
be doing final year without you. but all the best for the rest of the year and hope to
hear from you again sooon. i love you.
FF
m#
sj
001–06
Well hello there. I see that you ran out on me. But hey these things happen. As you
can probably tell I am a workaholic. I also enjoying making money. thank you for
Appendix 173
your very descriptive email. Well I do hope that you enjoy the rest of your stay here
in the States. Hopefully the next time we meet I will have a lot more free time, and
you won’t be in too much of a rush to leave. As always my email box is always open
(smile) and your more than welcome to drop me an email at anytime. Take it easy
now, until next time.
Oneness
FF
m#
sj
002–01
Seminars on Literary Criticism
Dear Dr. LL, Thank you again for the advice you gave me with regards to my
course selection. However, I am writing on another matter this time.
During my search for graduate studies (abroad), I realised that most of the programmes in literatures in Spanish require that students do courses in the theories
and methods of literary criticism. I also noticed that although our undergraduate
degree in Spanish here leans more towards literature we are not exposed to the
theories and methods of literary criticism.
I thought it would be good if the department could organise some seminars/workshops next semester to introduce students to these areas so that we can approach
literary criticism in a more mature and informed way and that we will not be totally lost when we are ready to pursue graduate studies.
The recurring areas are: structuralism, formalism, modernist and postmodernist
theories, post-colonial theory, and queer theory.
Please let me know how feasible the idea of the seminars is.
Thank you
MM LL
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
m#
sj
002–02
Re: Some bad news, temporarily (I hope).
Hi Dr. LL,
I read with dismay your message re the obviously “bad news”. Your coming down
with the Chicken Pox did neither of us any good because it meant not having the
only class which I look forward to every week not only because of the content but
also due to the style/manner in which it is delivered. Believe it or not I just do my
other courses because I have to and every Wednesday when I go to Syntax class I
start looking on my watch after the first fifteen minutes. So not having you at class
made the week very dull.
The first class we had some people just came and collected “their” transcripts and
left. I know you don’t have to think very hard to figure out the people who stayed
to read through and have a discussion. If you were the one who “stunted” the
students’ development I thought they would have seized the opportunity of your
absence to voice their opinions on the work (literature) Anyway, that is how some
people are.
I must admit that on Friday I woke up at five minutes past nine (after a very loooong
Thursday - Sports Day, Hall meeting and other classes and activities.) I was in such
a rush to get dressed and managed to reach class at nine thirty. I could just imagine
if you were there and I walked in at that ungodly hour. Anyway we had a discussion on the “misterio escondido” of “El celoso extremeno” which I still have not
found and think that we should not waste our time looking for. My view is that not
because Cervantes says that his stories have misterios escondidos means that all or
any of them have them. He might be sending the reader on a wild goose chase. Or
deliberately promising what he will not deliver (“Celestina”?, “Buscon”?)
I would have responded to your e-mail earlier but I have been bogged down with
hall and school work. I must say that this holiday is a real sham for me. I am doing
more work than during class time. However, I hope that you are recovering and
you are getting some well needed rest. You will need all the strength you have to
mark papers, deal with Quijote, deal with students....... DO TAKE THE REST!!
Looking forward to seeing you refreshed and ready to go (return) after the break.
Your student and friend, MM
P.S. I did not have enough time to edit this e-mail. Please don’t subtract marks for
grammar and spelling.
m#
sj
002–03
L32A In-course Assignment
Dear FF,
I want to know if I can do something out of the ordinary for my L32A in-course
assignment.
Appendix 175
I have always wanted to complie a dictionary of Jamaican Creole and I think this
course and your guidance would be the perfect place to start. This dictionary
would contain at least 500 entries written with the Cassidy/Lepage system of orthography, the meanings of the words, etymology (African, Spanish, Portuguese,
English etc.) for some and usage (where necessary)
I would have to state my sources and include a report on how I gathered my data
and some of the problems I encountered. I think this exercise will be more fulfilling for me than an essay.
What do you think? Is it possible for me to do it.
If you agree to it I will take to you more about it, if not then I will just write an
essay.
MM LL
m#
sj
002–04
A Special case!
Hi Dr. LL,
I am in a very peculiar situation. The essay for S32A is due on Monday, and the
Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, in which I am doing a Linguistics major is sending a group of us to Guyana from Thursday of this week to
Tuesday of next week to do field research.
The problem is that I cannot hand in the essay before I leave and I will need about
two days after I return to submit it. I have done all the research for the essay already and I have planned my answer. I intend to write the essay while I am in Guyana and TYPE IT AS SOON AS i RETURN. I need two days because I type with
two fingers and I will need some time to do the usual formatting and the usual
special features that an essay of this type demands (italicising, ‘bolding’, quoting,
foot-noting, etc.)
The peculiar thing is that this letter is an explanation and a REQUEST for extra
time to submit my essay. However, by the time you read this e-mail and respond I
will already be in Guyana. Hence, it is like asking permission to take a cookie from
the jar after having stolen one.
I hope that you will understand my case, since I only had a few hours to plan for
this trip, really. I will see you in class next week Friday, that is if you do not kick
me out of your course.
Hasta que regrese yo!
MM
m#
sj
002–05
Re: Earlier e-mail re. “A special case”
Dear Dr. LL,
You can only imagine the mixed emotions with which I awaited your response to
my e-mail re my going to Guyana. Therefore, it was certainly ‘horriffying’ for me
to have opened your first e-mail message and to see the law laid down like that of
the Medes and Persians. I went to your office both yesterday as soon as I had arrived in Jamaica and had checked my e-mail, and I went there today also, but on
both occasions I found it locked. Hence, I still don’t know “Fate” lies, but I am still
typing the essay with utmost good “Faith”.
If you see this e-mail today, I hope you can call me at XXX-XXXX EXT 340 at
6:00pm, so that I can try and redeem myself, if I am redeemable. I do not have your
telephone number so I cannot call you. if you prefer you could e-mail me and set
a time for me to see you at your office.
I will try a little explanation. The trip was connected to my Caribbean Dialectology
course which I do in the Dept of Linguistics (I am also a Linguistics Major). Some
weeks ago, the lecturer, Dr. FF LL announced in class that the department would
be planning a trip to Guyana so that students could get first hand knowledge/experience of what we have been treading in the books on Caribbean Dialectology.
I decided that I was too swamped with work to go so i did not pursue the matter
and the issue of the trip never came up in class again.
On Tuesday evening of last week, the Secretary from the Linguistics Department
called me and asked me why I had not called to confirm my going on the trip. I
learnt later that Dr. LL had submitted a list of names of students who she recommended for the trip and my name was on it (I was not informed of this before).
The Secretary convinced me that the trip would be an invaluable one and managed
to lure me with the fact that I would only have to pay JA$5000 and everything else
would be taken care of.
I spent the entire Wednesday out of class trying to make all the initial and final arrangements for departure on Thursday (the next day). Those preparations
involved writing you to request an extension. I informed you that I had already
completed all the research and the planning of the essay and would write the essay
Appendix 177
in Guyana and type it as soon as I come back, begging for two days after my return
to facilitate my two-finger typing.
I realised that the trip seemed disorganised from this angle because the Linguistics
department here was not really in charge of the planning. It was actually planned
and executed by the St. Augustine Department of Linguistics The Dean of the
Faculty of Humanities, Dr. Ian Robertson), and Mona was asked to send some
students along.
You might wonder why I went on the trip. The reason is that I am trying to keep
my options open. I like both Spanish Literature and Linguistics and I am looking
forward to doing postgraduate studies in whichever one first presents an opportunity. The trip was an eye-opener, and could lay the foundation for graduate work
in Creole Linguistics.
I am still awaiting your verdict while typing the essay with fingers (and toes)crossed.
I’ll admit that if my essay will not be I would not want to do the exam since that
would mean that I could never get an “A” in the course and would heighten my
chance of getting a “B” or “C” since perfect grades are not given for essays. I would
prefer to fail due to absence from the exam than to receive a low grade in Golden
Age Literature because it has now become one of my major areas of interest. Not
to mention the fact that this would also eliminate me from the Spanish Major because of earlier complications.
Please accept my apologies for placing you in this spot (in deciding) but I will just
have to accept the consequences of my actions and try to reorder my life from
there.
By the way, could you remind me at the next class please that I owe you about $40
for transcript. You know they say that creditors have poor memories. Looking
forward (?) to hearing from you soon.
Yours sincerely,
MM
m#
sj
002–06
Letter (and Holiday Greetings)
Hi there,
I hope you are both okay. I am sure Dr. MM is surprised that I am sending the
same letter to him and someone else, and FF must be surprised that I am writing
her at all.
I just wanted to put you both on your guard. I will be applying to the University of
Cambridge next year and I need two persons who are familiar with my academic
work to write letters of reference for me. I know you are both busy marking exam
scripts now so I will not bother you with all the details. However, it might have
been good if you wrote the letters before you got to my exam script, I am bound to
get a better recommendation before they are marked.
I will write you again as soon as I get back on campus in January to inform you of
all the requirements. This is of course on the assumption that you are willing to do
it. Please tell me if you are willing to write the letters.
Thanks and enjoy all that the season has to offer. Wishing for you Happy Holidays.
MM (MM)
m#
sj
002–07
Sorry for not Keeping in Touch
Hi FF, I realised that I have not written you in such a loooong time, and I have
not heard from you either. How are things on your side? How is September 11th
affecting you (quite a worn out question by now, but September 11th seems to have
affected the entire world in some way or the other).
By now you should have realised that it’s my final semester at U.W.I. (THANK
GOD!!!) On Monday I am going to send off my application for postgraduate study
at the University of Cambridge. As a back-up, I have applied to U.W.I. also. Later
on this year I shall be applying to the University of Salamanca, in Spain (seems as
if I am making a full time job out of applying to universities). Plus, I will not tell
you the stress I am going through to apply for scholarships.
Oh, I promised that I would give you an update of my academic performance at
the end of each semester. last semester I did four courses, one of which is a yearlong course so the exam is at the end of the year and I will not get a grade for it
until then. The grades are as follows:
Introduction to Spanish-American Lit. A
Spanish Golden Age Theatre B+
Caribbean Dialectology B
I am expecting all of seven grades at the end of this semester.
Appendix 179
By the way, April 2–6 I ought to be going to the 8th International Conference for
Caribbean Women Writer’s and Scholars, to be held in Martinique. I will be presenting a paper entitled: “Literary Revolution and Decolonisation: The Value and
Impact of Louise Bennett’s Poetry”.
Anyway I have to go now.
Please say hi to MM and MM for me. I will write again soon (HOPEFULLY!)
MM
m#
sj
002–08
You Caused this Trouble on Youself
Hi Dr. LL,
I know you told me not to bother you, but I am just giving you ample time to think
about my request (NO RUSH!)
Do you remember the other day I asked you if the possibility existed for taking a
postcolonial approach to siglo de oro literature? (Actually, I didn’t say it in those
words. I asked if you thought it was worthwhile looking at the treatment of negroes/indians and the Indies in Golden Age literature.)
Well to your own detriment you answered yes there is, and gave set out more work
for yourself when you went on to say there was a ”work” which would be perfect
for such a study but I shouldn’t bother you to remember it.
Sorry, your statement aroused my curiosity and I am dying to know which work it
is. I am in no hurry though (or am I?), and you can take your time in remembering
and drop me a line as soon as you have the time.
By the way, I am disappointed and relieved at the same time that you are not marking an essay for me - it relieves me of the apprehension. Anyway, happy marking!
The essays are about your favourite topics: marriage, love, sex (placed in order of
importance).
Thanks in advance and bye for now.
MM
m#
sj
002–09
Absolutely fantastic work! (CONFIDENTIAL)
After reading the Three-Year Strategic Plan I just had to write to let you all know
how extremely impressed I am with the proposal. Not only is it thorough and realistic but also reflects a level of foresight, planning and teamwork that could only
have resulted from hours and hours of deliberation and discussion.
Great work guys! I feel so proud of the great work you have done to ensure quality
assurance and excellence is maintained at Preston Hall.
As some of you might know, some of those very same projects were on the agenda
of Diary and myself, but with all the determinaton we both had, our time and
energies were just not enough. So you can very well imagine my excitement at the
reality of them being initiated and eventually completed. When your term of office
is over you will realise, as both Diary and I, that your greatest sadness and fear will
be the unsurety as to whether there will be continuity and improvement of what
you worked so hard to achieve. And admittedly, we did not do as much in that area
to ensure that. Thank you for picking up where we fell short.
Please be assured of my 105% support in whatever way I can. Unfortunately, being
all the way in China makes it a little difficult and even here, the demands of this
language, my masters, numerous part time jobs and my daughter’s arrival in April,
leaves me very little free time. But this is something very close to my heart and so
I will try my very best.
Got to run now.
Keep up the good work!
always
FF LL LL
m#
sj
002–10
Absolutely fantastic work! (CONFIDENTIAL)
Hi FF,
I am happy that you responded so promptly to the e-mail I sent you with the
Three-Year Strategic (TYSP), and that your response was so favourable. However,
things are not all well in ”paradise”. I am on the brink of giving up. The truth is that
I put together the TYSP over the Christmas holidays, having been on last year’s
committee and knowing how we all feared that the things we started would not be
continued. I tabled the TYSP at the mid-year retreat we had in January and now it
is being circulated to as many Prestonites as possible for their in-put.
Appendix 181
I did say things are not all well (not what they seem). I am on the verge of giving
up, because it seems as if I am fighting a losing battle. I know the hopes and dreams
we had for the Hall last year and I have been trying my utmost best to sell the vision to the members of my committee but it seems as if some people just don’t
want to buy. Some members of the committe are just not approaching their tasks
with the same kind of professionalism and dedication as we did. We have had a few
successes, but on the whiole I feel as if we have been failing at more things.
I feel totally depressed because I don’t think that I have the same support system
that we formed for Diary last year, and I have to be coming up withmost of the
ideas, suggesting them to the members of the committee, remind them and then
probably do it for them. Can you imagine that FF has not yet had one meeting to
deal with the constitution, even though I brought it to his attention from Retreat
last year. He will be having a meeting on Sunday (which I think I had to con him
into. I told him that he must have a draft to present to the hall at Hall meeting on
Monday. Some of the problems I am experiencing is that some people do not take
their jobs seriously (I had to quarrel and get on bad with FF last semester before
she would start putting some initiative into her work); other people have hang-ups
and just don’t want to ask for advice and help (I told FF to speak to MM about
Preston’s Sports Day, so she could tell him where she failed last year and what he
should do n- Soccer never spoke to MM and Sports Day was a disaster. I wouldn’t
even speak about UWI Sports Day. I don’t know why they are afraid of people with
experience.
For Black History Week I suggested two added features: a Vigil on the Sunday
night and Traditional Games on the Monaday night, both of which I co-ordinated and which came off quite well (we got good reviews for both night and good
”VIBES”). I left the CEAC to plan the rest of the week - it turned ot that the weerk
ended on Monday night. Can you imagine my grief? And can you imagine how I
must feel with FF still there, seeing me run the Hall to a wreck.
I think it is just a bit more than I can manage . I am doing six courses, I am on the
Guild Council (and you know how that goes), and I am the Commonwealth Youth
Ambassador for Jamaica.
Anyway, some of the things in the TYSP, we have actually sarted and so I will not
think my year an entire waste but I am just disturbed that all this should be happening while I am leading. Dem gi mi baskit fi carry water!
By the way Mr. and Miss Preston was extremely good, so was Creole Day (we
joined with PEACE), and I think it is the best one I’ve seen in my three years. WE
are looking forward to a splendid Preston Week. I am hoping that the commitee
will allow me to leave office with dignity if not in style.
Bye for now and keep on enjoying yourself. And don’t eat any more frogs for God’s
sake!
MM ”MM” LL
m#
sj
002–11
STOP OVER
Hi MM,
MM here.
I will be attending a conference in April in Martinique and on my way there I will
have to stop over in ST. Lucia on April 2 (7:15PM) and leave April 3 (9:10AM). If
you live close to the airp[ort could I stay with you? If not, could you tell me which
hotel/guest house would be near enough to the airport and CHEAP enough for
me to stay at.
Bye for now!
MM
Jamaica
m#
sj
002–12
Paper on Brodber
Dear FF LL,
I am a student of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus studying
Spanish and Linguistics. This combination of subjects has led to an interest in the
interface between Linguistics and Literature; and how some (Caribbean) writers
use language, with emphasis on what variety they use.
I saw the title of your paper in the PMLA and it sounds quite interesting. I hope
you do not mind sending a copy of ”Erna Brodber, Spirit Voices, and Anthropological Authority” to me by e-mail.
By the way it is interesting that they are having a mini-conference on Erna Brodber
close to the end of this month her at UWI.
Appendix 183
Will you be here? If not I might be able to link you with some other persons who
are interested in Brodbers work also.
MM LL
m#
sj
002–13
Thanks for Sponsorship
Dear Mr. LL,
I am extremely grateful for your having donated money for me to pay my membership and conference registration fees to the Association of Womens Writers
and Scholars and then further providing a significant contribution towards the
other expenses I would incur at the conference.
Well the 8th International Womens Writers and Scholars Conference was a success
in my judgement and I learnt a lot and got much encouragement from the artists
and academics who attended. The highlight of my trip to Martinique though was
the presentation of my paper; ”Literary Revolution and Decolonisation: The Value
and Impact of Louise Bennett’s Poetry”. It was interesting to rub shoulders and
share with scholars from all over the Caribbean, Europe and North America and
I will be gearing up for the next conference to be held in the Dominican Republic
in 2004 (God’s willing!)
Again, I say many thanks and assure you that your contribution is well appreciated
and did go to good use since I left the conference with several contacts and several
ideas for future research.
Yours sincerely,
MM LL
m#
sj
002–14
Re: [caribbean-lit] new books on the Caribbean
Hi everyone,
I just wanted some feed back on this paper I am going to present at a conference. I
would be grateful if you read it and sent your comments to me by replying to this
message. Thanks much!
To view the paper just click on any of the links below:
http://www.XXX
or
http://www.XXX
MM
m#
sj
002–15
Apology!
Hi FF, Sorry that I did not get the Bible in Patois for you. I spoke with the Head of
Dept. and he told me that he would send the file to me as an attachment. That was
early last week and I still have not received it in my in-box as yet.
I hope this will not throw you off, but as soon as I get it I will send it to you. By the
way tomorrow I will be leaving to attend the conference in Martinique and I will
not be returning until Saturday, April 6.
See ya.
MM
m#
sj
002–16
ACWWS Conference
Hi Dr. LL, Well it is time already, and Thursday I will be presenting my paper at
the conference. I did manage to cut it down but still didn’t get to deal with everything I wanted to deal with. However, I know conference papers are not meant to
be all perfect (they are kind like wotk in progress, aren’t they?).
Anyway, I will write you again as soon as I get back from Martinique to tell you
how it went.
I am trying to complete my essay for Mr. LL which is due on Friday, so I can leave
it with MM to hand in for me.
Bye for now.
MM
m#
sj
002–17
Absence from Campus
Hello Everyone,
Appendix 185
Although all of you know already, I would just like to remind you, that I will not
be in the island from April 2–6, 2002.
I will be attending the 8th International Conference of Women’s Writers and
Scholars where I will be presenting a paper entitled ”Literary Revolution and Decolonisatio: The Value and Impact of Louise Bennett’s Poetry”.
I will resume my duties and classes on April 7th and 8th respectively.
Thanks for the support which you have given me whether directly or indirectly.
LL
m#
sj
002–18
CONGRATULATIONS
Hi FF,
How are you doing? My mother told me that you are going to get married in June
of this year. CONGRATULATIONS!
MM LL
m#
sj
002–19
Thanks to You
Hello everyone, I am sending this email to all the persons who have contributed
positively to my undergraduate life/experience in someway or the other. Thanks
to all those who gave me encouragement and constructive criticism over the years,
and to all who made me feel as if I was bright even though I knew better.
Some of you might have known that I had applied to the University of Cambridge
to do an MPhil in European Literature, but then changed my mind because I could
not afford it, and doubted that I would get a scholarship. Well, I was very recently
informed that I received one of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Tate & Lyle
Scholarships to do the MPhil at Cambridge.
The programme begins in October, and I am currently making all the necessary
preparations to leave for Cambridge in early October.
Once again I wish to thank you all for your participation in my overall development and pray for your blessings as I go to tackle Cambridge.
MM LL
m#
sj
002–20
Long Time.... but here it is!
Greetings and felicitations to one and all!
Mi know, unno no need to mention that mi no write so long that unno think se mi
wen dead, but I am still here, inna de struggle.
Well the first time I wrote, and that was the last too for a lot of unno, I made reference to my Russian friend (neighbour) and then everybody write me to ask me
how was my Russian. Well just to let you know RUSSIAN is a hard TONGUE to
take on ;-). And me too ole fi tek on RUSSIAN at this stage. Well barring that the
Russian girl (FF) and I went out several times, no is not what you thinking!!!! First
we went to listen to a concerto for violin cello and piano (sorry fi all those who
don’t know what that mean) and also to the performance of the University Chorus
(of which she is a member) and the orchestra. In the Christmas I went to a concert they were having in London at this famous concert hall, the place big, world
without end. But, me decide seh mi haffi live it up while me inna England an join
’society’ people and activity :-D.
Well, part of the holiday break I spent in London with my brother, but he left me
with his latest baby-mother, after three days and went back to Ja for Christmas. So
mi soend lickkle more time deh and then go to Wales to spend Christmas with this
nice white family I know there. You could just imagine: turkey, potatoes, Christmas pudding, ham... I mean HAMmering music from the sond system... hehehe!!
Ah still watching my weigth though and when I returned to Cambridge I went
jogging several mornings. Well I have to keep fit for all the admirers and plus I
planning to go tek Salsa and ballroom dancing lessons! lol. Got back my first grade
from the Cambridge people and frankly me not too pleased, but if a go talk to dem,
dem nah go understand because a some ’good’ Jamaican wud mi a go tell them.
The work hard bad and I have to battle with the writings of some people who out fi
mad mi with things like: ”To recall the Subject, is to transcend both time and space
and occupy the margins of spatiotemporal reality, while turning the theory in,
back on itself to form the trajectory from which the ontological and epistomological instantiations of the ancestral reverberations are hurled.” SOMEBODY TALK
TO DEM FI MI. For they seem to be speaking not in the tongues of men but of
angels! But things could be worse!
Me an de snow ting having problem though. Because some place inna England no
see no snow fi bout twenty years, an me not too excited bout seeing it either. And
haing never seen the white stuff before, you could forgive me when me see frost
and think is snow. Is a good thing me never say it nobody because dem woulda
Appendix 187
laugh after mi. Ah planning to go to Scotland go tour and probably some other
place this year!
Mi reading Gleaner and Observer everyday pan the internet an mi a beg all a unno
wah live inna Jamaica duh, nuh mash it up before mi done! Cause if unno mash it
up and want left come a Englan unno a go need visa, an unno cyan run go a Bermuda either! What a life! Everybody tek set pan Jamaica!
Unno expect mi fi seh mi miss unno, so.... mi miss unno and the lickkle time soon
done. See it deh, a January aready and January soon done. Fi all a who know people who know people who know mi, but nuh have access to technology mi a beg
unno hail up who unno fi hail up and big up who unno fi big up!
Walk good an tek care a unno self!
MM!
m#
sj
003–01
Dear FF,
It is good that you sent this mail to both my accounts as i am not able to access
yahoo right now.
You are quite precise in all the points you made so i guess we have been communicating well. Ok. Today i believe i can answer all those quetions not yet answered.
The flight is now CONFIRMED, I will outline the itinerary below. We were able to
get equipment here so that too is out of the way.
The flight.
Tuesday nov 06, 2001 (copa airlines)
kingston-Panama Flt:cm418
departure @ 2.40pm arrive panama 4.35
Panama-Bogota Flt:cm101 Departure @7.25pm
arrive in Bogota @8.40pm(terminal 1)
Wednesday nov 07, 2001(avianca)
Bogota-San andres Flt Av9776
departure @ 10.00am
arrival @ San Andres@ 12.05pm
Stay is three months.
Depart San Andres on mondayb February 02, 2002 @ 12.35pm.
m#
sj
003–02
Dear MM,
How are you doing. I pray that you are well. How is your eye? Did you get it looked
at?
I am not doing too badly. My grant finally got approved for my fieldwork in San
Andres and Providence. I should be leaving within a week or two as it is expected
that the funds will be released by then. i will not speak of the heartaches i had to
finally get to this stage. Nontheless, while i am having nightmares of what will
come of my field work in the islands, I am also concerned that i will not be able to
complete your assignment for the due deadline (January 31, 2002) as i will still be
conducting fieldwork at this time. As things are right now, i should be spending
three months doing fieldwork between san Andres and Providencia. Based on my
time of departure, i am not scheduled to return before february 2002.
I am thinking that i will need to be focussed on my fieldwork studies during this
time and it might not be possible for me to work on your assignment during this
period. I will however be taking materials from your studies along with me as i intend to utilise! the background that you presented to us in writing my thesis. Based
on this, i will still be in touch with what were taught in your course. I intend to
write your paper as soon as i return from my fieldwork. i am hoping that i will be
able to get it to you for marking by the latest mid march. I am taking a few articles
with me and will decide on the one i will be critiquing for the course work. i would
have loved to be able to complete and send my assignment to you even before my
field work but it has not been possible given the magnitude of things i have had
to be doing in preparation for my little trip and the problems i have been having
with these.
Please write and let me know how possible it is for you to grant me an extension.
I hope it will not be a problem. By the way, have you by now finished marking our
exam papers and at liberty to speak of our performance?
I hope that all is well with you. Please respond soon. hoping to hear from you.
Best wishes,
Appendix 189
FF LL.
m#
sj
003–03
Dear FF,
How are you? as you might have guessed, we have again been having problems
with our internet connection. I have been trying to send you mail and i just keep
on losing them. i am now typing this in notepad first before i paste it into my
email. You might also notice that i am using a different email account because
yahoo is down right now. I am not sure i will be able to attach anything as i have
not been able to do this either.
i was looking again at the comments you sent to me on the research proposal i sent
to you. The limitations of my study have primarily to do with the type of degree
that i am working towards and the time i will have there to collect data.
as such, at present, i must keep my focuss somewhat narrow. I wish i could do
more but i have been cautioned against this.
In terms of developing a chronogram of activities, i have not gotten this far and
was hoping that you would somehow be able to assist me ! in this regard and with
my choice of informants.
It is somewhat awkward to say but i am really new to this field in terms of fieldwork. Being aware of my shortcomings in this regard i have spoken not only with
my supervisor but with Professor LL. Everyone that i have spoken with so far is
just convinced that i will somehopw learn to swim once i am in the water since
none of them were ever formally introduced to this area but managed pretty well
nontheless. I intend, however to work out in some way or other, with your help of
course, how i will identify persons to be included in the study. I suspect that if time
and resourses allow, i will try to expand my sample beyond thirty.
In terms of your suggestions of futher readings, i have read Dittman’s “El criollo
Sanandresano...” the others i have not encountered. Do you have copies of these? I
suspect that in terms of my inclusion of Providence in the study, i will have to not
only describe the varieties present in the two! islands but supply sociohistorical
explanations regarding their developments. The dates i have presented are based
on my reading so far. Definitely my knowledge of the history of these island happens to be most limited but i intend to correct this as soon as i am in the island and
have more access to these readings.
In terms of my travel, things seem to be moving smoothly. I should know for sure
if i am leaving on the 6th of november. I am really sorry that you are not going
to be there when i get there but it cannot be helped so i must survivbe until you
return. I hope that you will enjoy your trip as well and be back in good health.
I will let you know as soon as possible when travel arrangements are finalised so
you can make reservations for me in Bogota. Chances are that if i do not travel on
tuesday, i will be off on the saturday which will be the next flight.
I will keep in touch until then.
All the best.
FF
m#
sj
003–04
–
Hi MM,
How are you doin? nice to hear from you again. Right now i have a lot of things on
my mind and my work has kind of slowed down. One of the things i am thinking
about though is that i might have to come back to Columbia sooner than i had
planned or am prepared for. I think i might need to collect more data but this time
i will have to pay for everthing myself. In order to come i would need to at least
buy a laptop computer and this is going to cost at least $2000(us) and i will need
another $2000 for plane fare and spending money. I dont know where it will come
from but i feel i will be coming. By christmas i should know. The only good thing
about it is that i have good friends like you there and that is incentive for coming.
I reallly look forward to seeing you again. I can pay my fare to come but i need to
think of the other things as well.
I have been thinking about something else as well, you have not told me what happenned between you and (what’s her name?) i cant understand why she should
be so upset with you and for no reason. Tell me what is going on. it seems to be
serious this time.
Well, i must go back to see if i can focusss on some work now. It is really difficult
and i have so many deadlines to meet. I will do it though. I know i will. I must.
Thanks for your love and spirit sweety. Keep sweet... Thanx 4 d info as well. I will
keep in touch. How about d hot mail messenger? you cant get on?
Appendix 191
m#
sj
003–05
Not yet.
Dear FF,
As yet, my flight is not yet confirmed as i am still waiting for the finance department to pay for the ticket and confirm the flight. I am told that this should be done
by friday november 02 but today is thursday and i have not heard any thing. I note
that friday is but a day before your own departure and i am only hoping that it
will not be impossible for you to arrange for me to stay in Bogota even at this late
stage. I know it has been difficult for you guys making preparations fdor me with
all these delays and i apologise. I will be on their tyails tomorrow to try to make
sure that the flight ids confirmed and then send an email to you by tomorrow aftrernoon. If i get any information regarding this before tomorrow i will send you
another mail. I will send you the details of the flight when it is confirmed.
In terms of my research, it is for the award of a postgraduate degree (MPhil). I
am going to send you another copy of my research proposal. You will notice that
it is not much different from the first one i sent to you as not many changes have
been made. Truth is that this is still preliminary and can develop or change at any
time depending on my findings. Here, we are not stuck with a research title until,
i believe, three months before the due date of submission. Thus, i am Flexible. The
most iportant thing while i am there will be to try to collect a corpus. Since i have
an interest in the passive aspect and the debates that have been going on in this
area, it is important for me to make sure that i have samples of these.
In terms of lodgings, It will be fine for me to stay in a hotel upon my arrival... Thank
you for making so many options available to me. This other apartment you speak
of in the nothend, what is the cost of this? Is it close by to a lot of natives where i
could collect data? will i get a chance to see both these places while you are away
and make a decision or will i wait until you return? I think i could perhaps stay in
a hotel for the first week of my arrival or maybe until you return. The only problem
with this is that although the hotel appears to be cheap, the house is cheaper and i
will need to save from my daily stipend for food and accommodation to fund my
travel to Providencia and this is something that i really want to do. I am not a massively fussy person I just need to know that where i will be staying is safe.
FF, you have been extremely helpful and accommodating and i really appreciate
it. The only thing left right now is for my flight to be confirmed and i guess you
have done all that you could have done within your power already. I dont know
yet, but just in case, my flight is not confirmed by tomorrow, could you arrange
for me to email the information to someone else who could make arrangements
for my overnight in Bogota if the flight is confirmed for tuesday? If the flight is not
confirmed for tuesday this might not be necessary as there might be connecting
flights for saturday.
I wish you all the best.
FF.
m#
sj
003–06
Dear FF,
How are you? It has been a while since i have written to you since my initial letter
about my upcoming fieldwork in San Andres and providence. Since then i have
made strides though it took a long while. At present, My grant for travel and research has been approved and i am now in the last stages of preparing to travel. I
tried to send you a copy of my research proposal in my last mail but i am not sure
you received it. As you might have guessed, communication has been difficult as
we have been having problems with our internet connections and i i guess that
you have not been able to check your mails regularly. In any case, I am hoping...
fervently hoping that you get this mail soon. Here is the situation, I am presently
in Jamaica but have made arrangements to travel on november 6, 2001 (next tuesday).
arrangemants have already been made for me in Sanandres in terms of accommodation and contacts. Right now, i have one main concern and this is visiting
Providencia to collect data. So far i have not made any arrangements in terms
of fieldwork here, contacts or accommodation. Actually, you have been my sole
contact here.It does not help that the grant that i received does not cover a trip to
Providence. Due to this, i will need to try save from the subsistence i am given to
pay for a flight to providencia. Even if i am able to do this, i do not think i will be
able to pay for accommodation while i am in Providencia. You had mentioned in
your last mail that while you are in Providence you do not pay rent and i may be
able to to stay with you there under the same conditions. At the time, i had thought
that this would not have been a necessity but it appears now that the only way i
will be able to visit Providencia is if i were still able to take you up on the offer if it
is still possible. I do not know what the situation is like with you in terms of your
present location but i am hoping that you are in Providence and still in a position
to assist. I will be spending a totyal of three months doing fieldwork between the
two islands. Since i will be going to Sanandres first, i am hoiping that we can make
plans for Providence while i am in san andres and move on from there even if i do
Appendix 193
not hear from you before i leave Jamaica. In the meantime, i will need you to find
out the cost of a return flight from San andres to Providence so i know the limitations of my budget.
I also need your comments and suggestions on my reasearch proposal so i am
again sending you a copy in case you did not receive the last one. I have not been
able to do much historical background reading on the Islands due to the availability of reading materials in this area so i am hoping that i will have more access to
these once i am in the islands.
hoping to see you soon and to hear from you.
best wishes,
FF LL.
m#
sj
003–07
Dear MM,
How are you my friend. I am home in Jamaica as you might have guessed and yes i
miss you guys a lot. you were really a good freiend to me and i will not forget you.
thank you for all that you did and were for me.
Right now since i have been back i have not had a moment’s rest, i have alot of
things on my mind and a lot of papers to write and present and all in a limited
time. This is one of the reasons i did not get to write before, i sent a couple of hellos
for you though. I dont know when Exactly i will get a chance to return but i will
definitely come back once life continues.
San andres and Providence from now on are my second homes. I never thought i
would miss these places so much!
Well, i need your help again MM. First of all, i need to get the Email address for
the Christian university and if possible that of UU LL. also remind the director to
write to my Head of department (i already gave him the email address). Tell him
he is awaiting the email. Here is the situation, LL is writing this book on the History of San Andres and Providence. I do not remember the name of the book but
it seems very important fo my study. I think it is already in Spanish and he is working on the english version First if all, could you find out the title of the book for me
and also how we could order and pay for a copy? talk to LL and the Director. My
Department would like to purchase a copy of the book.
Secondly, I have a photocopy of sections of a book i made in Bogota; The title is: La
Historia del poblamiento del Archipielago de San Andres, Vieja Providencia y Santa Catalina. It is bilingual in Spanish and English and written by Loraine Vollmer
(1997 ediciones archipielago San andres Isla.) I dont know if this is a magazine or
what as i did not do the photocopies my self. Could you check in your library or in
banco de la republica if you can find it for me? i need to get the list of references at
the end of the article. after you have found the book could you photocopy the list
of references and give it to FF for me please? i will have to decide what to do after
that. Mail through the post office takes too much time so maybe i will have to ask
Julia to type out the references bit by bit and send them by email to me.
MM, I know that you are a very busy man but i am taking the liberty to assume
that you can make some more time for me as you did when i was there. I would
really appreciate your help. please see what you can do for me. The problem that
we face here is that there is limited reading matereials on your island and we need
to see what we can access. my university is willing to send and purchase what they
can as these are vital to my study.
Well, enough of that. How are you doing? Is everything ok? I guess you are still
working on your thesis.
How is that going? I wish you all the best with that. I hope that we can keep in
touch and continue to be friends even though we are 480km apart. please take care
of yourself, i am always thinking of you and what a blessing it was to have met you.
Keep sweet and i wish you all the great things that life has to offer.
I will try and call you one of these days but it will be late in the night like 11.00
when i am almost certain you are home. You can call me too as i now realise it is
cheaper to call from there. Give me a call please. My numbers are :1–876–799–
3180 (this is my cell phone and you can call me here anytime and i mean any time.)
If you cant get me here, call me at home: what ever you do, let us keep in touch. i
know good people when i meet them and you are one of those. i never want to lose
your friendship.
Take care and may God Bless you plenty. i hope you will come to Jamaica soon so
i can show you the hospitality you showed me.
Peace and Love,
FF.
m#
sj
003–08
Thank you.
Appendix 195
Dear Mrs LL, How are you doing? I have been back in Jamaica for the past three
weeks at least. I wanted to write and say thanks for the help that you gave me in
organising the the trip to the islands. As far as i know right now, it was successful
and i will be spending the next year at least writing my thesis. I collected quite a bit
of data but at this stage i wish i had collected more. Overall it was a very rewarding
and fulfilling experience both personally and academically.
I have been busy since i got back writing reports and catching up with my course
works and overall settling in, this is one main reason i did not get a chance to write
to you before. I hope that i will be able to sit and talk with you about my experience
at a time that is convenient to both of us.
Thanks again and all the best.
FF
m#
sj
003–09
Re: Thank you.
FF, There is something I’d like to dicuss with you. Please give me a call 7024721.
Thanks, FF
m#
sj
003–10
How yu do.
A wah a gwan? mi know seh yu nuh have no body over deh a chat patios, so just fi
mek sure seh when yu come back a ja yu still know how fi dwit mi agi yu likkle.
anyway I just want to say hi and that i hope that you are doing well in your new
coyntry. MM called last night and said that MM was in the hospital. anyway i’m
sure he told you about it. I saw MM the other day, I gave him your email address.
he said that you should send your phone number so that he can call.
everybody alright, MM a go a school, a think it will be for a month because him
suppose to go weh pon farm - work. Anyway tek care till more time.
UU
m#
sj
003–11
You Agen!!
Hey Babes,
I bet you would not know just how wonderful it is to be in a foreign country and
hear from you your frenz at home. Once more you have brought me joy my friend.
Like today, i am feeling really lonely and somewhat sad. I was really glad to receive
your letter.
Yeah man, i am ok and i have met some wonderful people, dem sey wi a family,
dem nat evn waan mi fi kom bak a Jamaica. Sey mi cudda stay an mi wouldnt even
haffi work... u Know how people stay wen dem all excited eh. I am here, time is
going rather quickly and before you blink i will be back in Jamaica. thing is, i need
to make sure i get as much as possible done in the time i have left without going
crazy. Well, I know that God is with me and he will see me thru. I sleep well at
nights, me alone in a house near the beach. The House is beautiful and I DO MISS
MY BF BUT I REST WELL. Every one wants me to spend christmas with them
here but there is no where like home. I reallly miss home but i will just have to wait
until Febraury.
Yes mi fren. Nice, really nice to hear from you.
kEEP ME UP TO DATE AND KEEP IN TOUCH.
Same old FF.
Peace,
m#
sj
003–12
Re: You Agen!!
Well sweets..
It is happy to know that you are ok. I am here in Jamaica enjoying our weather at
this time of the year. you know it is pretty cold at nights at this time of year. Evrything is cool with, at least for now.
Glad to hear from you.. and if there is anything I can do for you please let me
know... bye sweetie!
MM... seh dat!
m#
sj
004–01
Allright... allright ppl
I appologize.. It doesn’t work
Appendix 197
I mean, the first time you decide to try one stupid chain letter and forward it to
eleven whole a ppl, It don’t work!!!
I give up khhh!!!
Layter y’all...
And remember.. I hold each one of you dearly in my heart as though you were one
of my own offspring.
Have a God Blessed Day
Bye
m#
sj
004–02
Mi nah lie when mi seh dah site yah tough man Mi really did enjoy di spectrum
2001 Pictures escpecially since mi neva get fi go dis year due to circumstances beyond my control Cause Beenie Man is my DJ fi Life an mi nuh si di video yet.....
Nuff respec’ to di Wolmer’s yute dem pon di site, Mi did go school wid couple a
dem yute deh an seeing dem jus bring back memories.
One ting dough... di only draw back mi find wid di site is dat di chat room nuh up
yet.. It woulda attract nuff more people to di site
Ne way continue fi hold down di fort an keep tings kool
One Love
Lush
m#
sj
004–03
Top Shotta Feedback
Yes king blessed..... so you are another wolmerian..... can u remind me your name
???
O.K. i remove the chat room and took it to another site because nobody was logging on to it...... they only listen to the mix cd’s and thats it....
Respect !!!
m#
sj
005–01
Enh-huh!
FF yuh nuh have nuttin’ betta fi do? Is alright though I didn’t bother to send your
message to anybody - so funny. But I did fall for a similar trick someone else
played. Later.
FF.
m#
sj
005–02
Public Relations Committee
Hello Prospective teammate, With the next semester, The University Dramatic
Arts Society will find itself with quite a lot of work, not only during rehearsals for
our productions, but also behind the scenes. Having such said, we will be forming
a set of teams to handle specific areas of production. The Public Relations Officers
are interested in having you join our team. We intend to publicize every event to
the fullest, as time progresses the exact details of our tasks will be more defined.
Please bear in mind that the P.R. team will only a limited number of dedicated
persons.
Your questions are welcomed and we look forward to your response.
FF-FF LL
UDAS P.R.O.
m#
sj
005–03
–
Hi D,
Take a deep breathe. See u won’t explode. The pictures u sent me were great, I really loved that play, I watched it on T.V again last week. I think we really did a good
job especially sweet bullybottom ‘cause MM is better than the actor I watched on
T.V.
‘Nywayz, MY EXAMS ARE NEXT WEEK AND I DON’T KNOW CRAP and this
time it’s not mny fault or at least I refuse to believe it is.
I went to the Hilton last weekend the music was great and everything, next time I’ll
probably go back in the day or somethin’ to play miniature golf, isn’t that cool.
Appendix 199
After I finish cramming 4 my exams, I’ll start work. I am totally frustrated about
those damn exams but that’s a long story. Did I mention I loved the pictures?
FF.
m#
sj
006–01
How should I have respan’?
Hey
I know this installment is long overdue, but see wid me, for I have, yet again, succumbed to another bout of hog flu dat I am still trying to shake off. The damn flu
put mi out of commission for nearly a whole two weeks, for is like it come wid a
vengance, being as how, all de while it come mi play dandy shandy wid it & ‘site’ it.
Dis time it tek a piece a aim & wham mi right dung under my goozoompeng (otherwise known as my maw which happens to be adjacent to my craw). Anyways, I
did made sure to walk wid good Jamaican Bay Rum to sap wid in these perilous
times, so mi rubbing up & put on nuff warm clothes to try & sweat it out of my
systrim. Oh by the way, I spoke wid Craig down in Lundun & his take on the matter is that is God send de flu, like how him did sen’ de plague down to Hegyp’, like
a test, for I must see eft Madame FF is worth her salt in broth. For any how she
cyaan draw likkle chicken soup & look bout! mi when time de tempetuous storm
raise its ugly head, den no ring cyaan gi. I am tending to agree wid this erudite
perspective.
Anyways brethren, that is not the main purpose of this treatise in the series from
Leeds. Let me begin, as I always do, to remind the reader that I, by any standard,
am a well brought up individual, from a decent home, with loving parents, siblings, friends, well wishers and dogs. And choo last ‘ear whilst I was ere in Leeds, I
might not have displayed what many might have described as civilized behaviour
(or to be more accurate having found myself in many a contentious situation) I
have come back to Leeds this ‘ear wid a new least on life. I decide in my mind das
I am gwine to be on my best behaviour, and even when time I feel to tell de people
dem up yah two R*!@@#$$, I would contain myself and rise above de quagmire.
Hard as it is at times, I do believe that I have remained true to my promise thus
far. But is choo de whole a unnu never know how close mi come to wil’ up one
Hindian gyal edda day who come bright harself & pass! har place wid mi!
Me was walking on de road minding my own business & knowing my God when
mi see dese two Indian girls approaching me in de uncoming direction. One of
dem wrap up wrap up in traditional Indian wear, wid de big red lipstick dot eento
har forehead & de other one she hot like Britney Spears... worlds apart if you ask
me. Now when we three were both in earshot of each other, de one who wrap up
eento de cloth weh come een like one long piece a doilie weh mi granny used to
drape over setee, she look mi up & down & clutch on to har fren hand & in a voice
that could neither hide nor mask her utter disdain, said YUK!!!!!!
Now sometime yuh have to tek serious ting mek laugh, for mi never really know
how to respan to dat one. For in all my 23 years of life, I never come cross dat yet.
YUK???? YUK??? Well, in the levelest head I could muster, I slowly leaned over,
placing my head in their direct path & said to the cocoon, “don’t worry my dear,
intelligence is a disease you will never catch” and continued on my merry way.
I’ve never professed to be an Adonis (although I am), nor have I ever professed to
be God’s gift to good looks (although I am). These things don’t mel me, they are
not madding me. But tell mi, is so tree root growing in mi face? Do I really have
a face that only a mother could love? Dat Indian girl better count har lucky stars I
never light up har life & sing sweet songs unto har ears. For any how she did mek
me start, I ooda did trace she & har family tree. Because I did ready fi tell har how
she fi tek har likkle indentured, curry teeth, coolie, third generation self & kir right
out, for she who a pay rent fi de likkle one room Council House fi she & har twelve
sister & bredda & de rest of de Rampoorasighn clan, who keep on breeding as if
dem in competition wid jack rabbit, doan have de minimum qualification fi talk
to me.
Anyways, I didn’t speak my mind. I bite my tongue. But as is per usual, I use this
medium to vent my frustrations. As de song writer says what more do you want
me to do? Friends, pray me up as I press along.
MM
m#
sj
008–01
Hello FF,
it is true we have not contacted each other for some time now. I have been working
on my project (thermometer) for days, it has been a frustrating. Sometimes I go to
my bed at 7 a.m. and wake back up around 1 in the afternoon and then I am back
on it again. I have missed many classes because of it.
Anyway I will finish over the weekend and make the big final push toward exam.
Enough of that now. I miss you too also and I am glad that the semester will soon
be over. I am still not sure about the dates still, but I will try to share the time as
best as I can if you know what I mean.
Appendix 201
Anyway I will contact you again very soon, I have to get back to work now.
Baby Love mi soon come home.
Love MM
m#
sj
008–02
Hiiiiiiiiiiiiii Baby
Hi MM,
What’s up? It is a long time I have not heard from you. I thought you would have
called me back before I left home. I tried calling you back, but as usual I did not get
through. I tried calling you on the Sunday, I left the Monday night.
I hope everything is alright with you. I hope you still miss me. Do you? That would
be a very interesting answer, but I will let that go by. How is school work? You must
be under a lot of exam pressure now. With the semester winding down and all the
pressure is getting more and more intense. I even doubt that you will get this email
before you come home. Well you said that you will not be coming immediately
after the semester ends, but try to let me know when. If possible, I might get to
see you in Kingston. But you have to let me know so I can ensure my boarding
and also tell Mom when to come for me. Well it sounds like you are going out and
all, that is nice. Well, I have not been able to go out, like you number one ,money,
number two, time, number three, company. But I am planning to go see the movies probably next Saturday night by Sovereign. I do not know which one yet.
You know your Mom called me when I was down, you know, just to find out if I am
alright. I thought that was really nice. I called her also before I left for Kingston.
Anyway babes, I miss you, but I am not really stressing because I know it is less
than six weeks left for the semester to be over. Yeah how nice, I only hope boredom
does not kill me to death, you know how I get bored easily.
Tek care and wirte soon, seen
Love, your one and only (I hope)
FF
m#
sj
009–01
Coulld be better
Yes FF, I am ok, but i am concerned still about a couple of courses. Right now i
am doing the only IR course i haVE left, GT36M. The Econ courses are somewhat
challenging, but with God’s help I will make it.
I will have to go back in the summer, but I will have to decide whether to stress out
the summer or just do 2 summer and leave one for next semester. I am glad that
you are settling in. Still looking to go to Canada? By the way FF LL was here and
she wrote a lenghty mail, detailing her rounds. I did not know though till i got the
mail; by then she had left.
Will keep in touch.
lov,
MM.
m#
sj
009–02
My Spring Break
Hi I am back in Kure now. My vacation is officially over now, unfortunately I had
a great time. Canada was cold, Tokyo was rainy but Negril, Cuba, and Kingston
were stinking hot. I loved it.
It was nice seeing my family and friends... it was just the boost I needed. And boy
did I need to eat some Jamaican food.
My Australian friend FF really enjoyed her first (and hopefully not last) trip to the
Caribbean.
For the most part teh travelling wasnt bad but it was filled with numerous ‘near
misses’. I took 13 different flights and stayed in 2 five star hotels.
It all started when I almost missed my flight from Tokyo to Vancouver. The flight
was at 7pm and we arrived at the Check-In counter at 6:45pm. Thank GOD the
flight was delayed. Due to that delayed flight we were late for our connecting flight
from Vancouver to Toronto. I was literally the last person to board that flight, the
door closed behind me. The night we stayed in Toronto with my friend FF was
nice. She cooked us a lovely Vegetarian pasta dinner and she gave us the cutest
teddy bear souvieners I have ever seen. (thanks FF).
The next morning we got up early to arrive for our 10am flight to Kingston. The
was fortunately an incident free flight. We arrive in Kingston as scheduled (actually the flight was early). My bestest friend in the whole wide world (FF) picked us
Appendix 203
up at the airport. The first thing i did was head to my daddy’s office to pay for my
Negril and Cuba trip and surprise my father. You should have seen his face.
I went home after that and called up some of my friends, surprised my mother and
a few more people. The next day Vivienne and I were going to take the country bus
to Negril but my father got us plane tickets instead (thanks daddy). So we flew to
Negril with a flight full of super models going to do some photo shoot (as if I wasnt
feeling fat enough). The flight from Mobay to Negril was in a very very small plane
and it was very very bumpy but it was better than the bus so we never complained.
When we arrived at Negril airport mi neva did see mi bag, mi almost dead.... but
it did come pan one earlier flight.... Thank GOD again!
We stayed at Couples Swept Away from Friday to Monday..... it was great! I exercised every morning, had a massage, and visited the Salon, had a dinner at a
gourmet restaurant and lazied around on the beach, FF layed on the beach and
went diving (which she absolutely enjoyed). Oh and I made friends with MM LL
(the owner of the hotel). My friend MM came to visit me there on Saturday. He
took us into the city so that FF could see a little of Negril. That night FF and I went
to Margaritaville (dont know how to spell it, sorry), dat did flop. It did jus full a
lickle pickney acting like a bunch of idiots. But I did get to meet the sexy boy name
Woody that won the best male contest.
On Monday we flew to Havana Cuba but not before we drove on the very bad road
between Negril and Mobay airport. FF loved it cause she could see some school
children and the sea and mountains and flowers.... etc... you know the things we
locals take for granted. The flight to Cuba was nice and incident free. We stayed in
a very very big room with the best view of Havana at the Havana Libre, nice, very
nice! On Tuesday we went on a historical tour of Havana city, and we went to the
Coppelia for ice cream. This is important cause the local people line up for miles
and many hours to get this very famous ice cream but we payed with US$ so there
was no line for us. Wed. I stayed in the hotel by the pool all day and FF went to tour
Havana by herself (she enjoys doing these things by herself thats why). Anywayz
when she returned I was nice and black again and she was in love with Havana. We
went o dinner at a very horrible Chinese restaurant and later on in the night we say
a Cabarre Show. It was Ok.
Oh Thursday I went back to Kingston and FF stayed in Cuba and took a bus to
Trinidad (yes dem have somewhere name so). Of course coming back my flight
from Cuba to Mobay was held up cause of some late people and some people who
were trying to smuggle somethings on board and my flight from Mobay to Kingston was delayed by 2 hours so instead of arriving at 5pm I arrived at 8pm.
On Friday i went to UWI (after UU stood me up for lunch) and spent the afternoon with FF. In the night I went out to dinner and Mass Camp with UU (thanks
for making it up). On Saturday i went to MM’s step class, the movies with Uncle
MM, UU and FF then we all went to one of Dance Society’s best shows ever! On
Sunday I went to Church with MM and MM, the hair dresser with FF and golf
with my brother, Uncle MM and MM. Then i went to eat ice cream with Sam
and Greg. Monday I visited FF, went to the Gym and picked up FF from the airport
and went to watch a movie at Soverign. Tuesday FF and I went to the Salon, took
the bus from New Kingston to Half way tree, went shopping, I showed her UWI
campus, and bought chinese dinner. Later that night we went to listen to Calibe
perform. She was great! Wednesday we left Jamaica
But my adventure is not yet over as it seems I have left my key in the hotel room I
stayed in Tokyo last night. So now I have no way of getting into my house!
I will let you know what happens tomorrow as the saga continues.
m#
sj
009–03
REQUEST
Hi FF,
It was wonderful reading “The Adventures of FF LL” Keep it up!! Anyhow it seems
some members of our batch of IR students have been very busy. FF LL (from the
France delegation) flew in 3 sundays ago, organized her transcripts and then flew
out the monday afternoon. Its called “La Vida Loca”
Listen up. A fellow student, from Germany, is doing post graduate work on Jamaican Language and is interested in analysing e-mails between jamaicans. Would it
be ok to forward yours to him. Please let me know ok? All the best. I hope you find
your keys
m#
sj
009–04
what a gwaan
Hey FF, What is happening to you? I sense (from the e-mails) that you are not
at the Bank anymore. You can still email me yu know!! me no waan look like me
a faas ina yu business, so yu can e-mail me. Where are you now? What exactly is
happening?
Appendix 205
m#
sj
009–05
Re: what a gwaan
Hi MM
i am not at bank i am in atlanta presently will tell you more, but i am relocating.
lov FF
m#
sj
009–06
Hi MM
As mentioned before i left the bank, i was really getting sick of New York cause it is
difficult to find a nice place to live and most parts looks like dump to me. So I have
a friend in Atlanta who keep telling me to come so i send my resume to her and she
got some really good offer for me here so i packed up and here i am (in Atlanta).
So i dropped off FF in canada on saturday and am now in Atlanta. I now regret that
i did not take up my friends invitation the first time i came to the U.S. and come
here. The place almost reminds me of Canada but looks even better!!!!
My friends house looks great, the real dream house one sees in magazines. My
bedroom is the size of both of your bedrooms at home, the place is HUGE and
looks great. Anyway enough of my ramblins, i on the net now checking out jobs
that also lined up interview for this week. The prospects are good am sure.
My problem though is that i was trying to assit MM with a job in New York, he
should be going there this week or next week, but i cant reach my contact that i
had there. MM was so good to me with his assitance and keeping me posted witht
he couse at UWI that i really wanted to help him.
Anyway will keep you posted, how is your exams coming though.
bye for now, love FF
m#
sj
010–01
YOUR ABANDONED SISTER
I THINK U DESERVE THE BIGGEST TRACING EVER IN YOUR LIFE TIME.
WHY U NUH CALL MI. WHAT HAPPEN U DASH MI WHEY. WELL UR PUNISHMENT IS THAT U WILL NOT BE RECEIVING ANY EASTER BUN THIS
YEAR. By the way Easter Monday is my birthday I at least deserve a card. How
are things over there. Life could not be so hard that I cannot even get a phone call.
Anyways I have something to tell u but u have to call me to hear it. Hail up FF for
me and hail up u mother and the ahhhhhhhhhhh the police guy (can’t remember
his name right now (ur stepfather).
Love
FF
m#
sj
010–02
Re: YOUR ABANDONED SISTER
Hey FF, how are things going? I apologise for not calling you or anything. I have
only called FF once because I didn’t see her for Christmas and my grandmother
twice. Apart from that, I have not spoken to any other person in Jamaica. My father had to call me. Oh, yeah, one day i spoke to Dave to find out Jason’s number,
but I am not finding an excuse for not calling, because there is none that would be
justifiable. I should have called you. FF says hi and she plans to email you. PLease
say hi to your mother for me and thank her for her hospitality over Christmas. I
enjoyed chilling with you and your moms over Christmas. FF really enjoyed your
company. Thanks again. Later
m#
sj
011–01
hey FF,
just tellin ya hello. So u gotta fill me in on how spring break was. sounds like its no
longer a tourist thing. Sounds like all the locals were there. Oh well, still wish i was
there to get a peice of. Me and bush espacially.
Anyway nothing major happening. My girls flying out one by one so i’ll be heading up to joberg shortly (2hr flight). Thinking of going barcelona for a weekend
holiday and visit ebs. Shes going thre emd of the month. then after its london for
a month or so.
I’m hooked on ostrich meat. don’t know if i told u, but its absolutely heavenly. It
has a really rich taste, looks like beef, has a taste closer to venison. It is red meat,
but supposedly really healthy beause it has no fat. Know whenever i do lunch, thats
what i order. trying to work on a sushi aquired taste. It currentys ranks very hi on
’model food’. by that i mean in order to broaden my circles i need to get aquainted.
I’ve turned down many an invitation. Firstly cause i don’t wanna embarass myself
Appendix 207
and secondly cause i aint a fish fan. but they got other dishes, like japaneese sea
weed and rice. YUK. i can imagine it now. The things men do for women.
I just did a new test. i think there hot, i’ll try to send the few that i’ll scan. Now i got
a full book, between mag tears and tests. anyway
later
MM
m#
sj
011–02
Hey.... I know you haven’t heard from me in a while. I’ve just finished the assignments I had due this month, now I’m getting ready for my exams. They start
around the 23rd, and end on the 9th of May.
I feel llike I’m falling back in school. The works seems too much. I’m gonna stick
in there though.
So, you and FF made up? Glad to hear. You REALLY missed a good weekend
last week. I don’t htink I’ve ever had so much fun. I’m also sure that ”I” was the
highlight of everyone’s weekend... at least on the first two days. You need to see the
shorts that I wore on those two nights.... people were like ”damn, you hot”, I literally stopped traffic. My friends put me in the road just so all 18 of them could cross
it..... and then you know me.... love the attention.
There’s not much I can tell you, you had to be there. By the way, did I tell you, that
FF (from XXX.com) has branded me? She calls me CHINEY PHAT. She even got
me a shirt printed with the name on the back, and gave it to me to wear in the
country. She says she might want me to do some work for her... take pics and stuff
like that... little stuff.
My life for the most part is alright.... love life sucks a little. I’m not unhappy, just
frustrated. I don’t know for how muchc longer I can do this ’no commitment’ thing,
this unspoken ’togetherness’. Oh well, in time I guess. I’m leaving soon anyway.
I’m looking so cute nowadays, even if I do say so myself. Someone asked me if I’ve
been working out. I don’t want to be skinny anymore.
By the way, you are such a waste!!! How come you told me you’d call and you
haven’t. Yu finga bruk? Why bother to say it if you ain’t gonna do it? Anyway, ah
suh man stay... always a promise tings an’ nah deliver.
Well, I’m still going to wait on the call..... until then....
FF.
m#
sj
011–03
Re:
hey kiddo. i didn’t tell u to hold ur breath until i called. told u i would call. before
i get started u gotta hear about my dream. I’m here all curled up beside ebs in bed.
(last night) No were not involved, just friendly like that. Anyway u come over here
to visit me. (i wish!) whatever were talkng in my pad and we get all carried away
and shit. Don’t have to explain how carried away do i?
then FF nudges me, this is about 4:30 a.m. She is like waht the fuck is going on
because my thing was all up beside her. said it was quivering like i was gonna blow.
it was so embarassingly funny. if she didn’t wake me might have had a wet dream
or something.
Fuck haven’t had one of those in a while!
Been on a little break u see. most of my girls are gone. fell out with my english
girlfriend before she left. only made up the day she was going to the airport. that
sucked. FF is upset with me. I’ve stood her up about three times. She wants to call
this thing quits. Oh well thats cool with me. She lives like half an hour outta town
and goes to university which is an hour outta town. Don’t see her till weekends
anyway and she has a guy on that side of the world. All these players love it. Our
schedules don’t afford us anytime. She planned this romantic wekend doing the
’wine trail’ and then just the thursday i got booked for a hree day shoot. never seen
a diva so upset. oh well
Anyway, i can just imagine u in those shorts. u had this white see through shorts
that used to drive me crazy. Anytiome u wore them out with me i would always
take special care to make sure anyone never tried anything funny. Oh well.... that
was some other life.
my english girlfriend wants to come visit me in jamaica... now wouldn’t that be
some hectic shit! fuck i would be in so much trouble. FF says she wants to visit in
dec. like what the hell. nah tek sand to the beach!
It still surprises me to see the chicks that i ‘pull’. people i would have never gone
after are like drawn to me. This french model came up to me the other night in a
club and said she thought i was so sexy. the thing is i had alwyas noticed her, but
know i don’t make the effort to go after anyone. i wait till they make their move.
Anyway this girl left the very next day, said she didn’t approach me because she
read and saw my game. Oh well.
Appendix 209
Can’t belive i almost had a wet dream over u. Still got me lauging. Blue balls killing
me at this very moment fuck. i guess im feeling the effect of dem shorts all the way
in africa.
hey i might be home before i spend that month in london. i could be home as early
as next week. Still have to extend my ticket. i might just come home and work new
york for a month and then head to london for a month or two.
here the deal. can u promise me this one. After ur exams, would u let me steal u for
a weekend. just u and me, no demands, whatever happens happens. just promise
to be sexy! Nah, on a real, promise me a wekend in the counrty, with no strings
attached before u go ur way and before i go mind. just a wild and fun weekend.
anyway FF. take care and save a piece for me. Lol (i’m so funny) got some new pics,
when i scann them i’ll send one two ya
m#
sj
011–04
Why yu feel seh mi waan yu fill up mi mailbox wid dem f#@*$ ugly baby pics. In
your dreams you were cuter than me....
Your life is way too exciting for me.. and I’m being sarcastic.
Yeah man, bring yu girl dem come down, mi waan meet dem........... beer passa
passa woulda gwaan. I’d love to see how you’d get yourself out of that one.
By the way, I have no see through white shorts that I can remember..... you need to
be a little more specific.
When you called yesterday, my guy was beside me.... he was like “who is that?”
cause I said something about 16000 miles away.... and cause I was calling you a
bastard. I told him it was my ‘waste’ ex-boyfriend.... he was like “cool”, ...I’ve told
him all about you, and how I like you better now that we’re more open with each
other. It doesn’t hurt that you’re so far away. Ah love him yu si.
Anyway, as for that weekend thing, I dunno..... I’m supposed to fly out on the 10th
of May, to go stay with FF for a bit. I’m not sure if I’m gonna come back either. If I
do it’s gonna be for like a week, then I’m back in Miami again. I’m thinking of just
flying to France directly from there. I have to go shopping for some work clothes
though. ....And speaking of clothes, you need to hook me up! Even if I’ve gotta pay
you back for them, tell me if you can, and we’ll work something out.
The other day I was thinking how this bastard couldn’t even bring a girl back a
souvenir, how yu stay so. Mi neva travel go a Africa yet. I want something authentic from your ‘homeland’. I remember how you always used to talk about your
‘peoples’ LOL, well your definitely in the right continent.
If you come early give me a shout.... I don’t normally make move, especially a
spontaneous country flex, without ‘my boys’.... but we’ll see...
I have a class now, so likkle more.
FF.
m#
sj
011–05
–
Yow, dat rass gyal is so getting on my nerves, I know seh her mother brought her
up betta than how shi turn out...... I called MM’s phone last night and she answered
it - so I asked her to open the door for me - DO RASS GYAL CRACK DI DOOR
AND WALK OFF!! I just said thank you.
I went to MM’s house after school today and when I saw her car I just turned
around and went home, quite frankly, I don’t care but I really can’t deal with the
tention thing so I’m going to stop going to MM’s house for a while. I so wanted to
call you last night to tell you about the jokes I was getting last night between her
and FF. Did I give you the joke about what MM said about FF?
I went to the house the other night when MM came back and I asked why him
neva tell me seh other people were at the house (FF & FF), he started to laugh and
tell MM how the wifey and the wanna be are here, the understudy - I laugh til I
weak.
MM seh him ready for you anytime MM nah treat you right (he said, notice what
I said, anytime MM nah treat her right b/c I know seh mi cyan bypass MM) MM amuses me. Then him and MM went into how much they love you and who
woulda wife yu up and how “ready” you are.
Please get FF’s e-mail address for me. I NEED IT!! TRE IMPORTANT!!
I miss you so much!!
I e-mail MM and he hasn’t writtten me back so I guess he’s not talking to me.
How’s MM? Tell him Hi and tell him to tell UU and MM Hi for me and give MM
a kiss.
Appendix 211
Please tell Uncle MM that I have been trying to call him and keep getting a unavailable on the digicel. I don’t know what other number to call - does he still have
the CWJ?
MISS YOU
Love
FF
m#
sj
011–06
–
I love those guys. So unu was chatting mi, huh? Well so it go sometimes. I don‘t
have FF‘s e-mail address. As far as I know, you can just go to XX.com and click on
the link [email protected], or something like that.
I don‘t think she uses another one..... just go to the webpage and check it out. I
don‘t see why you don‘t just ignore the bitch, and plus, she‘s fat. Above everything
else, mi know seh mi fren‘ dem cyute, so tell har fi move harself. Ah cyaa wait fi
touch yu si, wouldn‘t I wile her up bout shi a crack door.... shi nuh live nuh weh?
I‘ll be sure to deliver those messages for you. In the meantime take care. My exams
start on Tuesday, wish me luck.... or better yet, pray for me.
Love you nuff,
FF
m#
sj
012–01
Transcript
Hi FF:
A rushing.
Never have money to send off today will do so tomorrow ($952.69). You will get
it the following day.
FedEx said if no one is there when they come, they won‘t be leaving the package
they will take it back to their office and after three attempts they will leave a notice
for you to collect it from their office.
Tell me if someone will be there at your house to receive it. Email me tonight.
Later,
FF
m#
sj
012–02
FF & Things
Hi FF: I already called FF and told her when you coming and tell her to contact
you by phone or email re the things she may need.
Is which address you send the cheque to?
Thanks for dealing with the sneakers for me.
I‘ll link FF and FF tomorrow.
Love, FF
m#
sj
012–03
Transcript
Hi FF:
Your transcript was delivered this morning and signed for by UU LL at 9:58 a.m.
Good luck!
FF
m#
sj
012–04
Re: Transcript
Hi FF Thanks much i received the transcript today.
bye lov FF
m#
sj
012–05
hello
Hi MM
I am well and sure you are too. I plan to visit Ja. at the end of April, don‘t think I
will see you cause I will be in more of a rush that I was then. This dam place is so
cold it is getting on my nerves. They say its spring but today its 26 degree C. Its just
as bad as it was in the Winter.
Appendix 213
Otherwise work is okay and I am getting used to the place, I trying to find a more
permanent residence and get a car on credit.
You know how woman fass, and me just as bad so I have been keeping up with the
sus (joke)
FF and I are having a quarrel (via the net) or argument on the Israeli conflicts what
do you think about the escalating violence there. MM links it with prophecies in
the Bible and gives Israel the right to the land. What do you think about it all? My
views are a little different, even though I am sure the Bible states that Israel have
the right to the land. But the Israeli‘s are getting out of hand, and it‘s like a man
sticks you with a tooth pick (man being the Palestinian) and you chop off his head
and his entire family, that‘s what the Israeli‘s are doing. When a suicide bomber
bombs and kills 2 or even up to 10 Israelites.
The Israelites bomb a whole village and kill hundreds of families, that‘s why the
fighting will never stop, cause the more you kill Palestinians the more they fight
back. Just like the crime in Jamaica with the police, the more the government create these squads to kill the criminals the criminals get even more vicious and the
innocents suffer in the long run. Israel needs to stop and look at another solution
other than violence.
FF and FF are fine and hope FF is too, just tell her not to feed you so much cause
you are getting fat (looking like MM) whats happening with him, is he still around
the place, I email him now and then but don‘t know what he is up to.
Gone, lov FF
m#
sj
012–06
Re: hello
Hail up FF, What a lot of rush you‘ve been in these last few days, eeh. Careful, if
you don‘t slow down you‘ll burn out. Stop a while and smell the roses !!
Understand your predicament with the cold and especially so in the absence of a
full time “live blanket”, but you‘ll survive. The job sounds as if it will work out but
I‘m not very sure how you plan to work in a teaching career at the same time. N.Y.
must be a very fast city.
Anyway, I would have written you before but I just wanted to independently confirm your “suss”. Turns out that you‘ve hit the nail on the head. Really none of my
business, but I understand that several guys breathed a sigh of relief on determination of the paternity!!. Enough said on that.
As to the Isrealis & the Palestinian my comments are:
1. If “GOD” is who he/she is supposed to be then the concept of a favourite /
chosen people is ludicrous
2. Suicide bombings by the radical islamic groups has been for the most part
a reaction to the Israelis indifference to the humanity of the Palestinian
people.
3. The call by the US & the EU for Israel to “stand-down” their war machinery
is pathetic in light of how they parachuted into Afghanistan, Serbia, Somalia, Panama, etc to protect the human rights of the “oppressed people”
4. It is now a well known fact that USA‘s Oil interests in the Middle East will
forgo any judicuos action on there part against Israel.
5. Arafat is under seige in his Rammallah residence and is being blamed for
not calling a cessation to suicide Bombing. Go figure that one.
Finally FF, I‘ve been paying a dear lesson in my life to come to the realisation that
the World (meaning the people in it) ain‘t “effin” fair so if we try to reason or resolve things on the basis of fairness then ultimately we‘re the ones who will suffer.
“Rights are not aquired by dialogue and consensus, instead it is aquired by might
and force of arms”
Check it out.....
MM
m#
sj
012–07
you bad girl...
I was in New York all of last week. What‘s your phone number?
Respond to me at home tonight [email protected] and I will call you. Take care
and don‘t be a stranger.
Love,
FF LL
m#
sj
012–08
Re: you bad girl...
Appendix 215
Hi FF You have called me here several times so how comes you dont have the
number.
My number again for the thousand time is XXX XXX XXXX i come home at
around 6 in the evenings and if you call and phone rings forever i am on the net.
Buy for now, love FF
m#
sj
012–09
OK, I searched and searched for your phone number last night and could not find
it - I have written it down again - tonight for sure - I hope you don‘t go to bed too
early.
Later, FF
m#
sj
012–10
Hello FF,
Have not heard a word from you what‘s happenning?
Below please see pictures of my nephews MM and UU. No need to open the first
picture because its some kind of ad.
FF said that she had the olive oil you sent for me, thank very much.
Guess what I got another helper, and she will be meeting with me again on Saturday morning to show her the usual stuff but she really starts officially on Monday.
FF is still at home and I will tell her tomorrow morning that I will no longer require her services. I plan to give her an extra week‘s pay and just call it a day. I still
feel sorry for her because I think she really needs the money for her son‘s medication anyway I know with my prayers the Lord will provide a way for her. I just hope
and pray also that she will get help for that drug habit. Did I tell you that she has
been smoking in the bathroom.
This new helper seems quite intelligent as a matter of fact her previous employer
who gave her a good recommendation said on one or two occassion she was a little forthright so she had to put her in her place. I think the lady ment that if given
the opportunity she can be a little feisty but in a suttle way. Anyway I wont have a
problem with that because I can show her or clarify for her what it is to be forthright or feisty. But lets hope that things will not get that way. The new helper said
she is a christian and seems very active in her church and she has a daughter going
to PP PP 6 form. Her husband is a farmer and I think she said she had 4 children.
She will be meeting with me on Saturday for us to continue the interview then I
will make a final decision.
Well FF as usual I have to run drop me a line sometime soon hope you enjoy looking at the pictures are they not sweet. I am really looking forward to seeing them
in Florida.
Bye bye tell FF I send hello and give her a kiss.
Be good
Love always
FF
m#
sj
012–11
Pictures
Hi FF
i see the pictures they look very cute!!!! FF thought they were girls they look like
the cartoon character telly tubby, thats what FF says, i had to tell her they were
your nephews.
Also remember i tell you not to employ no helper who was not over 50 years. the
younger ones dont want no work. they have life and you will end up looking agin
in a couple of weeks. This one seems to fit that bill very soiooon she will be missing
her family and leaving the work
Any have to run i getting kicked off the net. And i did not send the oils with hope
so dont know what FF promis you. have them here to carry when i come month
end and going to get the phone on saturdy.
bye for now, lov FF
m#
sj
012–12
RE: Pictures
Hi FF,
Looking forward to seeing you soon. Why are you getting kicked off the net? The
helper started working today she seems ok but only time will tell did I tell you
that she lives up by PP tavern so that is not far from me and she got to work this
Appendix 217
morning at 6:00 am. I dont think I will have a problem if she wants to come back
on a monday instead of a sunday. anyway I just pray she works out ok. because
God knows I am so tired of these helpers. On Friday evening I told FF that things
were not working and thanks very much for everything and with that she packed
and left. She could not take all her clothing so she will be back for them. I realise
that FF was one big lie including her recommendation because it was her sister
boyfriend who gave her the recommendation. FF use to work for this man and
his wife and FF‘s sister started having a relationship with him so in a way he use
to be FF‘s boss. At first I could not figure out why FF was so close to this man so I
said to her he must be your man. She denied it and eventually she told me that he
was having a relationship with her sister and now the sister is tired of the man and
trying to hide from him. FF also seem to have a lot of other problems but cant get
into that now. What date did you say you were coming I think I may take the day
off so send me a reminder. I am so tired of working but at the same time I thank
God that I have a job.
Well I have to go be good and will be in touch.
FF
m#
sj
012–13
Hi
Hi FF
I will be coming on a Saturday so dont you bother taking the day off!!!(laugh)
Will send flight info next week but its the same time flight like the last time, leaving
on the tuesday same time flight.
So maybe you could take off the tuesday if you want, but it may not be necessary.
I have a free internet using now and its give only 9 hours free for the month, it also
limits your use per session so when its time to come off it gives a prompt. I had
AOL it was free for a couple of months but it now cost US$28.98 and i too cheap
to pay that. I really cant afford it!!!(laugh)
gone for now, bye FF
m#
sj
Hi FF,
012–14
Re: Hi
Well, well, when you talk about cheap you certainly clarify that. Anyway I am teasing save as much as you can because it time you start preparing for your old age.
I got a big tin of peach and I was told it is from you how come you dont remember
sending it. Thanks I can use it at the next prayer breakfast in July.
Well let me tell you the latest dont get excited its not other people business I will be
travelling with FF on May 5th to a conference in miami it has to do with ethanol,
I am so distressed, for the life of me I can not imagine where this wild card came
from, but I just get the feeling that BCS is responsible for this. Its so strange that
when you dont want something it comes. God knows that I would not mind if
they dont give me anymore work and dont pay me any more, not that I dont need
the money but I want so much to concentrate on other things. God help me with
immigrations because if I have any problem with them I will just flig the card and
give them.
I am so tired I think I need 6months away from this place anyway apart from that
all is well just the usual murders but you get the gleaner.
Looking forward to seeing you soon, bye for now.
FF
PS I HAVE APPLIED FOR THE DAY OFF ON FRIDAY SO I WILL NOT BE IN
OFFICE.
m#
sj
012–15
Hi
Hi FF
Since I coming on the weekend i begging before I reach, could you try and get
some Apples (jamaican) roast 2 breadfruit and festival at your office for me and
hussel up some ackee. By the way MM say him want fry fish. (laugh) but if any of
the above is a problem you dont have to okay.
thanks much, lov FF
m#
sj
Hi FF:
012–16
Re: Hi
Appendix 219
Thats not a problem, I will try my best to get the stuff for you. I will ask my coworker to buy them at coranation market and roast the breadfruit Monday, so that
you it can be ready for Monday night.
Can you try and pick up some panties for FF? Size L or size 10. Remember she is
8 years. If you can get 2 or three size 10 shorts and tops to match I would be greatful.
My mom did surgery yesterday, it was successful but she is in a lot of pain. Hopefully she will be better soon. Do hope you will be able to see her on the weekend.
By the way do you know the Downy Frabic softener and finisher?
Or those things you drop in the machine to freshen up your clothes - - don’t put
yourself out of the way, but you you can find them it would be good.
I will get the fish and ackee for MM. He called MM. over the week-end and promise MM. legacies (laugh).
m#
sj
012–017
Referral
Hi FF:
Seen, I will mail the ref to you on Monday, as I put it away safely at home. Too
much changes a gwane here, so I try not to keep personal things in my drawer
(laugh).
Does it make sense for me to mail it on Monday since you are coming on the
27th?
Email me from Sunday night so I can know by Monday morning. I think you
should just take it with you because it won’t get there any faster (4–5 days).
My hip measurement is 37 1/2” (I think it may be helpful).
FF and her family will be coming over from this evening and I am sure she will
have a lot to talk about concerning her beliefs. I can’t wait to see her and the kids
because I want to know if she still home schooling them because all the ask I ask
she not commenting. I am sure it will be an interesting weekend. I will tell you
about it on Monday.
Have fun shopping, I only sorry I am not there to help in that department. Hope
you find some good bargain.
Say hi to FF (is she back though).
What do you want to take back with you? Let me know from early.
Love, FF
m#
sj
012–18
spring
yes miss mam!! this is free!! how u mean fi gi MM FF # afta u no seh him an did u
did a viagra up. a hope de one MM stop read u email!!!1 him call FF yesterday (Friday) seh him a call since him neva hear from har and him lef him #.. u no seh mi
nuh want nuh big belly man in a d family so him lucky... spoke to FF while u were
in d attic... what a way she sound like true blue “merican.... thanks for d legacy that
u sent me it will beat the pangs of hunger away from me door (lol)... anyway tell
MM thanks for his hospitality and the loan of his suitcases we will make arrangements for him to get them back in the near future. What u doing about the exam
it nuh mek nuh sense u mek d one course keep u up so tek the likkle 2 day and
come look for us... And miss FF FF nuh no faren but she fine me wrinkle releaser
NOT fabric enhancer!!! anyway the enhancer works pretty well too so thank you..
me gone now
Me glad fe Know say spring finally come... Jamaica hot like a raas summer already!!!!
MM/MM
m#
sj
012–19
Hello
Hi MM Still laughing after your email!!!! Well thats Jamaica for you!!! endless
crap, endless problems!!!
Anyway I got a B+ and the others B (i did 4 subjects) I should have done my entire degree at (5 weeks per sememster) cause whether I am there for the whole 14
weeks or just 5 weeks I seem to end up with the same grade. Now I know I waisted
approximately 2 years of my life doing a 3 1/2 year degree that i could have done in
about 1 1/2 year!!!! Anyway I though I would have failed one of them and I thank
God that I did not.
I am here looking work, going to endless interviews, just coming from one today.
They interview and testing the shit out of me here!!!! I had 2 hours of testing from
maths, comprehension, algebra (which I dont have a clue) and mental ability. Then
moved on to do computer testing Word, Excel and powerpoint. I shocked that I
Appendix 221
pass so the next step is another 2 weeks of more training (this is a bank). I ultimately want to teach, it pays over 35,000 here per annum and they need teachers
like dry peas want water!!!!
I have applied for this program where they pay for your masters degree in Education/teaching and you are bounded for 2 years to teach in a ‘broke down’ school.
I not relishing working in some crime infested area, but after Jamaica I can work
even in Afganistan so I am sure i am up for the challenge/job.
Otherwise I am here biding my time till september cause I should be in the classroom by then.
As far as MM is concern he does not have a clue whether I was in Ja. or not. He
called here (my mother had given him the number years ago) this is her home. He
spoke to FF (i answered the phone) he remarked about me galivanting over the
globe with him pickney, i tell him to Fuck off and pass the phone to FF.
I sure I not in him good book even more so now but i dont give a shit. Man a dead
so easy in a ja. and mi no know how him nuh get lick yet!!!! (yes I am really awaful) but sometimes I wish someone could hold him over their knees and beat his
ass good!!!
Glad you met my friend sorry you married cause she needs a man!!! she would kill
me if she knew I was saying this!!! (laugh) and I love your wife. Anyway in your
next life!!!
Anyway enought of me and people business. I fell a little dirty now so I gone to go
wash!!!
Nuff love, FF
m#
sj
012–20
Re: Hello
Hail up FF,
what’s up?. Well the Jamaican Saga continues. Sometime ago I decided that I would
spend my spare time doing something constructive, soooo...., I bought some tomato, sweet pepper, scotch bonnet pepper and callaloo seeds and started a little
vegetable garden. All went well, the seeds grew and I reaped the callaloo, and hot
peppers, etc, etc. Everything was great until yesterday evening that I went home I
realized that the “OWNER” for the Sweet peppers came in and took every single
one. The bastard did not even have conscience enough to leave one of the young
ones on the tree. Come to think of it, I’m just realizing that the oranges on the tree
finished a lot faster than I can recall me or UU picking them.
Anyway, I’ve decided what I’m going to do. I won’t blow my top. I’m going to the
farm shop, I’m going to buy some rat poison, mix up a batch and inject the rest of
the peppers with it. When the FUCKEr’s belly begins to swell he will know that
him musn’t tief.
Daamm!!!!
Of course the little mongrel bitch that I have in the yard must have kept har mouth
quite and creep and hide in the shade when all the action was taking place.
I’m beginning to wonder what I’m feeding the daam dog for. For the last 2–3 weeks
I’ve been having to run the man dog dem out of my yard because my little bitch
was in heat. I know they have to have their fun too but when the fun done is me
going have to feed and bury puppy. And to top it off, these would be suitors keep
scratching up the yard and pissing on the car tires as if to say them a man a yaad.
I pulled a muscle in my hand and stone juck me inna mi foot bottom the last time
mi run dung one of them and throw stone after him. Can you imagine.
Anyway, Jamaica nice same way.
Missus Qeen Elizibeth come to visit we the other day and of course they were
having dinner at Jamaica house with all the dignitaries and specially invited guest
when ....BAPS!!!!, the light lock-off pon dem. JPSCo say is not their fault is the
electrician who wire up the place and that them put too much electrical plug pon
one circuit. Of course BBC News had it live and me & FF nuh stop laugh and hold
we belly ah say how the Quen mussi a wondah if a assasinate the black bugger dem
plan to assasinate har.
Life pon the Rock is never without amusement.
Petrojam is still here. Winston Watson left on business the other day and left Richard Jones in charge of the company. Can, you imaging. My warning is that you
must be careful how “yuh rub butter inna puss mouth”.
So how are things with you? and how is FF and FF hope they are O.K. How is the
job hunt going? Tell me all about when next you write.
MM
P.S. I hope I don’t go to market and buy my own sweet pepper (smile).
Appendix 223
m#
sj
012–21
Everything
Hi FF
Just read your email and by the time you receive this this will be stale news cause
it will be Monday and you will be back at work and really happy!!! (I know that is
me stretching it) laugh) anyway it is getting colder here tonight; in the 20’s and 30’s
this is Friday night too. But I am now at home taking it easy.
Will get your olive oils too, I just read what you said about the Israeli’s and the Palestinians and the war, but following them is almost a waste of time (meaning getting surprised about the escalation of violence there) its like Jamaica, so the crime
is high and everyone gets bothered by it, then people predict all sort of things. But
I see the fighting as a way of life and I don’t even get a little concern cause its just
a waste of my time. I am sure you don’t agree with me and you may even link the
war with the prophecies in the Bible, but I can only respect your opinion. But the
Israeli’ s are getting out of hand, and it’s like a man sticks you with a tooth pick
(man being the Palestinian) and you chop off his head and his entire family, that’s
what the Israeli’s are doing. When a suicide bomber bombs and kills 2 or even up
to 10 Israelites. The Israelites bomb a whole village and kill hundreds of families,
that’s why the fighting will never stop, cause the more you kill Palestinians the
more they fight back. Just like the crime in Jamaica with the police, the more the
government create these squads to kill the criminals the criminals get even more
vicious and the innocents suffer in the long run. Israel needs to stop and look at
another solution other than violence. It is unfortunate, but I will never support a
people who oppress another and now in my books Israel is the oppressor.
Enough politics, FF has been on school break so she has not been home all week,
so the stress has been off. Work is the same, I am getting used to the place more
and more so the work is fine. I have been getting other better offers too for jobs,
almost every week there is a message on the phone but I am sick of looking jobs so
I wont even bother to follow them up.
I was so surprised to hear that Mr. LL was ill and in hospital, I hope he is better
now, also hopefully MM situation is getting better. Mr. LL works too hard though
at the shop, maybe like how Petrojam gets to you, you should think about going to
work with Mr. LL (as Partner or something) put some money in his business and
do the stress part of the work for him. It would get you out of Petrojam.
Bye for now, lov FF
m#
sj
012–22
RE: Everything
FF,
Just one more thing. I will never support terrorists and as far as I am concerned
the Palistians are also responsible for September 11th. I will never support the
Palistians.
May the God whom I serve deliver Israel.
AMEN
FF
m#
sj
012–23
time table
Hi MM
Got your messages, I called FF in the morning early but did not get her so I called
the other number and leave message with a woman. I plan to to pick her up either
tonight or very early in the morning. I solicit a ride from the (mean) MM so hopefully he will not post me if he does I will have to take the bus, cause as I mention
I must pick up FF.
Did you check what time of day is the exam, please do for me and send the info. I
hope its not the 4 – 6 one cause I want to catch the 4:30 flight back, so I wont have
to take 2 days off work.
Its freezing now, FF will not be pleased, I should go on the road last night but did
not go out, its in the 20’s degree, they saw also that Connecticut will have snow
(can you believe its suppose to be spring now!!!!)
Of course I will look out for your fabric thing.
Bye lov FF
m#
sj
012–24
time table
well gal me sarry fi tel u seh u carna dark... oh i am sorry i should have said : hello
FF, it is very unfortunate that i have yo te you that your exam is on april 29 at 4–6
pm so you will not be able to catch the four thirty flight and so u will have to take
2 days off work.. hush life is a bitch when it wanna be but knowing you i know you
Appendix 225
wil find a way aroun that.. oonoo stay deh wid d snow it is as hot as summer in ja
maybe even hotter,,, i hope it snows so that hope can enjoy !!? the snow anyway me
gone.. have plenti a skool wok fi do.. give FF a hug, MM some luv and MM some
fun and tek care
luv MM
m#
sj
012–25
Hi
Hi FF:
I thought you would be home early today.
FF said that the referral from Prof. LL will be ready about Monday afternoon.
The Officer at the Adoption Board said that the law does not allow anyone to adopt
a child who is not a relative (nephew, niece or gandchild), unless the child is living
in a very bad condition and that situation has to be reported to Children’s Services
and the child taken into their care. In that case a stranger can adopt the child who
is in the care of the State.
FF has grown into a big girl. She looks very nice.
Hope you enjoy your weekend.
Talk to me on Monday.
Take care, FF
m#
sj
012–26
RE: Hello
You too good. What happened to your job? You really mek de people dem fire yu.
Anyway mi caan run lef mi job fi FF pickney. Not right now. She fi stap now.
Make sure you get a ticket out of her for the baby sitting job your doing.
Later
m#
sj
Hi FF,
012–027
I am back at work, went to the conference in Miami It was good but gosh there is
so much that I did not know and I am left to wonder if I now know anything at all.
One thing I must say is that ethanol will be the gas at the pump and the banning
of MTBE will become a reality although the Govonor Davis of California has put
a temp. hold on this. I also listened to two US senators at the conference telling us
that ethanol has friends in the house and that president George Bush supports the
whole ethanol cause.
I also found the whole environment issue very very interesting so much so that it
leaves one with the feeling of wanting to save the envoronment and now I see why
people can be so passionate about this. There were times when I thought that the
Greenpeace people were really a bit crazy but now I fully endorse there cause.
Got to go drop me a line.
FF
m#
sj
012–028
Re: Hi
u ole fart u !!!,
i have no computa thats y u neva heard from me, i am at petrojam just now so thats
how i get to be emailin u, what happen to the job at bamk of new york? u going
to just up and leave like that what u gonna do about FF? chile what the hell is going on email me when u come back so i can call u i cant bother with this one way
conversation so tek care till lata
luv MM & FF
m#
sj
012–29
Hello
Hi FF: How things going with you. Are you in Canada by now?
I tried finding out from FF LL if she passed on the info to Professor LL and she
telling me that she was not at work from Tuesday so she don’t know what is happening with it. She don’t even remember if she send over the info to Prof. LL that
I got upset with her because I spoke to her already and she say she got it. I told her
that them too inefficient up there in handling things for people.
I could not get MM so I spoke to FF and she said that he is having exam. She promise to check with Prof. LL’s office for the referral and get back to me on Monday.
Appendix 227
I will call MM over the weekend.
I don’t know how you deal with them govt. people. If you leave up things to them,
you mess up you future.
I checking out something for my mother at General Legal Council and nobody
answers the phone in the afternoon.
Have a happy Mothers’ Day on Sunday.
I hope we can chat on Monday mid-day.
Love, FF
m#
sj
012–30
Hello
Hi FF:
You should be by FF now.
Those people up UWI are a real waste of time. I wonder when they will change
cause cussing certainly not changing them. They must be careful because with so
much universities offering programs in Ja. they may soon have to close some of
the faculties.
These foreign people know how to compete. Right now they (UWI) are advertising.
I’ll try to reach Prof. LL and tell him how them mess up you life (laugh).
I sent FF a mail re the Adoption. I asked someone to pick up the approved forms
for me today (the person I usually ask had an accident). I’ll go through it and tell
her what the steps are. Maybe I’ll have to seek advice from FF for her.
As for me, me deh ya a gwane. FF LL pregnant at 42 with a girl, she suppose to have
the baby in September (her husband is 72).
Talk to you later today.
Bye, FF
m#
sj
Hi FF
012–31
Re: Hello
I am happy you were able to do the course you wanted to do. I did my exams they
were really tough this semester. I am in Florida now but it is so hard to find something to do here. I am so totally broke so I have to do something. Do you think it
will be easier to find something in NY? Let me know the possibility. Last year this
time I got something to do. I hear about Atlanta my dad says he wants a house
there too I guess it is the latest growing town for blacks, what I know about it is
that the economy is doing well. I guess with your qualifications you should do very
well there. Let me know the prospects of getting a job in NY. Send me your phone
number. I will give you a call. Lov MM. PS say to MM for me.
m#
sj
012–32
log off
Oh shit!!!!
I suppose you did not know then, that she is dead, so sorry you must be felling bad.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but its even sadder when after all the years of
stress at UWI to just die right after exams.
Was she sickly or anything cause it seems strange for a healthy person to just die
in their sleep.
Mail me your phone number so i can call you tonight after i speak with the girl in
New York.
lov FFm#
sj
012–33
Re: log off
Hi k, FF was as strong as an oxen she was also very brilliant and very outgoing. My
cell phone# XXX–XXX–XXXX house# XXX–XXX–XXXX. Call you later
MM.
m#
sj
012–34
Hello
Hi MM
I just spoke to my mom and she says its not easy to get jobs without the status
anymore, but she said there are several agencies that do it and she has given me the
number for the friend who works with one of those agencies.
Appendix 229
I will call the girl later she is gone to work now, i just called her, and talk to her.
bye lov FF
m#
sj
012–35
Re: Hello
Hi FF
I see what you are saying I am going to call you shortly so bye. MM.
m#
sj
012–36
Hi MM I am presently in Atlanta and looking jobs, the prospects seem good, I
have an interview for tomorrow so hopefully i will be working soon (before I get
broke).
Anyway in New York a lot of people keep saying its tuff by seriously I did not have
a problem. The only problem finding work there is the screening, it takes a lot of
time now since the 9/11 attack. But there are jobs there. I got many offers. They
desperately need people in the home health aide and child care too. So if you have
contacts there you could try it.
The company my mother works with (home health aide providers) are desperately
in need of staff and they train you free for two weeks then put you in the job. You
could call my mother about it if you want. She is always having to give up her
weekends because they cant find anyone.
Not sure if you interested in that kind of work though but there are others. The
banks need tellers and although they train you for 2 – 3 weeks you get paid from
day one.
Call me
lov FF
m#
sj
012–37
Hi FF, with my status I will have to do the health jobs I am sure you understand
what I me. Do you still think I will be able to do somthing considering the status.
let me know. I am at the library now and will be for a while. Love MM.
m#
sj
012–38
Hi Again
Was surprised at your quick response, anyway my mother maybe able to tell you
more about the job with your status, we have a friend who is and has been working
in NY for years now and she is in your position. I will call her now and get back
to you.
FF
m#
sj
012–39
Hi FF,
I would appreciate it if you could talk to your mom first. I will not go to NY unless
I know for sure what is happening. I must get confirmation about something to do
as I don’t have the money to go up there so I will have to borrow it. As long as I get
something to do I will pay it back. P.s let your mom know that I have experience in
the field. I will call her and explain to her. Thanks again Love MM.
m#
sj
012–40
Hello
Hi FF:
I hope you get the cell phone by now.
It seem as if you not using the net. What happen, you a go a street a day time?
I keep hearing that better jobs are where you are at now, so good luck!!
I did not get through to Prof. Jones, but I am going to call again cause I want to
hear what he has to say about the service they offer.
Will talk tomorrow.
Love, FF
m#
sj
012–41
hey there,
Appendix 231
How is atlanta?, i heard from FF that you gone a atlanta gone live, i guess there
is no email where u are? any try i an find one library and keep me posted.... ok
mam
good luck and many success in your endeavours.....
luv MM/FF
m#
sj
012–42
Hi
Hi FF:
I tried calling MM but his phone is either turned off or he is out of range. As soon
as I get him, I’ll get back to you.
I spoke to FF on line yesterday about a job at her place; she is due for promotion
and she said the environment is good and it pays more than the one I have. She
said I could run it by you to get your opinion as you know the people there and you
already know that they are ok.
Link me later.
Love, FF
m#
sj
012–43
Hello
Hi MM
How are you it has been a long time since i have heard from you. Whats happening to you on the job scene? Have you found a new job yet, or are you planning to
come to the U.S.?
I have left New York, and am now in atlanta, in the suburbs, i am presently job
hunting and will be looking for a house too. I droped off FF in Canada on Sunday
but had to wheel around to take the plane to atlanta so did not have the time to
call you or FF.
Anyway the place here is great, it looks like Canada but even better, the area i am
in is call PP and its a upper middle - rich class area, i am staying with a friend from
jamaica.
I will keep you posted on whats happening with me here but mail me soon. Say
hello to Sandra for me and tell her i had to rush cause i was late for my flight so i
did not get to link her on sunday.
Bye for now, lov FF
m#
sj
012–44
Re: Hello
Hi FF,
Sounds great. I have not landed anything yet but currently doing interviews.
Most favorable interview is for somewhere in Edmonton, Alberta (N.W) which
is much colder. Monday is a holiday so Tues. I should know more of what’s going
on.
I hope you land some thing soon, and I figure that there should be somewhat of
a demand in Atlanta for people with your background. Unfortunately I here that
you definitely have to own a car if you plan to live there.
Been busy so I hardly have time to speak to FF. Anyways keep me posted as things
progress.
MM
m#
sj
012–45
Hi FF,
I was very surprise when I got your mail, as you have abandon my email address
and keep sending message with FF to give me. The reason I came on was to email
you and give my address again as I thought you have for gotten it.
Anyway where are you presently? I hope you don’t mind me asking such question.
It seems as if you don’t have much time in hand because you could not find the
time to drop me a line. If there is a problem yo must let me know as we all aware
that communication is very vital.
MM
m#
sj
012–46
Hi#
Appendix 233
Hi MM
I am well and not sure if I mentioned in my last email but i was in the verge of
moving out of New York when i saw you in Jamaica. So i have done so and am
now in atlanta. I am relocating here. Guess who lives here, well its FF remember
my friend who use to live in the Apartment (FF) across from you, and she had the
daughter, MM and you help move her up to PP hill road. Well i am at her house
now she has a HUGE beautiful house one that you see in the magazines. She is
doing very well here.
Anyway today i went to an interview for a job. I hope they dont take forever to
place me in a job because they have to verify all my info first so i am waiting on
that.
I went to do my driving test today too and i passed the first stage, how they do it
here is that you have to do a written test pass that first then make an appointment
for the driving test. They have you a provisional lic that you can use to drive with
in the mean time. There is no public transport in this neighbourhood cause its a
upper middle class/rich area so i must get a car.
FF is okay her school give holiday so i have sent her off to Canada to stay with
FF (my friend who i was living with there) i dropped her off on sunday. She was
thrilled to go cause she spent last summer there too. School is still on in Canada
so FF is enrolling her there too. School is out over here so she would be here bored
in the days.
FF is in Connecticut, i usually speak to her a couple to times per week when her
school gives holiday she is coming to spend a week with me and then go to Canada
with FF and also MM’s sister who lives in Canada now.
My mother is fine also my sister, my sister is pregnant she has a girl (remember
chad) well now she pregnant again and she is haveing another boy, she now will
have 3 kids. She works at American airline as i mention and says she sick of going to work already and will not go back after the babay is born so i have to hurry
up and do all my travelling now before she resigns and i dont get the free tickets
again.
Whats up with FF is she still teaching, hail up FF for me and of course FF.
bye lov FF
m#
sj
012–47
Re: Hi
Hi FF ,
Is your sister taking care of MM?. What is happening with him? remember he is
very special, full of potential. It is good to hear about your sister, tell her congratulation.
Tell FF hi, if she remembers me. FF is stil teaching, FF says hi,(her computer i am
using) FF also. Don’t kill anyone with your driving. I am working at MM LL as accountant of Caribbean Foods Ltd. (Foska Oats), there is an accountant for LL so i
am not the accountant.
MM is trying out for Vaz swim team, MM is beating him up, but everything is
alright. bye now .
m#
sj
012–48
ADSL
Hi FF: You mentioned your friend having ADSL. Is it expensive there? We have it
here and it is being offered to staff at a discounted rate but of course I don’t even
bother to enquire because it is VERY EXPENSIVE.
All now I can’t get over FF and the gardner. Then she have FF in the middle a draw
up and down like puppet.
We will talk tomorrow.
Lots of love,
FF
m#
sj
012–49
Hi FF:
Is who you talking to all afternoon?
Anyway, I just catching up with my mails from morning and saw the one about the
woman cussing out MM. That must be very dramatic because she behave as if she
have him under tight wrap.
Remember you getting older everyday and the older you get is the more difficult it
will be to start new relationship.
The monthly amount for the SLB is $3,000.00.
Appendix 235
I waiting to catch you before I go (it’s 4:20 here).
Love, FF
m#
sj
013–01
MM
How are you doing, I mistakenly pressed the enter key so the first mail is empty.
MM I am tired of sending you mails at jmmb and not even the kindness of a response I cant get from you.
Anyhow I hope you are fine, and that you are doing well at school. I wanted you to
know that the toll free number you gave me does not work from up here so could
you please email me and tell me what to do. I will be calling you sometime, please
remind me of your cell number, so I can get you right away I have no time for
jmmb waiting numbers. smile
my number at home is XXX, just give me a call when it is possible, remember we
are all of five hours ahead of jamaica, so until I hear from or call you
be good
FF
m#
sj
013–02
FF
Hey MM
I see you have abandoned me, I wonder is what I did you (smile) how things, are
you alright, I will be telling you at the end of this week or the start of the new week
when exactly to take the money down to new erea.
By the way how much you got for your proposal, I hear that some very terrible
grades were given, I hope you at least got 10 out of the 20, anyhow take care and I
will talk with you soon
FF
peace
m#
sj
014–01
Dear Dr. LL,
I will try to state in my understanding of the Bible what faith is and how one tries
to acquire faith. A definition of faith is given at Hebrews 11:1 where we are clearly
told that faith is the ”evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.” To
have faith one needs to see something on which to build or base this faith. Faith
must always be based on concrete evidence. For example the visible creative works
testify to the presence of a Creator. (Romans:20) Another reason for our basis and
belief in God is the fulfillment of prophecies some of which have been attested to
be historical evidence. (Not that we need outside evidence to cause us to have faith
but it at times helps us to see that thre is concrete reason outside of the Bible for
our faith.)
Faith can never be credulity. Knowing that something is imposssible and still
putting all one’s faith and trust in it would really be tantamount to insanity. For
me I think that I trust Jehovah (the personal name of God) because I have seen
evidence of His hanfd in my personal life and in the lives of others. As you pointed
out prayer at times can really sustain and comfort us so when we pray to jehovah
we feel his response to our cries for help. We realize from our interaction with him
that he is a real person who exists.
Abel put faith in God and was counted as one of the first person with great faith.
Why did he demonstrate faith? Did he have any evidence? Yes. He saw the flaming
sword the thjorns and thistles outside the garden and the face that his parents were
growing old and dying.
m#
sj
015–01
what’s going on..
Hi FF
whats going on long time no hear from you. Just came back from midsemmeter
break and trying to cope with the fact that final exams are only two weeks away.
FF came and visit me today, that was a surprize she said you should email her.
I spoke to MM otherday, MM was not there. Hopefully i can go and visit one day.
As for my boyfriend MM, him alright him give problem every two week, but i am
still loving him.
Appendix 237
FF have you booked your flight as yet, hurry up and come...
love FF....
m#
sj
015–02
re: what’s going on..
Nutting nah gwan. Same ole same ole. Life soon get better though. Say hello to
your sisters. LOVE UU
m#
sj
016–01
translation
ok then madam i see you are a lady of your word and thats a plus in my books ok.
what i said in the little note i gave you was basically, ”that i would love to be with
you” mi gustacia mucho estar contigo i hope it got you good its just another way
of saying give a nigga a chance b4 you judge him. not you but overall ok. so if you
want you can call me @ XXX XXXX anytime ok peace. and my school is WILLIAM PATTERSON UNIVERSITY it is in mew jersey and yes it is a beautiful
college or university as it is called ok. i also speak 5 more languages along with
spanish ok.
i have no idea what to say. you caught me off guard ok so now we have accomplished the friend thing lets keep in touch ok see ya.
m#
sj
016–02
hello
Everything is cool but could be better.
Studying, for me I am way behind in that race, however I hope I will speed up very
soon to reach the level that people like you are at.
I hope we all do well in our upcoming exams.
By the way, haven’t you find any guy on campus yet? Well, whether or not you have
I want you to know that I am still available.
I am still free and single.
Until next time take care of that sexy body of yours.
LET LOVE LAST LONGER.
MM.
m#
sj
016–03
J.O.S
Hey FF, what’s up it’s MM. How’s your summer been. I just couldn’t resist the opportunity of writing you, you are a nice friend to have. Hope your summer classes
go as well as you want them to and hope to see you again sometime soon. Haven’t
got much to say, ain’t really a talkative person. I don’t say much but I am a smooth
talker. Enjoy your summer, I’ll write to you soon.
m#
sj
017–01
you must be crazy
If you think I’m going to call you on a cell phone you out of your damn mind!
HEY BABY, HOW YOU DOING?
NO, I’M NOT MARRIED YET.
MI NUH BREED NOBODY EITHER (AT LEAST I DONT THINK SO) I DONT
KNOW WHEN I’M COMING BACK YET. MAYBE I’M ALREADY HERE, MAYBE I’M STILL UP THERE, YOU WONT KNOW NOW WILL YOU.
Bye the bye, congrats on getting through to the big place, I knew you would make
it a long time ago. Oh I see you didn’t mention the car crash though, what think I
wouldn’t hear about it?
Anyhoo I will be seeing you soon (provided you send some pictures of your foiiinne self my way, but how come this is the first e-mail I’m getting from you? You
know how much bloodclaat mail me send yuh likkle raass? Mi bex man!
You know the way I feel right now, I dont want to talk to you again. Thanks for
reminding me. Mi gone.
ONE
P.S. Make it up to me by telling me who is the new male in your heart that had you
all summer. Think I wuoldn’t hear about that too?
m#
sj
017–02
JUST A SHOUT FROM ENGLAND
Appendix 239
I ARRIVED SAFELY ON WED. MORNING TO A GREY DAY, BUT REACHED
HOME TO FIND A LITTLE SUNSHIHE. THE DAYS ARE FAIR SO FAR BUT
QUITE CHILLY.
MY JOB SEARCH HAS BEGUN AND I AWAIT APPLICATION PACKS AND
SO FORTH.
TAKE CARE AND KEEP ME POSTED, IT’S BORING HERE.
BY THE WAY HOW ARE YOU DOING, WHAT’S NEW? LET ME KNOW.
BYE!!!!!!!!!!1
m#
sj
017–03
intouch
OKay people....
look here nuh.....
I still do exist... it would be nice to get call from u people once in a while..
okay fine..... u live in jamaica... thats expensive... i understand.. how about writing me an email every now and then... that would be nice.. Keep me informed on
whats going on down there..... hmmmm....
Anywayz even better..... a hand written letter would be soooo nice. hint hint..
if u don’t already know.. whgich i’m sure u all do...my mailing address is...
XXXX PP Avenue
#XXX
Fort Lauderdale, Fl XXXX
u zimmi...
MOMMY.... this one going straight to u :-)
m#
sj
017–04
HI THERE !!!
HI FF I KNOW I DONT REALLY SEND U E-MAIL BUT I JUST THAUGHT
THAT SEEN AS I’M IN THE COMPUTER LAB I MIGHT AS WELL. HOW IS
EVERYTHING, I DONT REMEMBER IF I’VE SEEN U TO TELL U HAPPY
NEW YEAR, BUT U KNOW THE REST. OH BY THE WAY MY E-MAIL ADDRESS HAS CHANGED TO [email protected] i DID THIS BECAUSE THERE
IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH MY CURRENT ADDRESSS. ANYWAY I
HOPE THAT YOURE NEW YEAR WILL BE A MORE PRODUCTIVE ONE
THAN IT WAS LAST YEAR, NAD I’LL SEE U SOON.
MM
m#
sj
017–05
home....!!!
hey guys...
I”M HOME !!!!!!!!!!!
YES!..... u know how long i waiting to come home man.
well for those of u down here in Ja and know my old cell phone number(the one i
had down here)... well it still works surprisingly... so give me a call..... b/c i realize
a lot of u changed ur numbers without informing me.....
FF
m#
sj
017–06
Hey girl!
Hi FF,
It was so nice of you to reply. I had no idea that you were still in jamaica, i thought
that you would be here too. It seems to me that everyone has left jamaica.
life has been good so far i can’t complain. I live with my oldest sister and my niece
in Pennsylvania. I am currently enrolled in a community college.. Montgomery
County Community College, I am studyign Dental hygiene. I want to go on to
Dental School. I am also working at a Dental office as an assistant. i love my job
and what i do. i recently ran into another dentist who offered me another job so i
should be starting that soon.
because of the new job i will not be able to come home for christmas but i’m thinking about coming home for spring break. i just home that everything works out.
I haven’t heard from FF myself, But i know that she is in New York somewhere.
Maybe i can get her number from her dad.
well i have to run now i have a meeting at school. i am one of the officers for my
dental hygiene class.
Appendix 241
If you know anyone that i would like to talk to let me know their address or #.
Take care for now and NUH BADDA FIGET FI WRITE.
FF.
m#
sj
018–01
Haven’t heard from you
It’s me again ur little sis. I imagine that u must be very busy seen that i have not
heard from u, but it is the vibes. Hope u and ur family r ok and the rest of the family on that side. Mi jus a hail u up. ok bro. one love FF aka tourist but registered
FF bye
m#
sj
018–02
Re: Haven’t heard from you
Greetings sis, I’ve been working hard trying to complete this record.. did you see
my website... XXX.com give me your opinion at this address... hope to see you
soon.
Jah Guide..,
MM
m#
sj
019–01
Re: Glad everyone is alright
--- Hi Aunty FF,
How are you ? When I heard about the terrorist attack I immediately started to
worry about you and Aunty FF and everybody.
I have been trying to send you an e-mail the day it happened but the server was
down, even days after I could not get on the net. That’s the reason you had not
received an e-mail form me earlier.
Aunt FF told me that Uncle MM called and said that every thing was alright, and
I saw Mr LL and he told me the same thing.
Thank you very much for everything, everyone says thanks and hi.
MM started school and everything is alright. I also started my second year, things
are going great.
Thanks again. Glad everyone is alright
Love FF
m#
sj
019–02
Re: Hurry up and cum home
Hi,
Are you still dying from boredom?
I’m so tired these days. In some weird way going back to school will be a break,
considering that I won’t have to be working for eight straight hours.
As it concerns Ms. LL’s new party; you know how it is with me and the media these
days (we don’t interact much). I only get bits and pieces of info here and there,
hence I really don’t have much to tell you, so I guess you’ll just have to wait until
you come home.
I have so much to say to you but I really don’t have the time right now. You will be
getting an earful when you get back.
I miss you sooooooooo much MM, hurry up and come home to me.
Write soon.
LOVE
FF.
m#
sj
019–03
Re: Hurry up and cum home
FF,
Can’t wait to come bac home and curse the place again. Its ironic how depressed
and angry JA makes me feel, but yet still i «miss» it in a wierd way.
Did you get a chance to see the film «Life and Debt»? It started to show in the
cinemas right after i left. I happen to be flipping through the channels last night
and caught it. It should really teach all those anti-government people a lesson in
politics: ie, that its not only the govt. thats out to screw us.
I might be cum... opps... i did it again. coming home on Monday. I’ll let you know
for sure when i know 4 sure.
Appendix 243
Love,
MM
m#
sj
019–04
–
My Dearest FF,
Yes you guessed right i do have that book. and yes i do wish i was there with you.
Hey, why yu loose the queen Nefertitti braids? It cah get staile, at least not TO ME.
and thats all that is suppose to matter, right? (laughing) I just walk the whole of
Manhattan today (well it sure felt like it). i also went to Harlem, against FF’s wishes
who thinks that its «not safe». she was kinna right, its a dump. Is a real rass shame
what negro mek Harlem come to. wit all the money people like «sean john» mek
dem cah fix it up?!! Jus imagine, the place have so much history behind it. You will
never find white people neglecting their historical landmarks dis way!! Never!!
Anyways bye for now and write soon. Oh, and yeh, i always knew you would forget about me, you ungreatful woman!! imagine i come up here and spend all this
money on... whatever, when i get back.
Love,
MM
m#
sj
020–01
–
Hi FF Come down from your high horse now, 36 out of a possible 40 is not good
enough; where is the other 4 marks? Just KIDDING! I am still in awe about the
grade we have gotten I am so motivated to start reading for the final exams. you
can email me too you know?
m#
sj
020–002
Re:
MM,
I am so happy about the whole thing. When can we meet to start studying together? Do you realize that I owe a debt of gratitude to you for all the efforts that
you have put into it. Those graphs were fantastic.
m#
sj
020–03
–
FF Thank you. I want to start studying as of next Tuesday. Mrs. LL showed you the
project? how was it? MM
m#
sj
020–04
Re:
The project looks good but I think we could have gotten a 37 or 38 grade. What
do you think?
m#
sj
020–05
Re:
You know that I was not too thrilled about the whole presentation, because by my
standards I think we deserved no more than thirty because we could have done a
lot better.
MM
m#
sj
020–06
Re: UWI
My computer just informed me that you are online
m#
sj
020–07
Re: MS22A
Hi FF
How was class yesterday? What grade did we got for our project?
MM
m#
sj
020–08
Re: Your Book
I took your book to school three times last week and I did not see you on any of the
three occasions what is the matter with you girl? please reply
Appendix 245
MM
m#
sj
020–09
–
Hey MM (my cashy cousin)
How are you long time no hear from you. How is everything - still pulling down
them big bucks, old «activist»?
m#
sj
020–10
RE:
Glad to know you are still pulling down the big bucks, well I am still hanging in
there bearly getting paid but still giving thanks.
MM
m#
sj
020–11
Re:
Shame on you to be mocking me like that. Is it true about the part you’re bearly
getting paid? I hope not
m#
sj
020–12
Re: Scandal in the MINISTRY
What are your comments on the big fiasco in the Ministry of Water and Housing
(my former workplace as you know)? I knew it would happen, it was only just a
matter of time.
So, how is everything with you? GOT ANY PAY INCREASES YOU WOULD
LIKE TO SHARE WITH ME???? I could do well with a car right now, but it is
way out of my league. It hackling to get to and from school especially now when
its exam time. By the way i am not doing so badly, as I expected, in school getting
a couple A’s and a few B+. Thank again for the use of the internet account i hope i
don’t bother you when you want do work on the net and i am on.
MM
m#
sj
020–13
Re: Your Studies - UWI
Hi MM How are you? Long time I don’t see or hear from you how are you keeping
up the studies? I hope you have been studying, I am stressed out. I have three exams next week: FD12 (the controversial one you may have seen on TV last night),
MS22A and FD11A. I still have about six chapters to read in OB and I have read off
all the FD12A though. How your MS21C coming on? You must study you know,
I am counting on you.
MM
m#
sj
020–14
–
Hi FF
How was your weekend? To the point, I am wondering if we could start studying
FD11A and FD12A and also the two accounting course from this week on, during
the day in the library? I could come to school in the days, as you know, I don’t have
anything doing in the days and i suppose we could work between your classes.
MM
m#
sj
021–01
More Virus Info.
Mr LL, I just read an article from the Symantec (Norton) site that seems to be
very disturbing. Now more than ever, hackers seem to be tapping into the vulnerabilities of Microsoft. If you should read the article below, you will see that they
(the hackers) have been using the Instant Messaging network to either gain access
to users computers or to entice them to download malicious software. I cannot
emphasise enough the need for us to start work on the user policy here at the Ministry. It is of paramount importance. We all know who’s neck will be on the block
in the event of a serious “virus-related” crisis. Please read the article below very
carefully and let me know what you think.
MM
m#
sj
021–02
RE: Access to HM’s electronic calendar
Appendix 247
Everything is fine. I’m just a little overworked (as usual). I had a problem at Antidumping yesterday and so after class I had to go back to sort it out. Didn’t leave the
bloody place till 12:30 or so :-(
Anyhoo, I’m ok now. Thanks for asking.
m#
sj
021–03
RE: Access to HM’s electronic calendar
Ok, mi luv tek it easy.
m#
sj
021–04
By the way, nutten neva gwaan wid FF. W went to another party afterwards and
didn’t leave until after 4 or so. She decided to go home after that. There will be
other times however..... hahahaha
MM
m#
sj
022–01
everyting a everyting
Yes my girl, is like a ting like STREEESSS! Apart from dat, I is quite cool. I had
Geology practical yesterday for 3 hrs. and it was ok, but i messed up the last question - so it goh.
It look like i ain’t reaching the Logos this year as my people are quite busy, but they
goin try a ting.
On the matter of the orient issue... we will labrish about that in person;)
Well i’m imprisoned in the library at the moment and clearly in writing you dis I
am bussing a idle flex - next stop Carib (yeah right). Scorpion King will be seen on
cable. Well i gone, so love and madness - later*
m#
sj
022–02
Hey CHICA
Hey Chica, Stop stealing my lines - Chica’s mine!!!! So how is home and all ? I
Hope your mom is fine an not giving u a hard time. When are results coming outi want to fas’ in yuh business. Seriously though have u spoken to her about next
year? Anyway on to good stuff - How is the vacation going.
I am fasting today so i could deal with some good “stir fry” - Know anyone who
can help me out. Hope u are getting some good rays at the beach. Have u heard
from the man? Are u O. K. with everything? I am currently unemployed but it
is o.k except for the broke part. Just relaxing catching up on all the lost sleep -YEAH RIGHT! Everyone is good 4 now . Gotta go and do something IMPORTANT rather than writing u some e-mail (jus kiddin). By the way -what hotel are
u going 2 work at u JOKEOLOGIST u! LATER
m#
sj
022–03
Re: Hey CHICA
Dear FF
I just wrote u a nice long letter then the computer started chatting garbage and
apparently ate so i am having words wid it at the moment. I will write u back soon
a promise.
Luv FF
m#
sj
022–04
My girl, where are you - u dash me weh? I haven’t heard from you in ages. I have
a feeling you are re-celebrating ur honeymoon :) I am not sure if you are still here
or in the States. I should be coming back in Town at the end of August. I should be
getting a holiday job soon but meanwhile I am enjoying the bliss of either idling
or doing absolutely nothing. I have an apppointment now so I’ll catch you later
-Bye.
m#
sj
022–05
FF gyuurrl!!!!
What’s up chica? How is the working life? I am supposed to start a summer job
soon hopefully in a hotel. Otherwise, i am enjoying the sheer bliss of doing absolutely nothing (apart from watching hours of cable). I am on my ‘summer selfdevelopment plan’, and I am also learning calculus for summer so that I can do
Geophysics if they offer it this year.
I miss ya dearling. Mommy is running me off the computer so later - bye.
Appendix 249
m#
sj
023–01
This is a letter of Displeasure
What I’m about to say is not nice. It’s actually quite horrible but here goes. WHEN
WE SET MEETING A EVELING TIME OONU MUS TRY AN’ NOT ONGLY
MEK IT BUT CANTRIBUTE!
Guys, on a serious note. We are set back significantly when we do not meet weekly.
Why you may ask?
1. We can’t update each other on what has happened (i.e Committee meetings, conferences)
2. Our show idea just drags along and doesn’t pick up. It’s been almost 2
months and we have very little to show for it
3. We look unprofessional. (We need to have a meeting with Natalie and
what will we have now that we didn’t have last month)
4. It makes us look like a set of charlatans. (Action is what we need now more
than ever)
Everybody is busy. Don’t ever forget that. We all could be doing other things but it’s
a sacrifice to meet weekly. We all knew this when we entered the programme let’s
keep our committment to youth and to NCYD.
A good executive is one who schedules his time properly. We all need to be great
executives.
On a lighter note all Ambassadors are expected to attend Commonwealth Day on
MONDAY MARCH 11, 2002 at 11:00am at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and
Trade. I have confirmed attendance for us all so please make every effort to attend. If you feel you can’t, tell someone before hand so we can apologize for your
absence. And when we say before we mean like the Friday before. Thank you all for
reading this it must have taken a lot out of your time to do so.
A most disgruntled Ambassador,
MM.
P.S Maybe we can set a Monday meeting with FF after Farin Affairs.... that would
mean we would have to meet Sunday to talk before.... what ya’ll think? Lemme
know!
m#
sj
024–01
hi FF whats up i was not home for the weekend so i just got your mail, and MM
doesnt run taxi anymore i thought u knew that and even if he did we dont really
talk so....... anyway how was your weekend and why havent u called me? oh let me
guess, i did not reply to your e mail and your pissed right? do think i check my
mail everyday? FF im just messing with u dont take it too personal now, anyway
im gonna get off now i have exams now but give me a call, okay sweetie, well have
a good day later
m#
sj
024–02
hey boo
hey girl whats up ell i know that i promised to write u a long loong mail but i dont
have the time, right now i am getting ready for school (group work and u know
how that go) but i decided to drop u a few lines to explain to u whats up and when
i get home i hope to write u even if it is late tonight so please understand..... i know
u do and i think that MM is in truoble FF i really think he is going to hurt himself
and i tried to talk him out of it he really has some issues, i told him even if it is over
betwee u guys he has to go on and who knows maybe in the future u guys wil come
together again he just has to be strong and take life one day at a time and although
it may be hard now time heals all pain..... i told him that u r going through a lot of
shit too but what u r not giving up u have to go on its not easy but at least u r trying and i am so proud of u because its so hard. well mi have fi go now sweetie but
i will hit u up tonight. bye FF.
m#
sj
025–01
wassup FF!!? i am in florida... have been here for the past 4 months... i will be returning the end of may... how is everyone
please tell FF hi. she must think that i have deserted her but i was going through a
rough time in my life that is why i am here chilling out. how is FF? i know she must
be having the time of her life..... how’s UU?.... i hope u succeed in ur exams....
MM is ok he is a little upset with me for ‘abandoning’ him. but i just needed to sort
my self out for a while. as for jobs... nuttin naah gwaan fe me.... i will return soon
to depressing jamaica to restart my job search......
Appendix 251
take care and give my love to MM and the gang..... respond soon......... by the way...
when are u coming to miami?..... did u hear about the new u.s immigration law?
dem wicked eeeh?!!! anyways such is life..... later
m#
sj
026–01
hello there!
Hey FF... Whusssup kid. Sorry bout that half dead letta that I sent to ya, nothin
really was behind. Only reason I wrote that was because I really didnt have much
to say.... really... nothin at all to say. I knew one of my egocentric sensitive friends
would hhhave to say somethin bout it, and it figures that it would be you. Laaawwwd how yuh so nuff (lol)
seriously though... I came up into a bunch o’ crap... and I was a bit upset bout it... I
just wanted you to know I was alive. But even then.... I shouldnt have done that.
Well babes. The baby is gonna have to start using Newspapa fi cover im ass... and
I know he’s only 3 months old... but he’s gotta go find a job now... seriously.... any
bway wid a ting dat toing is considered a man... and I is the only one who should
have the ting that swing. As fi the milk... I heard that Breast milk is jus as good.
(Got Milk??)
Im really glad to hear that you’re back in town... wish I was there than here... trust
me on that. Florida serrrrriously sucks. Everything that I thought would happen is
happening... but I’m not gonna weigh you down with that cool. I reaallly wish you
were here though. I need someone to talk to.
Lets see. Besides working (which is just a few days out of the week) at this company in Tamarac doin close to nothin, Im not really up to much and on the side Im
doin some baby sittin... its kinda cool.
It seems like I never left, everything is the same as last year. I came back to the same
conversations, and everything else.... just like last year... NOTHING has changed.
(There I go already... Im not going there)
I thought you were gonna stay with Martin’s cousin?? Before I left he mentioned
something about you staying in Mona or something like that..... why dont you call
him and see. Trafalgar road kinda far still.
So how’s VIDEO PRODUCTION at cptc goin so far? I know you gonna love it.
FF... I really miss you and MM. seriously. everynight I think about both of you
and smile. I was very happy around you both... seriously (O.K... Im not gonna get
too mushy or start sounding like MM or anything... so I gine stop) But you know
what I wanna say right... and we always knew how to say things without sayin too
much... well I did at least (lol).... b4 you say anything on that note... yes You....
(lol)
I wanna say so much... from the start to the finish bout whats goin on here.... and
I know you have soooo much to say right now.... bout everything. We soon talk.
Just give me a number that I can call you on. Not a Rass am I gonna call yuh cell
phone gyal. (lol)
As for your ass... I couldnt resist.... what ass..
I spoke to FF online couple times, she told me she spoke to you and all. She’s bored
as hell too and missin us. Eyyyyyyyyyyyy How’s FF???? She dead yet?? Send Funeral arrangements via e-mail. Preferably fulfilling FF’s wish of Curried Tweegy.
*grin*
Hail up MM fi Me Zeen. Tell him fi mek sure im link mi fi di ting inna di year
(Dont say a thing about my language just now).
Oiiii... I have so many things to tell you.... I met this girl... her name’s FF.... etc.
(soon tell you more)
You know what... I gonna go compose my thoughts and give you the full 100 tomorrow cool.... I promise babes. I hope you continue to keep in contact, and tell
me whussup whenever you can. But I writin you a niiiice long letta tomorrow...
cool.
As always nuff love
MM (PP)
(Please dont mind the jumbled thoughts... You know how I get sometimes)
m#
sj
026–02
hello there!
that has got to be one of... if not the longest email i have received... and i mean it
is not even a forward or anything. well its really great to here from you... sorry i
could write sooner cause i have to come up to school to use the computer and
yeah, i have’nt been here everyday. thanks for your concern (such a darling)... but
the hamster STILL LIVES!!!!! anyways the course at CPTC is going good i’m really
enthusiastic about it. by the way... my friend FF is here. she came back just recently
and now she is trying to enter miss cornwall (talking about ca’nt keep still). that i
Appendix 253
am very glad about. i told her about you and about how close you and i were and
how much fun we had, i am yet to see her so you’ll here more.oh... you do’nt have
to call me on my cell. (cheap ass Sketel) i have a home #XXX–XXXX and you can
call me anytime! it my own line. i am pretty cool with where i am living. i mean it
si not so far from anything. it might be just a little way from uwi but remember i
am not going back there and besides i might get a job at Centennial... but like i said
i keep you posted. and besides i am staying with family. speaking of which, sorry
to hear about all thats going on up there... you sound kinda outta it. just hang on
in there kid! it will be over soon. anyways i miss you again and trev too do’nt think
i forgot her. and i am glad that you were all excited to hear from me... it makes
replying to you worth while (as usual) any ways the baby tried to get soom work
but i do’nt know what wrong they keep turning him down... saying him do’nt have
enough ‘EXPERIENCE”... but you know if no one employs him how him going to
get experience? i really do’nt know what this country coming to! that why mi ca’nt
wait fi de papers fi come true... you know from when you file fi we? by the way the
newspaper idea... PERFECT! anyways i hope you write back and try to have some
fun! LOVE YAH! FF.
m#
sj
026–03
Heeeeyyyyyy
Hey you, You just ran across my mind (Guess thats why I cant get rid of this headache... lol... get it... you running... ahhhh whatever, if u didnt get it... you should be
doin farm work... yuh ppl dem a waste money... lol)... guess I miss you more than
I thought I would, right. So Im really just writing to say “Hi, I miss you... cant wait
till the summer’s over so I can see you.”
Well, there isnt much to say from this side. Fla got better, but just as it got better,
I have to leave for NY in a couple o’ days... life’s just like that right. Well I always
loved NY... so I bet its gonna be hype right.
This isnt gonna be a long one cool.... I think MM said all tha there is to say right
now.... ohhhh... Im cussin yuh tooo... LAWD YOU CANT TEK THE INITIATIVE
FI WRITE MI EEEEEEHHH..... WHAT KIND O’ FRIEND ARE YOU HUH....
LAWWWKKSS... lol... just messin roun.... BUT YOU NEED TO WRITE....
Well... again I miss ya... hope all your plans are going as you want them to... and
hope you’re having lots o’ fun... coool.
Be good kitten.
Peace
MM
m#
sj
026–04
Re: Heeeeyyyyyy
well hi back at you for your info I have being good nothing going on in ja as far as
I am concern havent started studying yet and things are looking mighty dim but
shit I might still be able to pull it of
oh yeah I miss you too and I miss Shamrock and regretting now more than ever
that I didnt reapply it suck I guess it all came down to very end of the semester
when all the cool people remained on Shamrock and the others (you know those
who I am talking about) left that eveything on shamrock just mellowed for me
anyhow damn I miss it a lot esp with so much restriction at home. I miss our constant disagreements over every and anything and you acting all deep and philosophical.
I guess I’ll see you in september but it will never be the same. Well I have nothing
else to say hold up just want to know that I no longer feeling sorry for myself I got
closure re my shitty ass relationship and I have come to the grand conclusion that
I really dont hate men and love women all that much I mean they are nice but not
that nice.
m#
sj
026–05
Yuh miss me?!
Hey MM mi no understand yuh.... bout yuh wish mi did deh deh fi chill wid yuh
and yuh implicaton seh a me alone yuh can have decent conversation wid, and
when we deh a school yuh barely know mi much less have “conversation” wid
mi!!!! A wha yuh deh pon, yuh mus really lick yuh head if yuh miss me..... lickle ol
me....... boring ol me....... (headache come back now?)
Anyway yah man... so what a gwaan. Mi miss yuh to, wid yuh lickle cute self. So
what yuh up to? Working? How the girls? Mi know seh some a look yuh and mek
sure fi tek nuff pictures, and bring back sinting fi mi, cause last year yuh go weh an
come back wid yuh two long hand dem! Anyway mek mi gi yuh some news and
after me say it no wrtie me an tell me seh mi confused or nuttin like dat....... me and
MM break up. Y? Cause mi still in luv wid MM. Anyway so mi a work pon dat.....
When are u coming back? What do u plan to do for the summer? Y New York?
How’s the family? Hail up Dad for me and don’t 4get father’s day is Sunday.
Appendix 255
Luv ya baby,
FF
m#
sj
026–06
Re: Heeeeyyyyyyyy
be good kitten? how lane can you get? anyways i am just here. by the way i really
have’nt gotton a chance to check my mail often so that’s why you don’t hear from
me as much. anyways i am not up with much... wait i did write you did’nt you get
my reply? it was really long and funny and i continued to talk about our imaginary
child. well if no... let me know. i’ll send it again. have fun in NY. love FF
m#
sj
026–07
Heeeeyyyy yourself
Hey yourself !!!
It is good to know you are living the life....
ok ok not all up there living but you are enjoying it. Me? Mi jus de ya box bout.
I am trying to get a job and let’s just leave it at that. Sounds like I am complaining huh? Well that because I need something to do. Something constructive like
working so I can get some work experience. Aside from my lamenting I am fine
(I guess) my television still works, I have books to read and once there is life there
is hope right?
Thanks for the email it is nice to be thought of every now and again. Nuff love and
enjoy NY for me ok.
P.S. Did your Daddy make you cut your hair???
Nuff LOve
Later
m#
sj
026–08
Hello kitten (puuurrrrrrrr)...
Oooh, you shoulda written to me in Spanish. I wouldn’t have understood one thing
you said, but it would have done two thing... I would have been very impressed
and think it sexy that you are so fluuueeent in the language (oii mami... groooowwwllll).... and two, I would have spent half the night cussin out yuh cllatttt as I try
looking through my Spanish dictionary trying to decipher it.... ‘cause besides Yo es
hambre (ummmm or was it hungrio... whatever), I know nothing else in espanol
(lol)... nada (did I just say that).... 4 years of lessons taught me squat.
Apparetly Im gonna have to start a hotmail account cause it seems like everyone’s
got one but me. I’m gonna do that tonite, Ill let you know it as soon as Im there...
cool. It would be cool, cause Im up til 3 or 4 in the morn online everynite.
Me sarcastic... nooooo... you think I would actually wanna dis THE Mount Hillaby... me... oh no... not at all... cough. Mmmmhhhmmm..... yyyeeeaaahhh.... continuing ohh, and about that comment you made (and I quote): “I know u ain got talk
for Mount Hillaby fa real? remind me to bitch slap u the next time i see u for that
sarcastic comment about that particular piece of geography....” (end quote). Now I
dont know why I found it so interesting cause here, Im thinkin first “you and what
army.”... Then I reconsider the thought, resulting me saying to me “Groooowllll,
you gonna slap [my] Geography... kinky”. ...lol (I couldnt let that one pass... Im
Jamaican, that was a loaded pistol... hmmm, I mean.... statement..)
Yeah, you got it right. I am in Ft. Lauderdadale. And yes I tried going out with
one of these many old fowls... Hold up before you think nothing naughty, here
me out first... it wasnt exactly ouuuut persay, just to her room to get a drink and
to freshen up (i dont think that helped much)... and secondly, it was a dead end
relationship.... didnt go too far.... I wasnt ‘freaky’ enough for her (I raised my eye
brow also cause to my knowledge, I dont know how she got this info out of about
an hour and a half worth of converse). She wanted... and I quote.... “Heart attack
material”... and NO I wasnt going to sleep with her (Well not for $100 at least...
lol). I know she had no teeth (you know what they say about women with no teeth
right... (*wink wink*)... lol... and Yes even though she said she could “teach me a
lot of things my youthful mind doesnt know”... and NO I’m not discriminating o
the basis of age and pride... But I’m not that desperate.... yuck. NOW LISTEN MS.
LL.... only you and I know this story (Im thinking SHE found her “Heart Attack”,
and died already so there is no third person)... and I would not be pleased if you
told another soul. It was an unfortunate incident that happened last year, anfd I do
not wish to rember it again o.k. WE WERE ONLY TO HAVE A CUP OF COFFEE... AND THATS WHAT I TOLD EVERYONE ELSE... o.k.... lol... Ill tell you
that one on another plane... It was last year when I was working.... ummm.... yeah,
so how’s the weather up there....
About you friend FF (No I didnt find it weird). I know its going to seem strange,
but remember, it has been a year. A lot has happened in both your lives, changes within yourself.... and the change is inevitable. Put yourself in her place, see
through her eyes... and understand. She sees you the same way you see her.... trust
Appendix 257
me. It took some serious adjustments and sorting out here with my family to get
back in the rhythm with them. It went to the point that a huuuggee arguement
erupted. But after that, we understood each other... I failed to see... and so did they.
Im not saying you need to let it get to that point. Just understand that you are both
different people now. You both have evolved into beautiful people, with different
perspectives now. Its up to both of you to make the move to remove that veil from
your eyes. make the move. Good friends are Very hard to find. you may be surprised, the friendship could get stronger... or it may not but accept the outcome.
If I were you, Id watch the phone bill. Remember you got Hall fees to pay (I wont
even say Tuition... cause your Government loves you lovely tax payers, and pays
that one... ours on the other hand... well as you know, they’re trying to screw us
from any conceivable angle possible). Parents can be some seriously spiteful sons
& daughters of of @#$%$ when they wanna be. Trust me pon that.... Why yuh
think I gotta work every summa.... It was about 4 years ago (Flashback) ...i remember well... Me running up the phone bill to JAM. $18,970.60 (yeah... jus’ call
it 19 gran)... bout I tryin to be a Cassava-nova with this girl in Canada.... ah-me,
memories you wanna forget.... Talk about ‘It hittin the fan my girl. Im still recoverin from the whoop ass mi pops gave mi. And Im still paying for it... they dont
say it, but I know I am.... lol. There I go draggin the letta on too long again. I like
to give just enough, so that you want more later. So, I gone... lol... Could you repeat
what you just said, I dont think I got it a while ago... dont mumble. Oh, and I do
see you as a kitten (Except at competition... I give you Tigress there), and trust me,
youre sweeter than you think... its a wonder you dont melt when you swim... sugar
melts in the water you know. (Yes, I know that definately sounded cornballish...
and again she rolls her eyes and says “ohh please”). Stop hiding it... you know its
true... you have to prove it otherwise.... aight Kitten...
Ciao FF... purrrrrrr
MM
m#
sj
026–09
Hey you...
Hey you,
How you doing ? Whatchu been up to??
Lets see, its been three weeks since Ive been in Babylon and already Im ready to
drag my skinny behind back to the Rock... but silly me... I remember I cant head
back, cause I aint got nowhere to stay. So I came up with this brilliant plan.... Ill
just head to Barbados, and stay with the friends I got there (Namely... ummm...
YOU)... right.... then I remembered... I’d actually have to buy a ticket (Which costs
an arm and a leg, plus half of my other leg), fly by BWIA for 5 hours or more, to
see Mount Hillaby... cough cough... Hmmm. So I think Ill just settle myself where
I am and be satisfied (Well, you’d be worth the trip, right). Besided, I dont think
you could feed me.
Florida sucks big time still. Nothin has changed much since Ive been here, nothing
at all. Same ppl, same conversations, same everything. Nothing has changed. And
again, as every summer, I miss you people, seriously. I was remembering earlier
today that last night of conversation we had, and I really enjoyed myself... youre
really sweet to be around, trust me... Its people like you that make me rember why
I love home so much. (Did that sound as corny as I think it sounded?.. lol)
Hmmm... Ill be heading to NY in a couple o weeks, so I expect the vacation to start
gettin betta. My girl... Fla is seriously Retirement State. Everywhere you go you see
one bag o’ ol’ ppl.... the other day I think I was most distressed when I went to the
pool, only to see 9 old women sunbathing.... and NO I was not appeased by the fact
that they had no tops on. It wasnt a very pretty sight at all.... trust me. Especially
when 2 of them started to smile with me a bit too brightly (i never understood why
I never had this much luck with younger girls, its always a granny that takes set on
me, the same thing happens whenever I come this side... go figure). No, thats not
for me... lol.... Made you smile?.... I like doing that.
Between home and work, there really isnt much Ive been up to here. Just a couple
o parties and clubs, the Beach, and chillin... thats about it, nothing too exciting.
What I seriously need though some conversation. I havent found anyone to do
that with.... tried, but dannnng, it failed.... It seems that we’re on a whole different
wavelength. I dont know?? maybe.
But thats about it from this side, nothing else is left to be said, and besides, I dont
want to drag the letter on and bore you (at this point you said “ohh please” in your
cute accent..... yes I think I can predict everything... lol)
Well, write me, cool. Let me know whussup. As I said you can tell me whatever you
wanna, so just do that cool. Dont take too long to reply, and I’ ll do the same.
Aight kitten.
Stay Sweet
MM
Appendix 259
m#
sj
026–10
Heeeyyyyyyyyyyy FF
Hey Super Super Senior Sargeant Major FF Madame
How are ya? Sorry for not writing sooner, alot of stuff started swampin me here
as soon as I got here and it really took some sorting out on everyones part. You
wouldnt believe the stress thats goin on on this side. However, lets not get into that
crap now. and I really shouldnt be makin any excuses. . So Whusssup? How Hall
life (Dont answer that). I know it must really suck being there close to alone, but
trust me... its gonna do you some good.
You’ll be thinkin bout a lot o’ stuff and resolvin things with yourself. Believe me...
I know... Ive been doin it 2 years straqight and I wish I could do it during the summers too.
What you need to do is just live a little by yourself and learn that you CAN breath
by yourself (Christ I sound like I should be tapin these things and selling them...
lol). I wish I was there though, I need some time by myself now.
Well, lets see. Florida SSSUUUCKKKS Massively still. Nothin at all has changed.
It seems like its a freakin continuation of last year.
Same converses, sme probs(and more), etc. There is absolutely nooothing to do.
Between work and home ther is nada. I’ve been out a couple times, but didnt really
have much fun.
There are several reasons behind this:
1. There are WWWWWWWAAAAAYYYYY too many old ppl in Fla. .
Dang, eeeverywhere you go is like a old age home. Even Miami Beach has
been flooded with them.
2. Evvverybody in my family has wayyyyy too many children, so of course
they have to take the kids with them wherever they go, or cut fun time
short to take care o them picknies (Not that Im irresponsible or anything,
but I really dont thiinkl I want any kids right now... they slow you down
alot)
3. Work, work, work.... and work.
4. Evverywhere tooo RRRRAAASSSS far. Cant go nowhere without a car,
and guess who dont have a license. So Any timre I wanna go out, I have to
wait until smaddy inna di mood fi go out. Rass man. I tried to ride to my
destinations, but it too rass far Til mi ass start fi hat mi now.
5. Nobody comes out of there hoouses. If they do come out they either Old
ppl, or young pickney. CCho.
6. School’s still on up here, so all the young adults ‘roun the place are still at
school. Also, those that are around, are locked inside studyin.
Lets see. On a social level, I havent met many ppl. I met this girl when I was up at
my Uncle’s house the other day. He’s a producer, and he was ‘cutting her record’.
She’s Jamaican, my age, very sweet and very attractive with a beautiful voice (I
think you’ve heard a couple of her songs on Jamaican Radio), and reeeaally fun to
be around. However, I have to wait until smaddy inna the mood fi go all the way
to my uncle’s house, soooo the las time I saw her was 1 week ago today. We played
alot of pool, and its the eweirdest thing, thats basically all we do, for like 4–5 hours,
but its reeealy cool. We keep Conversation is at a low, but you can really feel the
vibe there... we just relax and chill. You know what I mean. She’s the only one I’ve
really spoken to since I ve been here and she’s vvveery cool. Besides that, a couple
of my g/friends that are up here call and we chat for a while. I’m suppose to call FF
(FF) to see if she’s up this side yet to see if we can jam or somethin. Also, I’ll soon
be headin to New York soon, so I guess it will be betta there,. I always loved NY,
its really alive.
Enough bout me though... hows you? I’m wondering if I should ask about MM...
but I wont. I like to see things unfold, so Ill see whats up there when I get back.
Whatcha gonna do for the rest of the summer? Gonna work? How was Cricket?
Tell me everything you wanna cool. I miss the talks we use toi have... long long
time ago, b4 everything got complicated (We all became such complicated individuals huh... lol... I’m seeing us in the movies... ‘ It#s... complex... you wouldn’t understand’.... lol). Feel free to just write and chat cool. Im usually online around 11 to
abot 3 in the morn, so if you wanna chat via messenger, you know where Im at.
Can I say Im really scred but next year girl. I mean really really scared. I want so
much to come out of it, in all areas. From the cluster to the hall to simply just me,
the person. Im want so much to happen. I want... everythin... lol... There goes that
comple being coming forth. haha. Lets not get into that now though...
Well, I think Ive written quite enuff for one letter. I hope I didnt bore you too much.
Just miss you and everybody else so damn much... and its only been 2 weeks. Can
you believe it.
I hope you write me back soon cool.
Nuff... I’m ouutta here girl.
Most Honourable Super Senior MM Sir... lol (a.k.a. MM)
Appendix 261
P.S I didnt cut my hair. My father hasnt seen it cause he’s in NY. He’ll see it in June
when he comes for FF’s graduation.
P.P.S... Could you do me a favour.... get me the e-mails of our Treasurer, Secretary
and C.E.A.C for me. I gotta send them some stuff thanks.
P.P.P.S... O.K, I know you gonna have it hard next year too, and you got your own
stuff to work on, but Im gonna need some guidance cool. I’m gonna really need
your help in many of the decisions I make cool. thanks again
m#
sj
026–11
Re: Heeeyyyyyyyyyyy FF
Hey S.S.S MM Sir,
You forgot the sargeant in your title - or is that just the drill sargeants on the line
who get sargeant? I know I get sargeant, but i don’t get major, just two supers. FF
gets Major, and three whole a supers! Damn... Anyhoo, campus kinda sucks, but I
was in MoBay as u know for the last five days until yesterday, so i enjoyed myself
there! Yes lawd! i needed that! Just relaxed. Went to the movies, went window
shopping, went actual shopping,b ought a hat i did not need, got cussed off by MM
for spending money i don’t have (another trait of you Cornwall men - y’all is nags!)
Went to ‘Ville during the day with him and his cousin from farrin and scared my
ass silly on the slides, went in the hot tub, went walking about down town, ran into
MM, limed and walk3ed about and explored town with him for an hour and half
or so (went to this area called Love Lane in Canterbury, which for some reason
caused UU and MM to nearly hyperventilate - u know i like danger- and it was
nightfall too) went to Ville during the nite with MM and his cousin again for some
serious, heavy duty clubbing, had a fabulous time, his car got a flat in the rain and
we got our asses soaked geeting it changed, but it was fun, limed all day on Friday,
went driving about int he evening, watched the Lakers game on tv, limed seriously
on Saturday, went to Ville, but only in the hot tubsd, cos i had twisted my hair and
was not about to get it frigged up going down the slide, wandered about a bit, and
returned to KGN on Sunday morning/afternoon. Whew! A really great time! Me
and MM? We neither here, there nor anywhere. Lie. We en kiss or anything, but
we getting to be normal aorund each other again, which i guess is good. He called
me this morning to let me know he’s leaving, which i appreciated. I have faith, what
can i say? I need to get to be his friend, without the romantic stiff there, and then
whether we get together again or whether we don’t, we will still have that strong
friendship base. At least he is trying to be my friend, whereas usually with his
exes, he said he is never friends with them, he said he has never been able to bring
himself to do that, but hey, I’m different. Anyways, I have to run now, I’m going off
to guild council retreat in guess where? Yes, MoBay. Ask me why i went last week
then. Cos most of my frenz are not there this week, so better i went last week - i’m
glad i did. Wish me luck and success at this retreat and i hope i don’t come out of it
with a splitting headache or high blood pressure, please god. You know i’m always
here for you. I miss you whole heap. I miss everyone. I’m dying for the months to
fast forward and for it to be August 11th and we ready and raring to go and make
this year such a huge motherfucking success. But then again, if i fastforwarded,
i would miss Cropover anbd Kadooment. But still home ent home, and here ent
home without y’all. This is my life now. How odd. Mi all a dream bout orientation
last night. Oh btw - we had some success with our battle vs. admin with regards
to orientation, but we still have some way to go. We managed to block them doing
what they wanted to do, which was push their recommendations thru under our
noses and force us to accpet it. They got slam dunked at the Finance and General
Purposes Committee meeting and FF was ordewred that she had to meet with us
and come to an agreement before they table it. Soooo, that’s where we are. Keep
faith! We WILL have our orientation programme - on Preston Hall and it go be de
baddest yet! We go be the shit. Anyways, i really have to run now, so bye-bye! Love
ya! When i reach home, you not going stop hearing from my ass on messenger.
lucky you.
FF
m#
sj
026–12
Eyyy Bwaaayy
how dare you send me a mail that you send to hundreds of people!!! talk about
tacky PP. i thought i was a little special... but no... i get a little note from you, but
then i realise that you send the same thing to every god forsaken person on this
island! well i’m fine thanks for asking. i’m just joking (before yuo start taking me
serious). glad to know you are making the dough for the both of us... because
the baby pampas soon done and the little tin a milk you buy finish already me
nu know what you think... the pickney eat everyday... not sometimes! anyways i
miss you. i found my ass (no comments please) back in kingston doing a course in
VIDEO PRODUCTION at cptc. is that cool or just cool! well i was in one piece a
ring-ma-row trying to find somewhere to stay. till now i am at MM’s Uncle’s house
in Trafalgar Park... yes my mom approved. well i hope youre having the fun that
you deserve... and please try to be as bad as you can... you live only once.(but still
be safe) (look who is talking) anyways plenty love and i hope to hear from you
soon. FF
Appendix 263
m#
sj
026–13
Well here I am in Babylon and LAAAWD I ready to get back home. I started workin couple days ago with this business place in the area, its nothin much, but I get
paid. I havent been up to much as yet, Im suppose to go out this weekend. I guess
it should be interesting ‘cause its a holiday w/end (Memorial Day [Go figure]... I
guess you gotta love the patriotism *Barf*).
Well I aint got much to say right now, so this is a short letta. Ummm... I guess thats
it. Ohhh Yo I miss ya all cool (Dont know Whhyy, but Ill move with the motion).
Lata
MM (a.k.a MM)
m#
sj
027–01
Hey MM,
I did not find any of the journals that you were looking for. I hope the other guys
help you out.
MM
m#
sj
027–02
Hey MM,
I will check the library for the articlws for you, but maybe only two of the journal
are here. I hope the other guys can help you out.
MM
m#
sj
027–03
Hello Mrs. LL, I hope you are well and that you are growing in the grace of God.
I was asked by FF LL to inquire of behalf of your son re information of the availability of bursaries to assist him in finishing up his research programme. I have
checked the Mona Office of Graduate Studies and Research and there is nothing
forthcoming. What I am uncertain of is, will MM need this assistance for the re-
mainder of this academic year or will he need it for the next academic year (2002–
2003)? If the latter is true then his possibilities are much better.
That is about it for now.
Best regards,
MM
m#
sj
027–04
Hi FF, I am not certain if it was FF or you who was responsible for the preparation
of the certicates for the change over ceremony sheduled for April 18, 2002. Here is
the list of the names of my committee members of the Mona Association of Postgraduate Students (MAPS) who should receive certificates.
They are:
Peter Edwards (Advisor)
Stacey McKoy (Secretary)
Jahlani Niaah (1st Vice President)
Indianna Minto (2nd Vice President)
Philip Rose (PRO)
Najwa Barnes (Treasurer)
Sean Townsend (Pure & Applied Sciences Rep.)
Dawn Stephenson (Social Sciences Rep.)
Don Davis (Arts & Education Rep.)
I would be grateful if you would address the matter for me. Please let me know the
outcome. Thank you for your cooperation.
Yours sincerely,
MM LL
(former Postgraduate Representative)
m#
sj
027–05
Hi MM,
How are you? It has been awhile since I have heard from you.
Appendix 265
I am fine. I currently working on my thesis and two papers at the same time.
How is your work going? Will you be moving on to a new Job shortly?
All the best.
Please remember to put Christ first in everything and things will work out according to His good pleasure.
Take care for now my friend
MM
m#
sj
028–01
sup FF FF
hey there,
is this FF from Al V?? if it is what’s up girl it’s been awhile. Well if this you hit me
back.
FF
m#
sj
028–02
is this ms LL?
hi, this mus be FF LL from PP. i am very sure. there is no 1 as crazy as u r. if so
write me back n let me know whats up with u. the last time i heard u were in
florida. don’t know how true. well i’m presently in miami for the summer.
FF
m#
sj
028–03
Re: is this ms LL?
hey it’s me it’s me it’s me ........ lol... word u in miami... let me have ur number so
i can call u later..... i know i’m crazy so what... lol i’m in California working and
attending skool as a matter of a fact i’m at work right now and i have skool at 6:30
to 9:45 that’s 12:45 ur time as i’m three hours behind y’all over there in Miami...
but wow i’m so syked to hear from u that’s way kool. But yeah i’mma let u go... i
speak to FF all the time, i’ve just recently started emailing FF i found her the same
way i found you and i talk to FF on the reg.... oh and remember FF FF LL i talk to
her to.
But yea gimme ur number and i’ll call u.
Nuff love FF (Sudar oops my bad FF... lol)
m#
sj
028–04
Re: u found me
hey there, we got diconnected earlier but yeah now i can reply to ur letter as my
boss just left so i have a few mins before i start working again. Well as i said before
i got to skool i’m in the program that transfers to UC-Berkely or anyone of the UCs
i want including UCLA. Well if u do decide to go to a skool out here in Cali let me
know and u can crash with me. I live in Concord which is 20 mins away from San
Francisco, that’s like 1hr 10 mins by plain to LA... yeah LA is hella far it’s like 4–6
hrs drive depending on whose driving. Can u believe i still can’t drive i’m learning
though... hopefully i’ll have my license (if that’s how it’s spelt) by September so i
can go about my business without bothering anyone.
Well right now my major is Computer Science yeah i’m doin programming and
all that good stuff.... i’m about to switch to Pre-Med though as my heart in really
in the Sciences. But yeah i work at this law firm, we have a real estate department
also and we also do credit repair and all that stuff so it keeps me busy. It’s part time
though as i can’t deal with working full time and goin to skool at nights i tried that
last semester and i was a wreck. I am in summer skool now and that gets out July
31st. Hopefully i’ll get to go to Connecticut on the 26th of July for my birthday is
on the 27th ...... i’mma be the big 20 baby... lol. So how is Miami?? I still can’t believe i spoke to you on the phone! Damn! it’s been a while.
Well it was great and i hope we continue to do so... i gotta jet as i have some more
letters to type and all that good stuff. Talk to u later.
Holla Back!!
Nuff Love
FF
m#
sj
028–05
Re: will write back soon
i was so disappointed when i tried calling you back yesterday on both phones but
got no reply. Oh yeah girl i love me some lifetime too... i watch there movies all
the time or should i say i used to as since skool started i be gettin home way after
they 9pm ones started. But yeah i’m hooked on it too like an addict on drugs......
Appendix 267
lol...... i’m happy i’ve found u too.... Damn it’s been a while. I hope u have lots of
fun this summer and don’t lose me email or numbers so u can use them as often as
u like and hit me up when ever u in the states ok?? if u see any email in ur mialbox
from Alicia with any different last name besides my own it’s me or if u see email
from any email adress with FF in it it’s me also as i have multiple email addresses.
But yeah i’m here at work chillin tired as hell but hey gotta make that paper dough
right?? So yeah i’ll holla back in a while hopefully i’ll hear from u soon.
Nuff Love
FF
m#
sj
028–06
Re: u found me
hey just to answer a few of ur questions........ i go to Diable Calley College..... it’s the
community college where i live at.... i’m in a transfer porgram that will get me into
the UCs or Cal States and UCLA means University of California- Los Angeles. I
work at the law firm it’s pretty neat... did i tell u this already i probably did well if i
did forgive my poor memory, but yea all is well with me here and i hope the same
is for you so hit me back and let me know if i already answered ur question and if i
didn’t i’ll write u again with all the answers... aiight... and oh FF FF doesn’t have an
email address well at least not one that i know of. I speak to her via telephone.
Aiight
Nuff love
FF
m#
sj
028–07
i havent 4 got u.
hi FF,
i havent 4 got u. just read ur email this morning n it was a blessing. very great
words 2 begin ur day with. i am about 2 get ready 4 work so i will write u on monday. i am so busy n tired. my feet hurt too. by the way how is ur mom?
love,
FF
m#
sj
028–08
Re: i havent 4 got u.
hey, yeah i thought u forgotten me........... my mom is okay for the most of it she
gets rather sick every now and then u know she has high blood pressure, asthma
and they say she has a slight case of diabetes........ but the Lord is keeping her in his
Grace. I’m so tired we left on Friday and now just getting back home at like 10pm
Sunday night we drove all the way up the Coast to the Red Woods and Eureka......
man it was like a 7 hr drive to the hotel. I’m here chilling though..... how are u let
me get ur digits again so i can call u man it’s been a while uh.... i sit and reminsce
about Al V sometimes and all the times we use to chill......... but yeah i’mma go as
i’m tired so i’ll holla later.
How is ur mom and how are u doing?????
Nuff love
FF
m#
sj
029–01
attention ladies and gentlemen....
back bye poular demand.....
he’s ure favourite person in the entire world....
u know him from such places as.....
st. peter and paul prep.....
ardenne high school....
and now he’s back in the attmosphere....
with no tan and really long hair....
itssssss MM....
yea thas right
the ruler’s back
HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!! finally i know u people missed me u had to have missed
me... i mean who else could make u people laugh like i can... and lets face it there is
no one who can compare anyone better to an animal than i can..... and u no thats
no joke....
Appendix 269
but anyway massive i will be back on the rock in exactly.... 16 days.... that would
be the 29th.... haha
see when big man did go a foriegn him learn how to count hahaha..... anyway just
thought i’d tell u guys that ill be home soon and im expecting GIFTS!!!! lots and
lots of gifts...... and no likkle fool fool gift nida u know some nice stuff like....umm
i dunno... a evo...
haha anyway lata peeps
see u in 2 weeks and two days
buh bye.....
guidance
m#
sj
029–02
hey people
by the time unu read this mi done reach home already.... but info sake today is the
18th and tomorrow is the 19th
u know wat that means.....
“and now hes back in the atmosphere wid no tan and really long hair eh eh eh
eh....” haha my little version anyway... yea
so jamdown expect to be rocked cause troy is coming home haha....”
yow, i role solo from state to state... haha”
and u know america found out that i was the baddest... (watch belly and find out
the res) in the US. anyway im reaching home at like 7 tomorrow so if u wan to
reach me call 1–XXX–XXX(mi digicel u don know) an if u don get through leave
a mess. zeen
and if anyting i link u tomorrow
so one love
keep the faith
bless
peace
astalapasta
cheerio’s
fruit loops
bla bla bla
sign
the jam down representative
MM
wid a CAPITAL M u zi mi
haha
m#
sj
030–01
Whats up
Hi MM whats up sorry it took so long to really email u seen that i just got the
chance and haven`t got much time . So how is life boy? what r u doing for the summer. I`ll try to highlight some other time on what up with me. bye
FF
m#
sj
031–01
the words i was loooking for - i am no longer religious
Maybe it is just i need to find my way bavk on my own with no influence or pressure from my parents or anything where i am expected to be whatever
My navel piercing was HOT or just cut hot
I did it rather spontaneously Christmas eve.
Story was to meet a friend in Portmore and did it in a jewellery store in Half way
tree on my way there
I had to be done twice since the first one wasn’t done properly so for a while i had
2 piercings the spoilt one has closed up by now
There was a time when i could only sleep on my back and could not slouch when
i sit etc etc
Appendix 271
I really wanted to do my nose though
What about you haven’t u transitioned lately?
i need news
FF
m#
sj
031–02
i miss you too and i’m sure the rest of us miss you as well
then again, who can forget FF the dictionary/ femaleist and the girl whi’s shoes i
hid since she was so into her argumentative mode
I’ve started school again i don’t read during school time
Actually i am half-way thru Shirley - the Charlote Bronte book i got from the library @ hchs and i had to stop seeing school has started
I don’t need a book to question anything - I’ve always questioned everything just
not in the open for the sake of not being labelled a blastphemist - spell check
I guess this guy don’t understand the meanig of f*** off or does he think GOD sent
him to you
Question: what r u looking for - lifewise ie what do you want to do with your life?
DO u think that every life has it’s purpose as God intnded it or are we just living
only ensuring that we can live comfotably
I know what i said sounds corny but i need an answer cause i think my life will
eventually consists of worthlessness
I have changed i know that and i guess i have changed a lot more than you think
or maybe not
I guess it was better having my father tell me my life than doing it myself.
chap3
FF
m#
sj
032–01
Hey, wats going on girl? A feel idle, u know seh a long time mi nuh rite yuh a line.
So, wats up?.... a miss u an all but i want to know if u’ve thrown me away after all
these years... a feel sooo soooo sad.
U cyaa call mi again babes? or has Steph found someone on campus and left me
to the dogs. U treat mi bad though an’ yuh know seh mi WOULD NEVA treat yuh
dem way deh, but a guess a part a life still. Rememba mi in life zeen, and call an’
let mi know wen i can collect di book from yuh and also let mi know wen a mus
return di othas to u.
LATA.
P.S Jus to let you know that i really mis u.
m#
sj
033–01
Re:
Hi FF sorry to hear about New Years Eve being shitty. Its always such a let down.
Mine was ok, well the actually party bit was ok - MM and I went to a ball at the hotel he works at in Runaway Bay - I got to dress up that was the best part I suppose.
It was the after party that was really excellent - if you know what I mean (wink
wink). Anyways I’m wondering what the miniature rcok garden dream means, but
I have no idea. Too bad you didn’t get to go to Mimosa I heard it was ok - from MM
and FF no less! They were in town as well.
So will you have to move out of your dorm for good... they really can’t do that! I
hope it works out. I know what you mean about working for a pittance, but you
have to start somwhere - and hopefully it will grow into something more. Anyway
please keep in touch. I want to know what’s happening. I will email you that picture we took at my house first thing next week. Love you loads, FF
m#
sj
033–02
HI Aunt FF, I just got back from a 4 day field trip. We went to Hanover and Cockpit
Country in Trelawny. I guess the highlight was going into a ganga field, a huge one
at the foot of Dolphin Head Mountain. I saw the rastamen drying it and picking it
and everything, it was an experience.
I’m really tired now, and I’m here at work.
Appendix 273
m#
sj
033–03
Hi FF,
Hope you had a happy Valentines Day. V-day could be called vagina day as I’m
sure its the day of the year when the instances of women being kind are highest.
I got a JOB at Birdlife Ja. 20,000 PER WEEK 20 hrs a week.
I started aerobics class, its really fun and keeps me in a good mood.
Love ya
Oh guess what, they want me to drive the company Suzuki Vitara around to do
their business, SCARY, but I’m up for the challenge, I just hope any driving incidents aren’t deductable
m#
sj
033–04
FF thats so good!!! $20,000 per week!!!! Congrats babe, I’m so happy for you. I
know this e-mail will sound insincere but I am genuine ly hapy for you. You have
to drive as well. Were you good to your vagina on vagina day? Hmmm.... should I
take a guess. I’m ok. Valentine’s Day was pretty depressing - I watched TV alone,
while all the couples in my house were having sex. I might be coming home for
easter, not sure as yet, my boyfriend says he needs me - I need him! He was supposed to come visit but can’t take the time off. Of course hes buying the ticket!
Anyway good luck with that... What exactly will you be doing. Write me soon to
tell me how its going. I love you and I’m so proud of you. FF
m#
sj
033–05
Re:
Hi FF, It would be cool if you came for easter, and even cooler that he’s paying. I
love you too, and I didn’t think that your email was insincere. I keep seeing MM
driving around in his Mark II, AND i keep thinking about him, I wonder if I’ll ever
stop it already. It’s good that you’re committed to your guy, I like that. I have a 4 day
trip all over leaving on Thurs, to Dolphin Head, Cockpit Country, Negril, it sounds
like fun and my classmates (only 2 people) are really fun and so are my 2 lecturers,
we make fun and give jokes constantly.
Kiss kiss, FF
m#
sj
033–06
Hi FF, haven’t heard from you in a little while... how’s bird life going? are you liking
it? I’m ok - I really want to come home but I don’t think I will cos it would mean
giving up a whole two weeks of possible study time and even though I really wish
I could be there I guess this is more important. Anyway I do know however that I
finish on the 29th of May - which is cool. Have you stopped thinking about MM
- just had a thought whatever happened to the other MM from Mt. St. Joseph?
Strange people just keep popping into my head... By the way are you participating
in the bacchanal festivities - I know you love the wine up ting! anyway write me
soon and let me know what’s up. Love, FF
m#
sj
033–07
Re:
Hi FF, Can you believe I wanted to go to a carnival session at UWI, and I couldn’t
find anyone to go with, well out of my 2 friends: FF and FF. Would you believe that
I had to go to New Kingston on Friday to EFJ. Of course MM was beside me telling me where to turn, which lane to take, and interpreting the stoplight! MM and I
are going to see Final Destination ii tonight. Well I’ve been going to aerobics for a
month now, and I have not lost 1 friggin pound, still standing firm at 130 FFFFFF
POUND. I know because I weighed my self. My gut is the same huge size, and I’m
beginning to accept the fact that I will always have my guttt, like my mom :). I really wish I could loose some weight. I’m at work, its boring and I have school work
to do, aerobics later, and movie tonight, cool huh.
I love, love love you. I was thinking last night that soon I’ll have to find a little
place of my own, a little car of my own etc. to go to work, but you can’t be my
housemate cause you’re going off with MM to live on the North Coast by yourself,
and most likely I’ll get a job in Kingston. But then maybe I ‘ll live by mysely in a
wonderfully decorated apartment, young free and single, enjoying my youthfull
days, what could be better.
muaah, FF
What’s it like with MM now and who do you talk to?
m#
sj
033–08
mash up suzuki
Appendix 275
The car mash up right, it has a transmission problem so they told me to warm it
up for 5 minutes before driving it, so I did, then now, as I went down past the UWI
gate, the dam car start rev out virm, virm, an nah move, so mi jus a virm virm and
naah move, yes it was shameful, two chiney people in a mash up suzuki
m#
sj
034–01
dutty chenk FF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
good afternoon ms LL, i does like di way u hav dashed me away. u doesnt call, u
doesnt email me, u does nuttin anymore. u didnt even send me a happy birthday!!
i does like di way u is flexin. thank u ‘friend’.
very upset friend, FF.
m#
sj
034–02
Re: dutty chenk FF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! w
hy hello ms. LL and good day to you too maam
for your Hinformation, you are di one who does not answer my hemails when hi
send dem to you. hi been wanting to know your fone numba if hit change hor nat!
but now u doesn’t write hor nutting hand den u come cussing me hoff!
look here now sah.. cho.... u waan mi nuh come home fi di crismus?
mind you know... i will links you hin the upcoming week.
den we will chat!.. what is you fone numba????
FF
m#
sj
035–01
Re: howdy
hey Baby,
what’;s up. well it is 4:45 and i am still at work my how i wishing i could be at the
beach. any way mi chile the least you could have done is write and say happy birthday cow. get what i am saying. any way i am getting old....... so let me say this before
it’s tooo later...... i really apppreciate our frendship. by the way when is graduation?
MM is in kingston. he is working at JMMB. any way love i will talk to you later
FF
m#
sj
035–02
RE: Fwd: This 1 just 2 wicked
i’m confused. is this MM or FF or just explain urself.
FF
m#
sj
035–03
Hi,
The identities keep dem guessing.
How r u do’n?
Tell me bout dat no!
FF/MM
m#
sj
035–04
Hey no joking if this MM please tell me, b/c if it is we have business to discuss.
FF no joking.
FF
m#
sj
035–05
Yes this is FF FF Price-Tag LL.
The name MM is for when I am sending things to people I do not want to know
my real name.
What is it that u havce to tell me? I am very curious at this moment.
Write me back soon.
FF
m#
sj
035–06
Appendix 277
Not u dumpling MM my brother i have nothing to fun tell u. how re u? i hope
good. r u going to find a british man/ u need to tell me about him when u guys
meet.
FF
m#
sj
035–07
write a fren a few lines no mi chile.
m#
sj
035–08
Re: alive
Hi FF, how r u? y r u acting as if I am the bad one here. I have been writing u I just
dont get a reply. what’s up with that?
Anyways how r u doing? please tell me u had fun on valentines day, or was it just
another day?
How’s England and do u have any intentions of coming back to this place? Try and
go to school there or something.
Please me what u are up to in more than one line. Thank u. How is FF? Is she married yet? if soon please send me a piece of the cake.
Take care. Love girl.
FF
m#
sj
035–09
Re: alive
look how is talking about emailing me.
if u had read the email before this one u would have known that i was in jam. for 7
days in jan. i wrote to u and asked u to send a telephone num. to me so i could call
u but not a word in english did i hear from u. i wrote to u and ask u if u had heard
from FF because i could not hear from her b4 she left here. if u here from here give
her my email adress and tell her to write to me.
i hear through the grape vine that u are doing post grad work. is it at uwi and are
u still living on seacole mi hall the hall of halls?
what ago on in u life chile find the baby daddy yet? (smile)
valentines day that come aready? when? does such a day exist on the calender?
because mi so old mi do not even remember dem things.
well drop a girl a line nuh?
love FF
i have not heard from charlotte for ever i guess she is too busy with her life at the
moment to factor in me. no hard feelings though.
lata den
Notes
1.
The term language is here used loosely, as the status of JamE and JamC as distinct languages
is not agreed upon among all linguists, cf. my discussion in section 1.3.
2.
At the time that fieldwork was carried out for this study (in 2002 and 2003), access to computers and the internet in Jamaica was strongly concentrated in urban areas, and ownership
of private computers restricted to a relatively small part of the population. However, both
private and public forms of computer access are spreading to rural areas as well.
3.
I will capizalize the adjective or noun Creole when it designates a specific creole language
(in this sentence, JamC), and use minuscules when the non-specific, technical term is intended.
4.
Patois, with stress on the first syllable, is the preferred local designation for the island’s
English-lexifier creole.
5.
According to Hippolyte (2004), in the genres of dub poetry and dancehall the distinction
between oral and written communicative modes is so blurred that the continuum between
the two should be conceptually “collapsed” altogether (82), so these are likely genres for the
written use of Patois. Both of these genres emerged in Kingston in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
DeCosmo (1995) gives a brief account of the history of Dub Poetry, and Morris (1993b;
1997) takes a look at the genre from a literary-studies perspective. In literary studies, the
term “performance poetry” is sometimes preferred, cf. e.g. Morris (1993a), Cooper (1995);
see Beasley (1996) for a defense of this term. Habekost (1993) provides an introduction
from a cultural studies point of view. Dancehall music is most comprehensively covered in
Stolzoff ’s excellent cultural-anthropological account (2000). Bilby (1995), Cooper (1994),
and Foster (1999) also provide shorter introductions to the genre. Its lyrics have also attracted the interest of linguists and literary scholars: Devonish (1996a) and Cooper (1994;
1995; 2004) address the phenomenon of the (Jamaican) cultural specificity of dancehall
lyrics, while Morris (1993a; 1996) must be credited with first exposing dancehall to the
scrutiny of literary analysis.
6.
Romaine (1988: 115-118) and Holm (1988: 32–33) discuss the development of the creole
life cycle theory since Schuchardt (1914) first mentioned a similar concept (using different
terminology than Hall’s model).
7.
Cf. Rampton (1998b) for a detailed introduction to the concept of communities of practice;
also Meyerhoff (2004).
8.
Or addenda, elaborations, etc. – for example, most of the functions comprised in Gumperz’s
notion of ‘metaphorical switching.’
9.
Bailey (1966) is the standard reference work on JamC grammar. JamC is probably the most
thoroughly researched Atlantic creole (Patrick 2004b: 407). For introduction and overview,
cf. the handbook articles in Kortmann & Schneider (eds.): Devonish & Harry (2004) on
JamC phonology and Patrick (2004b) on morphology and syntax.
10. There are various possible precursors to Ferguson’s use of the term, albeit not in the sociolinguistic sense, cf. the reviews by Prudent (1981) and, more recent and critical, Sand (1999:
39-50).
11. Both models feature functionally complimentary varieties. The main difference is that Ferguson (1959) writes about an H and an L variety, both of the same language, while Fishman
(1967) expands the scope to different languages.
12. This terminology has come to be associated with the model mainly through Bickerton’s
work (1975). The terms basilect and acrolect were previously used by Stewart (1964). DeCamp himself did not use any of these terms in his original formulation of the continuum
model (1971).
13. In giving transcriptions of Creole material I follow linguistic convention in using a phonemic writing system as introduced by Cassidy and LePage (1980). This excepts material
that has been written elsewhere, i.e. citations from the corpus, the internet, or other written
sources: in these cases I always cite the original orthography.
14. Even though early forms of the creole continuum theory, or precursors, date back to the
1930s (Reinecke & Tokimasa 1934) or even earlier (Schuchhardt 1914), DeCamp (1971)
is usually credited with applying the concept to the anglophone Caribbean, specifically
Jamaica, and developing it to its currently known and accepted version (Patrick 1999: 6;
Sand 1999: 51). Among other concepts that have become central to the study of post-creole
continuum situations, DeCamp’s research laid the groundwork for the method of implicational scaling, which Rickford (1987) proposed on the grounds of DeCamp (1971). Exhaustive reports on the history of the creole continuum theory are given, for example, in Holm
(1988: 52-60), Sand (1999: 50–61), Patrick (1999: 5–16), and Deuber (2005: 15–20).
15. DeCamp’s implicational scale for six Jamaican variables features seven speakers who
use the following variables to different extents: d~dh, t~th, pikni~child, no ben~didn’t,
nanny~granny, nyam~eat (DeCamp 1971).
16. While Patrick (1999) stresses the usefulness of the creole continuum to represent the Jamaican situation in one model (he focuses on urban JamC), he proposes significant modifications to DeCamp (1971) and Rickford (1987): a) urban JamC is gradatum, not a continuum, showing continuous variation within a wide range (mesolect–acrolect) but a sharp
boundary as well (basilect–mesolect); b) urban JamC is not unidimensional (as proposed
by Rickford 1987) but requires multiple social dimensions to accurately model variation
and changes in progress.
17. Devonish (2003) reports that as an expert linguist in a language-related judicial trial, he
found himself pressed to grant JamC language status, but found it potentially harmful to his
academic reputation to do so due to the many unresolved issues surrounding the question.
Wassink (1999) was unable to clearly solve the issue in her assessment of speakers’ attitudes toward JamC: some respondents “were willing to call [JamC] a ‘language’ […] distinct
from English […].” However, a significant subset of informants was also inclined to refer to
JamC as “broken English” or “slang” (81). – Mair refuses to make any commitment on the
question in his article on written language usage in Jamaica:
Recognising that it is impossible […] to give a principled answer to the question of
whether “what one typically hears in Jamaica” (which is not the same as saying: “Jamaican Creole”!) is a dialect of English or a different language with particularly strong
Notes 281
historical and lexical ties to English, I will capitulate right at the outset, but argue that
such a capitulation is actually productive. It allows us to break up a daunting major
problem into several more specific ones which can be coped with rather more easily.
(Mair 2002: 36)
In the present case, the view is cleared for the functional differences between the two codes
by a similar “capitulation.”
18. Code is defined by Crystal as “a neutral label for any system of communication involving
language – and which avoids sociolinguists having to commit themselves to such terms as
dialect, language or variety, which have a special status in their theories” (Crystal 1997a:
66).
19. As I argue in chapter 2, it is possible despite the empirically observable continuum of lects
in any given data set to determine which of the two codes a speaker/writer selected in practically any given utterance, or part thereof. This is especially true for written data produced
by a group of informants with quite homogeneous educational backgrounds.
20. JamE has been recognized as an outer-circle variety (cf. Kachru 1985) of English in the
past two decades or so (e.g. Shields-Brodber 1989), with feature-based studies such as Sand
(1999) and Irvine (2004) focussing exclusively on the variation in the standard end of the
Jamaican linguistic continuum. Peter L. Patrick’s work on variation in the mesolect is still
leading for that aspect of the situation (Patrick 1999).
21. Pollard, Lawton, and Shields-Brodber are native-speaker scholars of language in Jamaica.
22. “The evidence cited to support a linguistic continuum is insufficient, so far as Jamaica is
concerned. I wonder whether the present situation is not described more accurately in a
model of a two-language system, JamC and [JamE]” (Lawton 1980: 211).
23. However, Lawton (1980) probably goes too far in dismissing the creole continuum entirely,
including its value as a descriptive tool for the sociolinguistic situation.
24. I use diaspora here in the sense of the Jamaicans living outside of Jamaica, but of course
the Caribbean is itself often seen as African diaspora. In Mason & Allen (2003), the latter
is referred to as ‘diaspora I’ and the prior as ‘diaspora II.’ I will not adopt this conceptual
distinction here since it is not operative in this study and only the sense of diaspora II will
be used.
25. Cf. also Roberts (1988: 14) and Rickford & Traugott (1985: 257), who write that the recent
rise in prestige of English-based creoles in the Caribbean is a thing of post-colonial times
and the past few decades.
26. For example, according to the UK census of April 2001, 4.79% of London’s population
considered themselves members of the Caribbean ethnic group, which – given a total population of 7,172.1 thousand – means that the London Caribbean community had 343,544
members (ONS 2001).
27. Jamaican culture has enormous presence in these diaspora communities, but it enjoys great
currency even in places where no Caribbean diaspora is located. To mention two out of a
great number of examples: the genre of dance hall has spawned imitators in rather unlikely
locations, such as Central Europe. German-born artists sing and “toast” in Jamaican. This
can yield interesting and appealing types of cultural hybridity, as in the case of German
“SingJay” (a musician performing both in the DJ-style, i.e. rapping, and singing) Gentleman, who acquired JC in Jamaica from the age of 17 onward. Other “Germaican” artists
present less fortunate approximations of Patois, not apparently informed by any careful study of the rules of the Jamaican language. Nonetheless, there is a subculture complete with
an internet newsletter (The Germaican Observer <www.germaica.net/observer>) which
reports successes such as the listing of one of its – quite Caucasian – icons, Dr. Ring-Ding,
in the “German black charts” with his single “Doctor’s Darling,” peaking at position 23 in
May 2003. Further hybridization of the Jamaican element occurs through the importation
of “Germaican” artists into Austria, cf. the website “Dancehall Inna Austria” <http://www.
riddim.org>. – In Banjul, the capital of Gambia, Jamaican musical and dress styles as well
as forms of JamC are adopted by a considerable number of under-30-year olds; more specifically, Rastafarian styles are highly current (Manfred Pütz, p.c.).
28. Cf. Phillips & Phillips (1999) and Sebba’s (1993) introduction for the socio-historic background of Caribbean immigration to the UK.
29. Cf. Myers-Scotton (2002) who argues that quantity is a valid criterion for determining the
roles of marked and unmarked code, with the unmarked code being quantitatively dominant.
30. On Dread Talk see Pollard’s comprehensive study (2000).
31. The use of BrC by British-born Africans is put to literary use in the works of several contemporary authors writing in London, cf. Mair (2002; 2003b).
32. IM data is hard to obtain, not only because IM interactions are usually dyadic and private,
but also because they are rather ephemeral, since the textual record of interactions is lost
once users sign off. It is possible to save interactions as text files, but this is not regularly
done by IM users. A researcher would need to convince at least one of the interactants to
save his or her IM communications, potentially a considerable imposition. In order to obtain any substantial amount of data, they would need to convince rather a lot of individuals
to save their interactions regularly and systematically. – On the specific textual features
of IM interactions, little has been published (cf. however Palfreyman & al Khalil 2003).
– If short messaging via cellular phones is counted as a CMC genre, the picture is slightly
expanded. These short messages are also harder to collect, but more research has been
done on them (e.g. Galán Rodríguez 2001; Schlobinski et al. 2001; e.g. Androutsopoulos &
Schmidt 2002; Dürscheid 2002; Betti 2003; Höflich 2003).
33. On the process of e-mail data collection cf. section 1.4.
34. Miller & Slater (2000) is an ethnographic study of the internet in Trinidad. The authors
recognize the importance of the interface between reality and virtual reality. Their study’s
analytical scope is fully based on the premise that “the Internet is not a monolithic or placeless ‘cyberspace’; rather, it is numerous new technologies, used by diverse people, in diverse
real-world locations” (18).
35. Other CMC text types include: texts written for internet publication, internet discussion
forums, virtual worlds, newsgroups, blogs, internet relay chats. See Crystal (2001) for a
comparative introduction to different CMC genres.
36. For example, the first dimension – informational vs. involved production – is composed
of the following features: nouns, word length, type/token ratio, attributive adjectives with
negative weight for involvement; first and second personal pronouns, contractions, hedges,
and amplifiers (‘utterly,’ ‘very’) with positive weight for involvement.
Notes 283
37. Jamaica has two large institutions of higher education in the Kingston suburb of Mona:
UWI Mona and the University of Technology. All but three messages in the corpus were
written by students or recent alumni of these two. Apart from those there are a few smaller
institutions of specialized appeal: Northern Caribbean University, a religious liberal arts
college in Mandeville, the Management Institute for National Development, Edna Manley
College for the Performing Arts, and the College of Agriculture, Science and Education in
Kingston. The latter was being attended by the writer of the other three messages.
38. The Corpus of Written British Creole has a size of ~12,000 words and the Corpus of Written
Jamaican Creole ~70,000 (Sebba & Dray 2005). The Jamaican component of the International Corpus of English, which at the time of this writing is nearing completion, will measure
1 million words, but has been more than ten years in the making (Mair 1992; Mair & Sand
1998).
39. “[Es] ergibt sich nämlich […], daß eine Stichprobe hinsichtlich des betrachteten Merkmals
nur dann als repräsentativ ausgezeichnet werden kann, wenn über die Grundgesamtheit,
aus der sie stammt, so viel bekannt ist, daß es eben dieser Stichprobenbildung gar nicht
mehr bedarf ” (Rieger 1979: 66).
40. “Ein Korpus ist repräsentativ, wenn es in spezifischen, zu definierenden statistisch-stochastischen, formalen, semantischen und pragmatischen Konstanten mit bestimmten
Varietätentoleranzen des repräsentierten Sprachbereichs übereinstimmt. Ein Korpus ist
exemplarisch, wenn seine Repräsentativität nicht nachgewiesen ist, andererseits weniger
formale Argumente, wie evidenter Zusammenhang, linguistische Urteile des kompetenten
Forschers, fachlicher Konsensus, textuelle und pragmatische Indikatoren, für eine sinnvolle
Vertreterfunktion des Korpus plädieren” (Bungarten 1979: 42-43, emphases added).
41. Cf. Mair (1991) for a discussion of the suitability of corpora for either quantitative or qualitative analysis. Silverman (2001) is a standard introduction to qualitative research in the
social sciences and humanities.
42. I insisted that informants not share messages with me at all which they considered too private, and that they not edit out passages from any messages that they passed on. It turned
out that, partly due to my assurance that anonymity would be preserved, the majority of
informants were willing to provide all available material, including messages relating to
rather intimate topics.
43. E.g. Johanson (1991: 307–308), Biber et al. (1999), Yates (1996: 30) Baron (2000: 248), Crystal (2001: 94), and Yasmeen (2006: chapter 4).
44. One writer claimed to have spoken only English in her home, but had a native proficiency
of JamC nonetheless.
45. As Karim (2003) shows, it is common among diasporic groups from all around the world
to use internet bulletin boards as a public space in which to create and maintain diasporic
group identites. This practice has been called “media activism” (Androutsopoulos 2006),
but the doctrinary overtones of that term are certainly inappropriate for some diasporic
groups, such as Jamaicans in North America and England.
46. As mentioned in the previous section, the primary informants of the e-mail corpus were all
currently students at UWI and thus resident in Jamaica, only some of the messages written
to them came from Jamaican writers who were living abroad after finishing their education
in Jamaica.
47. CS research in areas of linguistics other than the sociolinguistic branch is done in a) a
psycholinguistic branch, looking at questions like lexical processing and switching costs in
CS production and comprehension, and b) under the structural approach (Muysken 2000
provides a booklength report on research in this branch since the 1970s).
48. Stolt (1964), Montes-Alcalá (2001; 2005), Graedler (1999), Schendl (2000), and the studies
of CS in CMC data by Paolillo (2001) and Georgakopoulou (1997; 2004), Androutsopoulos
(2006). The body of relevant work is now growing rapidly due to the steadily continuing
output of research on CS in CMC.
49. That is, in Rampton’s words, CS “becomes part of the ‘main action’” (1998: 290).
50. This approach, which can be labeled ‘identity-in-talk’ (cf. Antaki & Widdicombe 1998 and
Antaki et al. 1996), is based on monolingual speech, but can be productively applied to CS,
as Sebba & Wooton (1998) show.
51. Cf. Myers-Scotton, who writes about Auer’s CA approach (and the model of Acts of Identity, cf. LePage & Tabouret-Keller 1985): “The problem I see with these views is that it is
difficult to reconcile all of this individuality, and the accompanying view that social meaning is locally created, with the empirical fact that, in general, members of the same speech
community interpret the same interaction as communicating more or less the same social
intention” (Myers-Scotton 1993b: 61, emphasis added). Clearly, Myers-Scotton sees social
meanings of codes as static, and her research objective is to find the model that captures all
human, social CS behavior.
52. The model as laid out in the central publication Myers-Scotton (1993a) postulates four
maxims: a) The Sequential Unmarked Choice Maxim, b) The CS as an Unmarked Choice
Maxim, c) The Marked Choice Maxim, d) The Exploratory Choice Maxim (480). As in Grice’s cooperative principle it is assumed that all participants in bilingual interactions know
and orient toward these maxims by either obeying or intentionally disobeying them.
53. Pollard (1978) speaks not only of a large number of lects covered by the continuum, but states that “in the Jamaican situation, the number of discrete systems that would be required
to describe all the possibilities of speech acts would be infinite” (17).
54. Patrick (1999) provided a critical re-assessment of the validity of the creole continuum
model for Jamaica, and found it to be largely accurate,
55. Sand points out that challenges to the non-discrete character of variation on the continuum have been put forward “especially [by] linguists who are native speakers from creole
continuum regions” (1999: 55). Two or three discrete systems have been proposed long
after DeCamp’s groundbreaking publication arguing for the continuum (1971) – besides
Lawton, cf. Edwards (1983) or Gibson (1996). These are based on models older than the
creole continuum. Holm (1988: 56) provides an overview of older models.
56. I administered self-assessment tests to two speakers who had previously been recorded
in unscripted speech styles for the Jamaican component of the International Corpus of
English. They were played their own recordings and asked to designate those passages that
were “non-English,” given that the baseline code of all conversations was English. (The
International Corpus of English is a collection of corpora focused on standard varieties
of English. Therefore, switches into the vernacular were rare in the speech selected for our
recordings.) It was encouraging to note that informants’ notion of what counted as Creole
was identical to my own, laid out above. – In addition, I asked ten of the informants who
Notes 285
supplied material for COJEC if they thought of their available code choices as characterized
by “either-or” or if there was gradual sliding into and out of “Patois” and “English.” The
answers unanimously identified a notion of “either-or” as their actual practice, although
four informants pointed out that gradual sliding from English into Patois was in principle
possible for them.
57. As examples of “reductive creolisms,” consider the following: plural unmarking of nouns
(nominal -s-deletion), invariant verb forms (i.e. unmarked participles or past tense (-ed-deletion) or third person singular present tense finite verbs (verbal -s-deletion), and deletion
of the copula. Occurrence of the latter is highly probable with the -ing-form of verbs in mesolectal JamC (cf. Rickford & Blake 1990, also Rickford’s reanalysis of DeCamp’s JamC and
AAVE data, 1987). – Any type of overt creolism, such as the use of JamC analytical markers
for plural (postposited dem) or anterior tense (mesolectal did, cf. Patrick 1999: 177, or
other particles depending on the individual’s native variety of JamC, e.g. wen, ben, en, cf.
DJE), or the substitution of JamC for StE pronouns (e.g., mi used instead of I) would not be
considered acceptable in informal JamE; these items would instantly mark a linguistic unit
as JamC.
58. I.e. as forms that mark the linguistic unit in which they occur as creole, cf. Saville-Troike
(1989: 58–59).
59. I show in Hinrichs (2004) that nonstandard orthographic choices are no potent replacement for variation in phonology, and are not integrated with other linguistic levels, as implicational scales show phonology interacting with the other levels of linguistic description
in variation along the continuum.
60. In Caribbean English, the primary constraints on -ed and -s deletion are grammatical. The
deletion therefore affects irregular allomorphs as well. Phonological features are at work
too, with consonant cluster deletion additionally favoring -ed deletion, but altogether the
constraint hierarchy is quite different from, e.g., AAVE, where constraints for the same
process are purely phonological (cf. e.g. Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001).
61. However, Graedler points out that due to genre-based differences in the degree of formality,
similarities in CS behavior are greater between personal letters and speech than between
newspaper writing and speech (Graedler 1999: 341). Similarly, Montes-Alcalá, who in her
2005 article mainly stresses the similarities between oral and written CS, shows in her investigation into oral and written CS among bilingual (English-Spanish) youths in California that there are differences on the structural level between them, albeit not dramatic
ones. In speaking, bilinguals produced more intersentential switches than intrasentential
ones, whereas in writing, the opposite was the case (Montes-Alcalá 2000: 225). The study
showed that the medium had a clearer influence on which structural type of switch was
preferred than informants’ attitudes toward CS, which were classified as positive, negative
or neutral.
62. Stolt (1964) studied CS between Early Modern High German and Latin in the transcripts of
Martin Luther’s table speeches, which were written at some temporal distance from the actual speeches and therefore can be seen as written texts in their own right. Graedler (1999)
analyzed CS between Norwegian and English in popular Norwegian magazines and a small
collection of personal letters. The latter were included as a way of representing informal
writing in the material. Montes-Alcalá (2005) uses the CMC portion of her data collected
for her 1999 PhD thesis, Two Languages, One Pen: Socio-Pragmatic Functions in Spanish-
English Written Code-Switching. It consists of “over one hundred electronic messages written by several bilingual individuals;” the addressees are the author herself and a friend
(p.c.). Schendl (Schendl 2000) explores English/Latin and English/French CS in literary
texts from the Middle English and Early Modern English periods. Lattey & Tracy (2001)
analyze the letters of one German individual who emigrated to the USA, although more
with an interest in phenomena of language contact and signs of L1 attrition than in the
discourse functions of CS.
63. This most acrolectal variety at the highest end of the style continuum is focussed compared
with the less formal registers that occur in the corpus, i.e. colloquial English and Patois.
However, as Sand shows, acrolectal educated Jamaican English is itself “not yet [a] fully focussed variety in LePage’s terminology” compared to long-established standards of English,
BrE and AmE (Sand 1999: 80). Variation occurs both through the interference of Creole
forms and through the orientation toward both the British and the American standard, the
latter being a stronger influence on JamE due to its greater prestige in the Americas. Recently, Irvine (2004) has also identified important internal dynamics that lead to variation
within the Jamaican acrolect on the level of phonology and are responsible for some of its
special features. Some forms are preferred in the acrolect in order to avoid other forms
which may be perfectly grammatical in ISE, but which may be perceived as Creole.
64. Some writers playfully employ yet more codes. For example, Spanish is sometimes used in
practices of identity-related CS (see examples (45) and (46) in section 4.4.2 below).
65. If the borrowed word has JamC origins, but is long established in JamE for lack of alternative terms in the standard, there is of course no stylistic variation at all.
66. Cf. Auer (1992). ‘Contrastive’ meanings of code-switches rely exclusively on the presence
of a contrast between codes, but do not draw on any meanings attached to the code by the
participants. The opposite end of the continuum is represented by switches that draw most
heavily on the ‘inherent’ meanings of the codes used. These meanings can be both sociocultural and contextually created by the participants. Their interpretation requires the greatest amount of cultural and ethnographic information on the part of the researcher.
67. For a summary of criticism in this vein cf. Myers-Scotton (1993b: 54–55).
68. A change of addressee is not unthinkable within one e-mail, but the material contains no
such instance.
69. I mention Auer’s criticism here because he offers the most explicit counterproposal to the
perceived problem of the distinction between ‘situational’ and ‘metaphorical’ CS by Gumperz. Other critics of this include Pride (1979: 39–40) and Myers-Scotton (1983a; 1983b;
1993b).
70. As an example of the latter usage, Pollard cites “den kiem a babilan fi pik op ai man (then
came a policeman to arrest me)” (Pollard 2000: 9). Cf. also Cooper: “Babylon in Rastafarian
iconography is the biblical whore of St. John’s apocalypse; in the Jamaican socio-political
context Babylon is, as well, the code name for the police as symbol of a repressive political
state” (Cooper 1994: 430).
71. Dread Talk is a variety of Patois that has evolved among Rastafarians in Jamaica. For an
overview of the history and present state of Dread Talk in its social context, cf. Pollard
(2000).
Notes 287
72. There is no reason to believe that this phenomenon – increased use of an indigenous code
when away from home – is specific to Jamaica. Armin Schwegler, a linguist working at the
University of California, Irvine, related similar observations regarding his native use of
Swiss German, his first language, in an e-mail (p.c.). Having lived away from Switzerland
for much of his life, he likes to use Swiss German (usually in CS with English or Standard
German) when e-mailing Swiss friends and colleagues. According to him, his interlocutors
seldom reciprocate his use of Swiss German when they are in Switzerland at the time of
writing, preferring the more ‘professional’ languages of Standard German and English.
73. In the past two years, i.e. since about 2003, the topic is not discussed actively anymore,
which may be a consequence of the fact that by now a considerable number of permanent
websites exist that list proverbs in Patois, as a search for “Jamaican proverbs” on Google.com
attests (>1,000 relevant results on 24 January 2005).
74. Proverbs are often mentioned in the literature as a typical constituent of Caribbean discourse (Hellinger 1985: 171; Mair 1992: 80; Winer 1993: 237; Allsopp 1996: lvii). Cooper
points to the prominent role of proverbs in various forms of Jamaican (written and oral)
literature and includes a list of them in the appendix (Cooper 1995: 200-203). Sand (1999:
155) found the use of Creole proverbs in her data, written texts from Jamaica, “exceedingly
rare.”
75. In citations of corpus examples I will provide the message’s original subject line if it is
relevant to the context. The appendix contains the complete e-mail material with subject
lines.
76. I am grateful to Clive Forrester for native speaker’s advice and information on this example.
77. This neat correlation between topic and code is partly a consequence of the relative homogeneity of my informant group in terms of socio-economic standing and religious affiliation. All informants are educated, and all writers who engage in religious discussions
are members of linguistically conservative Christian denominations. If a Rastafarian had
been among the informants, some treatments of religious topics might well have drawn on
Dread Talk.
78. However, to Farquharson’s and my knowledge, no official, written language policy exists in
Jamaican churches.
79. According to Irvine (2004: 51), the stopping of /,ð/ is “unequivocally identified as a Creole
feature” by the informant group of her study, employees in a particularly StE-oriented “quasigovernmental agency” (41). Nonetheless, stopping occurs frequently even among frontline
staff with strong costumer interaction (between 18% for word-final [t] and 27.5% for wordfinal [d], 54).
80. As mentioned earlier, the preposition from used as meaning ‘since’ is established in the
acrolect.
81. These six different types are presented in Gumperz (1982) under the heading “conversational codeswitching,” and not explicitly referred to as sub-types of ‘metaphorical CS.’ Unfortunately, Gumperz does not fully clarify how the concept of ‘conversational CS’ relates
to ‘metaphorical CS.’ It is possible that metaphorical CS is a sub-type of conversational CS,
but the two may well refer to the same concept. At any rate, the list of six sub-types fits the
definition of metaphorical CS that Gumperz presents in distinguishing situational from
metaphorical CS, which I have summarized above. Myers-Scotton addresses this problem
in (1993b).
82. For a book-length report on three decades of study done in this line of research cf. Muysken
(2000).
83. I do not intend to say that there are no grammatical restrictions on the sites of CS in Jamaican. However, it must be said that little work has yet been done on these micro-aspects of
Jamaican CS. For the time being, the most useful claim is Devonish’s: “A language variety
can only be proposed to exist at the level of the clause. Beyond the clause, speakers are free
to shift language varieties as their linguistic repertoires allow and as social factors require”
(Devonish 2003: 159). See Devonish (1998) for details of the argument.
84. The CS function of contextualizing quotations occurs with direct and indirect speech, the
latter being more frequent in informal discourse.
85. The verb in “hussel up some ackee,” however, is not a lexical borrowing from JamC. Rather,
it is most likely an ironic use of StE hustle up (cited in the SOED as having an AmE colloquial meaning of ‘obtain or produce by forceful action; steal, swindle’). The nonstandard
spelling in 具hussel典 would probably be overinterpreted if explained as a consciously selected
phonemic spelling to reflect Creole phonology.
86. The form fry fish could be considered either a grammatical Creole feature in the writer’s use
of English, or a lexical borrowing of the noun together with the typically collocating adjective from JamC (see Sand 1999: 120 for a discussion of a similar problem of classification in
written EJE with the item bag juice). In either case the usage fits in with the writer’s general
strategy of using English with light mesolectal marking.
87. Crystal (2001: 34) describes this and other features of Netspeak as attempts in CMC to
make up for the lack of prosody, paralangue, kinesics, and proxemics, which can disambiguate utterances in face-to-face interaction, but which are lacking in CMC.
88. Ackee, “a kind of wild cashew tree and its fruits” (DJE); the latter cooked with salted codfish
make up the national dish of Jamaica, Ackee and Saltfish. The dish has a high symbolic
value for Jamaicans in the diaspora, as is attested by a great number of internet sites containing the phrase. The discussion forum jamaicans.com names the forum for conversations
about food “Ackee and Saltfish.”
89. Myers-Scotton reports a parallel kind of switching in a request from her fieldwork in Kenya. A letter from a Tanzanian friend to herself, written in Swahili and English, contained
a request for money. While the letter starts in Swahili and the introductory report on the
writer’s present personal situation is also in Swahili, the actual request is phrased in English.
According to Myers-Scotton, the English code was more “remote from him than Swahili.”
CS here serves mostly for the writer “to distance himself from the embarrassment of asking
for money” (1993b: 116). The parallel to the present example lies in the use of the contrastive function of CS in creating a hedge as a face-saving strategy, even though the personal
situations of the two writers are different. While the Jamaican asks on somebody else’s behalf,
the Tanzanian writer asks for himself. Also, while the distancing function of the switch in
the African example, in Myers-Scotton’s interpretation, works mostly for the writer based
on his own felt distance from the English code, the Jamaican writer can assume a similar
significance of English for both herself and the addressee (there is no indication that English
is much more “remote” to Jamaican writers than Creole).
Notes 289
90. It should be said, though, that the national dish Ackee and Saltfish does not contain fried
fish, but codfish that has been dried and salted for conservation.
91. Since the conjunction is, in most cases, affected by the switch into Creole as well, I will
henceforth refer to these clauses as se-clauses.
92. Or “bare declaratives” (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 951).
93. The syntactic parallel between StE and JamC declaratives is only partial. One difference is
that in JamC, declaratives, or (se-) clauses, cannot be fronted (Holm 1988: 187).
94. Note that the tone in the text surrounding these “accusations” is usually jovial and friendly.
If not, another kind of repair is administered, such as a more openly humorous or self-deprecating remark. For example, excerpt (5) is followed by this sentence: “WELL UR PUNISHMENT IS THAT U WILL NOT BE RECEIVING ANY EASTER BUN THIS YEAR.”
(Easter bun is a roll of sweet white bread seasonally shared among family and friends.)
These kinds of openings can truly be considered an established and accepted way of resuming contact, and their reproachful tone has ironic undertones. In example (3) dash
we does not even occur in an actual accusation, the writer merely asks if she should feel
“thrown away.”
95. Horst & Miller base this interpretation of their ethnographic study on the anthropological
analysis of the social networks that are typical for the Caribbean by Smith (1988).
96. Horst & Miller (2005) focused on low-income subjects. The socio-economic background
of the informants in COJEC is varied and some members are from middle- and even highincome families. This, according to Horst & Miller, makes them much less dependent on
linkup as a coping strategy. I have nonetheless observed among the participants of my study
a great amount of reliance on personal and kinship networks in sustaining the financial
requirements of one’s studies and basic material needs. Although I have not systematically
assessed participants’ material backgrounds, I can say that the majority had a low-income
background.
97. Cp. DJE: wuklis > worthless “by a common alteration of /t/ > /k/ and /e/ > /i/.” Metathesis of
/r/ and preceding vowel produced even more variants of the word that have been recorded
in Jamaica.
98. Gumperz gives three subtypes of ‘objectivization vs. personalization’: talk as action vs. talk
about action, involved vs. distanced, and specific vs. general (Gumperz 1982: 75). A great
many codeswitches fit at least one of these, making the whole category an unsatisfactorily
vague analytical unit.
99. Aside from the loan translation thrown away, another lexical use places this message opening firmly within the context of the numerous other messages with a similar start. The
author says she feels “idle,” i.e. ‘doing nothing, lacking worth or significance, worthless, useless’ (SOED). Other messages support that in the context of Kingston university students,
not writing to a friend for some time leads to worthlessness, as the label seems to be readily
applied in such contexts, cf. wuklis in example (4) and footnote, and the conviction that the
addressee in example (19) deserves the biggest beating (or verbal abuse, “TRACING”) of
her lifetime (the message in (19) has the subject line “Your abandoned sister”).
100. The concept of the opposition between ‘we’ and ‘they’-code is in itself not unproblematic,
as Sebba & Wootton show; this discussion will also be withheld until later.
101. Even though the population of Jamaica features a (low) percentage of non-blacks, these are
certainly not typical in the nation’s self-representation. 90.9% of Jamaica’s population are
black according to the World Factbook (CIA 2004).
102. This distribution is in stark contrast to speech in Jamaica, where JamC is overwhelmingly
preferred in conversations among adolescents and university students.
103. I use environment in the place of Sebba & Wootton’s turn. E-mail messages cannot reasonably be equated with conversational turns, as this would suggest that e-mail exchanges could
be closely compared to dialogic face-to-face interaction.
104. However, it has been noted in other studies of conversational CS, however, that indirect
speech is by no means necessarily given in the original code. Auer makes this points in
reference to Sebba & Wootton’s data (Auer 1998a: 260), and Alfonzetti’s data prove it as well
(Alfonzetti 1998).
105. According to the DJE, eveling (/i:vlin/) is a Jamaican vernacular form “< evening by lamdacism.”
106. Hush, a distinctly Jamaican word, is used to express sympathy or an apology (cf. the website
“SpeakJamaican.com,” <http://www.speakjamaican.com/glossary.html>, 20 Aug. 2004).
107. This item is distinctly Jamaican and much more culturally significant than AmE colloquial
uh-huh, to which it “corresponds” according to the DJE, which cites Twi Ehee as the probable source (cf. “iin-hiin,” p. 234). It is a saliently JamC interjection, used here with an sarcastic bend on its normal meaning – approval – to really mean disapproval. However, it is
not exclusive to Jamaica. Patrick & Figueroa (2002) discuss the interjection along with the
gestures “suck-teeth” and “cut-eye” as members of “a broad spectrum of pragmatic particles
and paralinguistic gestures, common (though not identical) across the [African] diaspora”
(383).
108. Aside from evidence of the JamC verbal system, the clause also contains the distinctly Creole article wan. In the English-based spelling used here, 具one典, it looks quite like its StE source
lexeme, but the JamC article system underlying its use here is distinctly different from StE.
As Sand writes, in JamC “the indefinite article” – i.e., wan – ”is used when referring to a specific referent which is assumed to be unknown to the hearer.” The use of 具one典 in the e-mail
excerpt, while unusual by StE standards, is actually meaningful in JamC grammar (Sand
2004: 285).
109. JamC verb forms are invariant for active or passive voice (Holm 1988: 83–84).
110. A chain of cocktail bars combined with elements of beach resorts, owned by country singer
Jimmy Buffet, which has branches in the USA, Mexico, and Jamaica.
111. The theoretical background of this type of CS behavior is discussed in the relevant section
below.
112. Myers-Scotton gives a detailed account of the Gricean influence in her model in (1993b)
and (1998).
113. His analytical tool in classifying language data according to a fixed set of speech styles is the
“Decision Tree” (Labov 2001: 94), which has two main branches: one for careful and one for
casual speech styles, each with four sub-branches, plus one residual category.
114. Cf. also Acts of Identity which, famously, views the individual as the locus of linguistic variation.
Notes 291
115. In the words of Silverstein, Acts of Identity is built on a notion of ‘first-order indexicality,’
where indexicality refers to the notion of a linguistic form pointing to (indexing) a certain
group (Silverstein 1992: 316).
116. I am aware that caution is called for in the use of this term as it has already been variously
employed in discourse analysis. Auer (1992) for a definition of the concept of frames as
coined by the sociologists Bateson and Goffman, and applied to linguistics in Gumperz’s
theory of contextualization cues. See Tannen (1993) for textlinguistic uses of the term. In
perhaps its most commonly accepted use, ‘framing’ refers not to the textual elements serving as frames to the actual content of the text, but – in a more metaphorical use – to thematic units which direct audience attention to core topics. Myers-Scotton (1992) has used
the word frame in her analyses of the structural constraints on intrasentential CS. The term
is altogether quite polysemous in linguistics as, for example, the fields of generative grammar, case grammar, semantics etc. apply it differently. I use it nonetheless for the clarity of
the metaphor.
117. Cf. Saville-Troike (1989: 59–60) who describes such strongly marked linguistic items as
“code markers.” Their effect depends on the degree of their saliency and other qualitative
factors, cf. Mair’s typology of creolisms in written JamE, reproduced in 2.1 (Table 2).
118. The bulletin board material contains the item only twice, and in one of these occurrences
it is not even a farewell formula, but an adverb: “Mi head and brain tiyad yah now suh nuh
questian nuh come to mind yet but likkle more. Mi pramis. [My head and brain are tired
now, so I haven’t come up with a question yet, but I will in a little while. I promise.]” (p# j–
03–08). This low frequency is equally surprising considering the bigger size of the bulletin
board portion of the data, and the fact that the bulletin board members are generally more
conservative Patois users than the student informants who supplied the e-mails.
119. Used as an adverb, later also occurs quite frequently at the end of e-mails in formulations
such as “I have an apppointment now so I’ll catch you later-Bye.” (m# 022–04) or “link me
later. Love, C” (m# 012–42). The latter is distinctly Jamaican due to the special use of link.
In informal JSE and mesolectal JamC, link can be used as a bivalent verb with a singular
direct object meaning ‘contact.’ (In StE, link can be used bivalently only with a plural object,
but not with the Jamaican meaning.) Thus, the latter example can be considered an instance
of Jamaican message framing as well.
120. Some results from Jamaica, retrieved in an internet search on 21 January 2005 are: “Midnight Madness 1 Hr Free Rum” (Margaritaville in Montego Bay, Jamaica), “weekend of pure
party madness” (promised by the Hedonism II nude resort for Easter), “ABSOLUTE MADNESS & MAYHEM IN JAMAICA’S ONLY FOAM PIT!” (once more at Margaritaville),
“Mardi Gras – Mask & Foam Madness” (at Mas Camp, Kingston).
121. The addressee is a Jamaican. A recent graduate of UWI Mona in Jamaica, she is spending
time in the Caribbean island of Martinique at the time of writing.
122. The nonstandard spelling 具lov典 coincides with the way that the phonemic Cassidy-LePage
writing system would render the JamC pronunciation of love (/lv/).
123. Cf. Pollard: “The cultural movement that is Rastafari is perhaps the boldest statement of
rejection of the values associated with European supremacy to have been made anywhere
in the New World” (2000: 83).
124. To illustrate this renunciation of the worldly system, which Rastas call Babylon, Morris
(1993a) quotes from an interview with Rasta poet Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze who talked about
raising her own baby daughter in the Clarendon hills, living in the Rastafarian tradition:
“You don’t deal with anything that is Babylon. You don’t buy anything from the shops. You
know, like to get up in the morning and make the baby porridge, you have to get up and
light a wood fire, then grater [sic] the corn – dry corn, right? – then you put the corn on to
boil, and grater the coconut for milk, and when you done putting in the milk then you cut
[sugar]cane and squeeze the cane to sweeten it. And me do that daily” (81). (Grater: JamC
‘grate,’ cf. DJE.)
125. Stolzoff gives a historical account of the rise of the Rastafarian movement to great cultural
influence within Jamaica in the 1960s (2000: 77–80).
126. “King blessed”: It is common in Dread Talk to refer to both religious icons and dignitaries
and to persons within one’s intimate circle of interaction using the titles of “King” and
“Queen.”
127. Wolmerian: alumna of Jamaica’s reputable Wolmers High School.
128. It is also a slogan on countless souvenir items sold in tourist locations all over Jamaica.
129. The DCEU cites seen as “Prob[ably] an erron[eous] rendering of Rastaf[ari] SCENE!” (Allsopp 1996: 496). The Rasta meaning of scene is cited as both a “greeting or parting word
of brotherly approval” and “an interjection of approval” (p. 491). Patrick (1995: 253) cites
StE seen as a possible origin but agrees it is a Rastafarian form. He cites several instances of
use from interview transcripts, but only as an affirmative particle. On the whole, the Rasta
source of seen is probably unknown to many of its users, and one love is, by comparison, a
much more transparent Dread Talk borrowing.
130. The humor in this passage would not be heightened by an explanation or gloss.
131. Sketel: roughly, ‘bitch,’ i.e. a derogatory word referring to females (Hippolyte 2004: 85).
132. Example cited from Sebba & Wootton (1998: 277). – Antaki et al. developed their ‘identityin-talk’-approach on the basis of the notion of indexicality in language ideology, which had
already been in sociolinguistic discussion for a few years. An important earlier publication
on indexicality is Silverstein (1992). Wassink & Dyer (2004) give a succinct overview of the
development of theory in this area of sociolinguistics.
133. See Bakhtin (1984: 199) for a schematic overview of the different types of discourse, classified according to their orientation toward another’s discourse.
134. To be more precise, situational switching is always the unmarked choice and therefore, it
represents unmediated, single-voiced discourse of a bi-codal speaker. Likewise, metaphorical switching is used to support the speaker’s intention by use of his or her own repertoire
of two codes, contrasted in their functions of unmarked and marked codes. Convergent
behavior, or ‘acts of identity’ as discussed in 5.1, are mostly representative of single-voiced
discourse as well because Patois use there is usually a convergence with an aspect of writers’
own identities: with their national identity. Merely the citations of pop-cultural identities
that are arguably not the writer’s own pose a problem: does a closing greeting borrowed
from Dread Talk such as one love constitute unidirectional double-voicing? Or has one
love already become part of the participant’s own discourse and is merely cited because of
its saliency? Both Bakhtin himself (1984: 190) and Rampton in his application of Bakhtin’s
ideas to crossing (1998a: 305) point out that there is a grey zone between unidirectional
Notes 293
double-voicing and direct unmediated discourse that cannot always be cleared up in data
analysis. What is new about the phenomena discussed in this section – the use of social
personae – is that they consistently represent some kind of double-voiced discourse.
135. As an example, consider the possibilities of raising voice pitch to indicate a female identity,
of assuming a symbolically authoritative posture to signal a dominant persona, or of reducing the speech rate to symbolize intellectual inadequacy.
136. the rapper Sean Combs
137. “haing”: having
138. As an exception, one English passage arguably contains a subjective evaluation as well: “For
they seem to be speaking not in the tongues of men but of angels!” (ll. 21–22). This short
passage constitutes in itself a performance of the role of a pastor.
139. “For they seem to be speaking not in the tongues of men but of angels” (ll. 21–22) is a reference to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, verse 13. The original passage reads “Though I
speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding
brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” The e-mail writer here separates the two types of tongues, turning the “tongues of angels” into those of the professors, whom in the persona of ‘country
bumpkin’ he claims not to understand, and associating himself with the “tongues of men.”
From a theologian’s point of view, this conceptual separation of “angels” and “men” may
not actually serve the writer’s intentions, as the motif of angels speaking to men has been
interpreted as the epitome of clarity and plainness (cf. Sadler 1906: 217). Nonetheless, this
rhetorical move supports the writer’s humorous playfulness in language use, as it is certainly
very amusing to liken the humanities professors whom he quotes in ll. 15–20 to angels.
140. Cooper (1995: 136) uses this term, a blend of oral and literature, to describe the large body
of Jamaican narrative art situated between the oral and the written medium that includes
the folk tradition of Anansi stories. She shows that Anansi is a pervasive model for female
personae in the poetry of Louise Bennett (47–48). Hippolyte writes critically of the separation of textual genres in Jamaican culture, arguing for a “collapsing continuum between
the oral and the literary” in Jamaica, i.e. literature and principally oral genres such as dancehall lyrics and folk tales evolved close to each other within a very close cultural space
(2004: 82).
141. I quote Cooper’s transcription of the lyrics in the CLP orthographic system as well as her
gloss (1994: 430).
142. “Rude Boys in da ‘ouse,” Website by “chico enrico,” <http://www.ogmac.co.uk/sidcup/rude.
htm>, accessed 19 January 2005.
143. Devonish (1996a) points out that homophobia is an accepted topical element in dancehall
lyrics, even to the point of calling for the murder of all homosexuals, as has been done by
the dancehall performer Buju Banton. In an argument laying out the partial incompatibility
of Jamaican pop culture with international audiences who are unfamiliar with the cultural
origins of dancehall, Devonish claims that the purpose of such anti-gay rhetoric is to support the main poetic goal of praising female sexuality, but that cultural insiders, i.e. Jamaican audiences, know how not to take such calls to violence against homosexuals seriously.
144. The author uses his website to publish both “rhymes” (i.e. lyrics intended for rap performance) and poems out of his own production. He also includes two photos of himself, one
with family in New York and one with relatives in Jamaica.
145. “Eat DEEEEEZ NUUUUUUTZ,” anonymous website, <http://hometown.aol.com/jumpin992/>, accessed 12 November 2004.
146. Ibid., accessed 19 January 2005.
147. “AK” is short for Kalashnikov firearms, cf. “The AK site. Kalashnikov Home Page,”
<http://kalash-nikov.guns.ru>, accessed 10 February 2005.
148. “Especially if we accept Shabba’s metaphor of the gun as symbolic penis, we can see Buju’s
use of the gun in ‘Boom By-By’ in a new light,” Cooper writes (1994: 438).
149. There is further empirical evidence of the unproblematic coexistence, and indeed lyrically
constructed combination, of poetry, love and sexuality, and violence in Jamaican culture in
other dancehall songs. It is explicitly present, for example, in Ini Kamoze’s single hit “Hot
Stepper” from the album Lyrical Gangsta (1995), which contains in its chorus the lines
“Here come the hotstepper/ I’m the lyrical gangster/ Pick up de crew ina de area/ Still love
you like that.” Background singers chant “murderer” after each line.
150. According to Cooper (1995: 48), these character traits are shared by many of the female
personae in Louise Bennett’s poetry.
151. The informant uses a nickname for herself in the exchange, anonymized here as “HQ,” and
her interlocutor has an African first name, for which I use “Kwasi.”
152. He has been in Africa probably for about four or five weeks. The four messages were written
between April 5th and 10th, 2002. They indicate that Kwasi left Jamaica for Africa before
the start of spring break. Spring break is usually “a tourist thing” (m# 011-01), a party occasion for North American students who come on, typically, one-week-spells for precisely
that purpose. However, it is turning more and more into an activity which locals, i.e. Jamaicans, partake in. Spring break season usually stretches between late February and the end
of March.
153. test – a test photo shoot for a potential employer or agent
154. The writer is Chinese Jamaican, an ethnic group accounting for 0.2% of Jamaica’s population (CIA 2004). Its members are often referred to as “chinies” in Jamaica. Phat (according
to one folk etymology, acronymically from ‘pretty hot and tempting’) is a North American
youth slang item meaning ‘good, cool,’ etc. (cf. Safire 1998 on phat and a number of other
slang items meaning ‘good’ that were current at the time).
155. A retort to Kwasi’s excessive hinting at the multiplicity of his girlfriends.
156. She calls Africa “your ‘homeland’” because while Kwasi is a Jamaican, like most, of African
descent, she has Chinese ancestors.
157. See Hinnenkamp (1989) on the distinction between ‘brought along’ vs. ‘brought about’
aspects of identity, i.e. those that are statically tied to speakers’ identities vs. those dynamic
aspects that are constructed in conversation.
158. dutty > dirty; chenk: ‘bit, piece,’ perhaps > StE chunk (cf. DJE)
159. Note that Patrick (1997) categorizes ‘speaky-spoky’ as a product of stylistic variation within
the JamC code based on structural criteria. I consider it as a register within the JamE code
because it is meant as English by those speakers who produce real ‘speaky-spoky.’ In this
example it is used in imitation and similar in discourse function to JamC when used as a
‘we’-code. Even though it thus certainly is a special case, its roots lie in uneducated speakers’ attempts at English, not Creole.
Notes 295
160. According to Wells (1982: 568), /h/ “in popular speech does not really exist as a phoneme”
in the anglophone Caribbean speech communities, “although [h] as a speech sound is quite
common. [The] use of [h] in words such as egg, off, end […] can be seen as hypercorrections (a speaker attempts to upgrade his speech by attaching [h] to words beginning with
a vowel, but does not succeed in identifying the lexical items for which this is appropriate
[…]), or merely an emphatic device used whenever a word beginning phonologically with
a vowel is emphasized.” Patrick (1999: 277) suggests that /h/-insertion is an emphatic device
only in mesolectal JamC, whereas if it occurs in the acrolect, it is more accurately seen as a
consequence of hypercorrection. The feature and a few others are “clearly recognized and
labeled by Jamaicans” as elements of a ‘speaky-spoky’ speech style (Patrick 1997: 48), which
uses “linguistic resources drawn from the standard in non-standard ways, superimposing
them on the speaker’s native [JamC] grammar” (Patrick 1999: 277). Irvine notes that “in
local theatre, for example, [/h/-insertion] is often played for comic effect” (2004: 51). Russell was probably the first to write about this speech style in his 1868 Etymology of Jamaica
Grammar, which was reprinted in Lalla & D’Costa (1990). He described aspects of verbal
tense and described the style as “trying to ‘cut English’” (190). See also Patrick (1997) and
Patrick & McElhinny (1993).
161. Patrick & Figueroa (2002) analyze the gesture kiss-teeth and show that the sound itself,
along with the meaning of disdain, is widely used in African-derived cultures. However,
following the sound with the word cho seems to be Jamaican practice.
162. Occurrences of kiss-teeth and/or cho in White Teeth are found on pp. 42, 81, 167, 177, 231,
241, 274, 281, 394, 530.
163. Expanding the scope to the discussion forum data, however, one finds three incidences of
cho spelled out, and one writer even uses the word kiss-teeth. The users of discussion forums
generally use Patois more self-consciously than the student e-mail writers, and that their
attitude toward Patois in writing is generally much more that of providing faithful transcriptions, than using it intuitively and unconsciously. In that sense, Tania is atypical of the
e-mail informants.
164. Rampton (1995) contains ample evidence. The author devotes his seminal study Crossing
to the study of non-native uses of minority languages in the function of ‘we’-code among
adolescents in England.
165. cf. DJE: rass (also 具raas典) “probably by metathesis < arse, buttocks, but also possibly by metanalysis: your-arse > you-rarse”
166. “DO”: typographical error < di ‘the’
167. In l. 1, the more acrolectal pronoun I (not basilectal mi) is chosen for the NP, whereas in
l. 15, the more basilectal variant im (not acrolectal he) is chosen. It could be argued that
therefore, the boundary for the switch in l. 1 needs to be drawn after the NP or even after
the verb. However, both of these words, I and know, have cognates in mesolectal JamC – a
and nuo – which in speech would be recognizable as Creole on the grounds of their phonological realization. The writer may have had these mesolectal variants in mind, but simply
not have cared to mark them as Creole in writing by choice of alternative orthographical
variants, preferring instead the standard spellings. These two forms are ambiguous, and the
boundary of the switch into Patois at the end of l. 1 is therefore not as clear as it is in l. 15.
However, since our interest here lies in the second switch (back into English), we can at no
analytical loss assume that the first switch occurs before the NP.
168. The writer’s choice of this distribution – Patois for the unlikable character, and English for
the rest of the narrative, rather than the other way round – is of course supported by the
fact that English is the normal baseline code for e-mails anyway. Writers seem to be more
comfortable writing in English, so they are generally more likely to select English for higher
quantities of written language, and write Patois only in insertions.
169. The MM takes community patterns of use as the unit of analysis, not individual interactions. For analytical practice, it is based on three categories: marked, unmarked, and exploratory choice. In addition, the model is not only intended as a descriptive framework, but
also to make “general predictions” about CS behavior in a given community (Myers-Scotton 1993b: 153–154). Due to the frugal layout of its categories, the model gives purchase
only on the most fundamental aspects of code distributions in sociolinguistic context, but
qualitative interpretation of individual interactions is still needed to arrive at specific and
valid descriptions of CS behavior. As Walker points out, there is a fundamental contradiction in the model: like all other sociolinguistic approaches to CS, the MM operates with
subjective, “ad-hoc interpretations of individual examples,” but the task of providing objective evidence of community patterns is not sufficiently solved in the model (Walker 1997:
843). Because of the subjective nature of analytical practice which is needed for the MM, it
may need more than its two-plus-one basic categories, Walker suggests; a gradient might
be more useful than just the idea of binary markedness plus one meta-category of “exploratory” choice.
170. Mair’s concept of ‘diaspora’ here includes computer-assisted interaction among Caribbeans.
171. As Shields-Brodber (1997) argues, the balanced use of JamC and JamE is no longer constrained to “peers in casual, in-group conversations,” which is the most frequent setting for “CS
as the unmarked choice” according to Myers-Scotton (1993a: 482). It is steadily spreading
to domains in which English once was the unmarked choice in the established diglossic
division of functions between JamC and JamE.
172. The MM postulates that the local, indigenous language is always the unmarked choice in
CS (cf. Myers-Scotton 1993b).
173. Cf. Sebba (1993), who described BrC acquisition as an accommodation-driven process of
second-dialect acquisition (45–48).
174. The literature mentions the existence of some minor linguistic differences between LJ and
JamC as spoken in Jamaica. For the most part, these differences are the consequences of
dialect contact between BrC and English in Great Britain (Sebba 1993: 48), resulting in hybrid forms and constructions (Sebba 2004: 197) and less consistent performance of Creole
grammar than could be expected in JamC speech. As Sebba comments with regard to the
faithfulness of BrC speakers applying Creole verbal grammar: “As with other features of basilectal JamC, ‘invariance’ in BrC is found variably. In other words, we can often find forms
which show a lack of morphological marking alongside other forms” (2004: 199). However,
in keeping with the practice adopted for this study and other works on CS related to Rampton’s “late modern ethnography,” I will take BrC “as an emic local dialect rather than as an
analytic problem space” (Harris & Rampton 2002: 41), viewing uses of BrC as linguistic
practice that draws – directly or indirectly – on the grammar of JamC as a resource that
is somehow available to speakers, just as all spoken and written Patois in Jamaica is a per-
Notes 297
formance of JamC grammatical competence. The focus, as before, will be on the discourse
functions of the code.
175. The beginning of Caribbean immigration is marked by the arrival of the Empire Windrush
in Tilbury on June 22nd, 1948, the boat that brought ca. 500 Jamaicans to their new English home (cf. Phillips & Phillips 1999). Government started recognizing and addressing
the challenge posed by the integration of British Caribbeans in society at large and in the
school system in the 1970s (Sebba 1993).
176. Hewitt (1986), the pioneering study of Creole elements in British speech, is an exception,
as the author does not postulate a variety of BrC, but instead describes a “multiracial vernacular” for young Londoners’ speech, i.e. London English that frequently contains Creole
elements. This vernacular is seen as being equally used by adolescent British Caribbeans
and members of all other ethnic groups; thus, there is no distinction between CS among
British Caribbeans and what to Rampton is language crossing.
177. e.g. Rampton (1995; 1998a) and Harris & Rampton (2002)
178. “JPSCo”: Jamaica Public Service Co.
179. “Life pon the Rock”: ‘life on the rock,’ i.e. in Jamaica.
180 Linguistic ecology, or ecolinguistics, analyzes sociolinguistics by consistently applying biological metaphors: language varieties are likened to species in a fight for survival, and the
social and sociolinguistic context is considered to be the totality of environmental factors
that influence chances of development and survival, thus stressing the interdependency
and integratedness of all factors, as well as analytical approaches, that influence the “life”
of varieties. Cf. the standard monographs on ecolinguistics by Mufwene (2001) and Mühlhäusler (2003).
181. cf. section 1.3.2, Crystal (2001)
182. “As English is the dominant language of the US, the UN, the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and big businesses and elites
in many countries worldwide, it is the language in which the fate of most of the world’s
citizens is decided, directly or indirectly” (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas 1996: 441).
183. For example, Rampton’s explanations of switching behavior reach a degree of plasticity that
is unavailable to merely quantitative analysis, as in the following analysis of Rampton’s material contained in Harris & Rampton (2002: 42): “The boys switch into Asian English in a
sequence where they bow to Ben’s calls to order, and in doing so, they conjure a stereotype
of Asian ‘babu’ deference which is historically ensconced in white British racism and which
can be depended on to embarrass a white liberal conscience. The switch indexes race stratification as a potentially relevant issue in our encounter, and this strategic racialisation was
carried further in the switch to Creole, a code associated with the rejection of illegitimate
white power.”
184. cf. Erving Goffman’s definition of informality (1971), cited in Misztal (2000: 42)
185. In what follows, I will refer to the US as a representative for industrialized, western societies
because the US is most relevant to the Caribbean context.
186. For example, the nuclear-family, two-parent household is prevalent in Trinidad & Tobago
(Miller & Slater 2000). The country’s average per capita income is almost three times as
high as Jamaica’s (CIA 2004; Horst & Miller 2005).
187. It is established in sociology that in industrialized, western societies, reciprocity is fundamental to the building of most informal networks outside the intimate realm.
Index
A
ackee.com 26, 27
acrolect 9–10, 33, 54, 58–59, 72
in CMC 38–39, 44, 52, 70,
74–75, 77–78, 83, 90
creole interference in 58, 64,
125
acrolectal JamE vs. international varieties
of English 92, 101
see also creole continuum,
creolism, hypercorrection
activity type 62
addressee specification 61
adolescents 119, 126, 127, 141, 151
and second dialect acquisition 15, 145
and performativity 29, 44,
71
conversations among- 71,
103, 105, 118–119
see also crossing
African-American Vernacular
English 96, 100, 101, 102, 118
American English 22, 44, 96,
149
anonymization 24–26, 169
Auer 5, 28–30, 34, 45, 46, 62, 63,
85, 135, 136
Austin 104
B
Bakhtin 104, 105, 136, 141
basilect 9, 10, 33, 37, 40, 83, 92
Biber 18
bilingualism 7, 10, 14, 54, 76,
118, 127
Black Atlantic 113
British Creole 5, 15, 16, 141–145,
147 see also London Jamaican
British English 22
British National Corpus 22
Brown 66
Brown quartet of corpora 22
Buju Banton 118
Butler 104
C
cell phone 154–156
community of practice 4
conceptual orality 20
conservative female 119–124
conscious language use: see
rhetorical language use
constructivism 30, 88
reconstructivist turn 30, 85,
147
contextualization cue 29, 34, 43,
61, 62, 64, 65, 70, 82, 83, 85, 86,
104, 108, 130
contrastive vs. inherent functions of CS 5, 30, 44, 63, 86,
106–108, 110, 134–136, 141
conversation analysis 29, 30,
63, 135
copula 38–39, 64
country bumpkin 82, 110,
112–115
covert prestige see overt vs.
covert prestige
creole life-cycle 2
Creole orthography 43
creolisms 36–41
in written JamE 37–38
see also acrolect
creole continuum 2, 5–12, 41
and CS 43–45, 61, 65, 69, 91
in CMC 33–40, 52
in the diaspora 15
vs. binary models 11–12, 20,
34–35, 37, 40–41
crossing 4, 29, 105, 126, 142, 143,
147, 151–152
cyberspace 17
D
dancehall 1, 96, 115, 116, 118
Devonish 7–8, 14,33–34, 36, 40,
118, 126, 139, 159, 160
dialect poetry 1
diaspora 2, 5, 13–16, 28, 49, 57,
71, 117, 133, 136, 141, 145
diglossia 5, 7, 8, 10, 14, 34, 35
double-voicing 104–105, 114,
140–142
Dread Talk 15, 47, 94–95, 101
dub poetry 1
E
Eckert 3, 87, 90, 136, 137, 147, 158,
160, 162
Educated Jamaican English 36
educational background 13, 24,
28, 37, 90, 93
and church 53
and diglossia 7, 10–11
and language policy 40
see also creole continuum
English as a World Language 3,
5, 6, 12, 17, 137, 145–151
essentialism 30, 85, 88
expatriate 28 see also diaspora
F
facework 65–66, 76–78
first language 40
folk tales 1, 113
formalization 152, 154, 156
framing 90, 92–95, 97–101, 118
functional shift of JamC 1, 8, 13,
14, 133, 139, 140, 148
G
globalization 147–150
Gumperz 5, 28–30, 43–45,
61–64, 66, 70, 75, 76, 81, 104,
112, 127, 135–136
H
Haitian French Creole 7, 96
homophobia 117–118
humor 49, 93, 101, 105, 109,
113–115, 144
hypercorrection 58, 125
I
implicational scales 9, 33
implicature 30, 86, 88, 105, 134,
140
indexicality 104
Indian English 12
inference 4, 105, 134, 140
informalization 148, 152, 154, 156
inherent functions of CS
see contrastive vs. inherent
functions of CS
intentionality 45
intentional use of CS
see rhetorical use of language
and CS
interjections 61
International Corpus of English 12, 24, 36
International Standard English 40, 69, 72, 91, 92, 146
Internet 2, 16–18
irony 105, 106, 113, 114, 119, 150
J
Jamaican English 1
jamaicans.com 26, 27, 55, 115
K
Kenya 12
killer language 148
kinship 154
L
Labovian sociolinguistics 3, 28,
30, 86–90
language contact 19, 147
language play 62
language rights 8, 14, 149
late modern ethnography 4, 137
Levinson 66
linguistic imperialism 149, 150
link-up networks 68, 155, 156
London English 15, 71, 72, 128
London Jamaican 57, 71, 72, 118,
119, 127, 128, 133
M
Mair 1, 2, 14–16, 22, 28, 36, 38, 40,
41, 55, 76, 88, 111, 115, 128, 133,
136, 141, 142, 146, 147, 160, 162,
163, 165
Markedness Model 13, 28–30, 89,
135, 139–141
mesolect 9–11, 33, 35, 37, 40, 44,
64, 65, 67, 69, 78–80, 91, 123
message boards 17, 25
message qualification 61
Myers-Scotton 13, 28–30, 49, 62,
63, 86, 89, 134–136, 139, 164, 168
N
negative attitudes or emotions 76–77, 103, 107–109
New Zealand 12
New Zealand English 149
nicknames 25–27
Northern Ireland 12
O
orthography 67
of JamC 12, 69, 98, 106, 133,
139
and standardization 1, 41, 43,
133
overt vs. covert prestige 7, 13–14,
95–96, 128, 131
P
parenthesis 62
participant constellation 62
Patrick 1, 10, 12, 16, 33, 35, 80, 96,
126, 142, 144, 146, 147, 164, 165
Pennycook 147, 149, 150, 165
performance 11, 29, 35, 50, 86–89,
103, 104, 110, 115, 119, 142
performativity 104, 147
personae 3, 4, 82, 87, 90, 102,
103, 106, 108, 113–115, 117–119,
122–124, 126, 134, 136, 142, 144,
152 see also conservative
female, country bumpkin,
rude bway, social identities
personalization vs. objectivization 61
postcolonial performativity 149,
150
prestige 6, 8, 14, 41, 95, 96, 128,
133, 148
punctuation 25, 27
punctuation 25, 26, 64, 67
puns 62
Q
qualitative analysis 3, 4, 11, 22, 29,
34, 40, 44, 63, 134
Queen Elizabeth II 143
quotations 61
R
Rampton 4, 15, 29, 30, 57, 104,
105, 136, 137, 141, 142, 147, 151
Rastafarianism
see Dread Talk
reciprocity 152, 153, 155
reductive creolisms 36, 37, 39–41
reiteration 61–62
reported speech 62
rhetorical use of language and
CS 2, 68, 77, 86, 88, 101, 125
and symbolic functions of
JamC 1–4, 37–38, 82, 106, 134
in sociolinguistic theory 1–3,
28–29, 44, 86–88, 134, 136–137,
146
and written language/
CMC 18, 21, 29, 37–47, 111,
137
Rickford 6, 9, 35, 131, 158, 160,
162, 165, 166
rights and obligations 13, 29,
139–141
robust female see conservative
female
rude bway 110, 113, 116–118
S
Sebba 7, 8, 15, 16, 22, 57, 141, 144,
147
Sebba & Wootton 44, 71, 72, 74,
75, 81, 102, 103, 108, 118, 119, 127,
128, 131, 134–136, 142
second dialect acquisition
see adolescents
sequential aspects of CS 62, 63,
70–72, 75, 107, 125, 127
Shields-Brodber 7, 8, 11–14, 36,
63, 96, 133, 140, 148, 167
shifting 37, 44
Singapore 12
social identities 46, 85, 102,
105–106, 108, 131
see also personae
social networks 154, 155, 156 see
also Kinship
socioeconomic status 11
sociolinguistic theory 3
speech act 104
speech community 4, 7, 10, 23,
28, 126, 136
speech recordings 16, 23
styles 3–5, 19, 86–88, 90, 126, 137
stylization 21, 41, 44, 125
Index 301
subjective 107, 108
subjectivization vs. objectivization 79, 112
Swiss German 7
symbolic functions of
JamC 1–2, 13, 28, 57, 64,
93, 97, 100, 118, 130, 133, 137,
141, 145
as ‘we’-code 71, 79, 82
in the diaspora 15–16, 93,
99, 142–145
and identity construction 89
see also rhetorical use of
language and CS
T
‘they’-code 54, 70, 71, 72, 75,
76, 127, 128, 134–136
text type 4, 16–21, 25, 37, 49,
63, 118, 139, 141, 151
The Harder They Come 118
Third Wave 3–5, 12, 90, 137,
147
threads 26, 27, 47
topicalization 62
topic shift 62
transparent vs. opaque lexical
features 36
trickster 113
Trinidad & Tobago 35, 81,
146
typographic conventions 25–27
U
unconscious language use
see rhetorical use of
language and CS
University of the West
Indies 14, 24, 37, 91, 108,
109, 114, 154
V
virtual community 16, 17, 133
volition 43
W
‘we’-code 54, 55, 57, 66, 71, 75,
77, 81–83, 97, 99, 108, 127,
128, 131–134, 136
World Englishes 145–
147 see also English as a
World Language
written Creole 1
written language 17, 29, 33,
43, 65
written speech 19
Y
youth culture 92, 142
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series
A complete list of titles in this series can be found on the publishers’ website, www.benjamins.com
153 Arnovick, Leslie K.: Written Reliquaries. The resonance of orality in Medieval English texts.
xii, 283 pp. + index. Expected December 2006
152 Warren, Martin: Features of Naturalness in Conversation. x, 264 pp. + index. Expected December 2006
151 Suzuki, Satoko (ed.): Emotive Communication in Japanese. v, 233 pp. + index. Expected November 2006
150 Busse, Beatrix: Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare. xii, 485 pp. + index. Expected
November 2006
149 Locher, Miriam A.: Advice Online. Advice-giving in an American Internet health column. 2006.
xvi, 277 pp.
148 Fløttum, Kjersti, Trine Dahl and Torodd Kinn: Academic Voices. Across languages and disciplines.
2006. x, 309 pp.
147 Hinrichs, Lars: Codeswitching on the Web. English and Jamaican Creole in e-mail communication. 2006.
xi, 301 pp.
146 Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa: Collaborating towards Coherence. Lexical cohesion in English discourse. 2006.
ix, 192 pp.
145 Kurhila, Salla: Second Language Interaction. 2006. vii, 257 pp.
144 Bührig, Kristin and Jan D. ten Thije (eds.): Beyond Misunderstanding. Linguistic analyses of
intercultural communication. 2006. vi, 339 pp.
143 Baker, Carolyn, Michael Emmison and Alan Firth (eds.): Calling for Help. Language and social
interaction in telephone helplines. 2005. xviii, 352 pp.
142 Sidnell, Jack: Talk and Practical Epistemology. The social life of knowledge in a Caribbean community.
2005. xvi, 255 pp.
141 Zhu, Yunxia: Written Communication across Cultures. A sociocognitive perspective on business genres.
2005. xviii, 216 pp.
140 Butler, Christopher S., María de los Ángeles Gómez-González and Susana M. Doval-Suárez
(eds.): The Dynamics of Language Use. Functional and contrastive perspectives. 2005. xvi, 413 pp.
139 Lakoff, Robin T. and Sachiko Ide (eds.): Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness. 2005.
xii, 342 pp.
138 Müller, Simone: Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse. 2005. xviii, 290 pp.
137 Morita, Emi: Negotiation of Contingent Talk. The Japanese interactional particles ne and sa. 2005.
xvi, 240 pp.
136 Sassen, Claudia: Linguistic Dimensions of Crisis Talk. Formalising structures in a controlled language.
2005. ix, 230 pp.
135 Archer, Dawn: Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760). A sociopragmatic
analysis. 2005. xiv, 374 pp.
134 Skaffari, Janne, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen and Brita Wårvik (eds.):
Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past. 2005. x, 418 pp.
133 Marnette, Sophie: Speech and Thought Presentation in French. Concepts and strategies. 2005.
xiv, 379 pp.
132 Onodera, Noriko O.: Japanese Discourse Markers. Synchronic and diachronic discourse analysis. 2004.
xiv, 253 pp.
131 Janoschka, Anja: Web Advertising. New forms of communication on the Internet. 2004. xiv, 230 pp.
130 Halmari, Helena and Tuija Virtanen (eds.): Persuasion Across Genres. A linguistic approach. 2005.
x, 257 pp.
129 Taboada, María Teresa: Building Coherence and Cohesion. Task-oriented dialogue in English and
Spanish. 2004. xvii, 264 pp.
128 Cordella, Marisa: The Dynamic Consultation. A discourse analytical study of doctor–patient
communication. 2004. xvi, 254 pp.
127 Brisard, Frank, Michael Meeuwis and Bart Vandenabeele (eds.): Seduction, Community, Speech.
A Festschrift for Herman Parret. 2004. vi, 202 pp.
126 Wu, Yi’an: Spatial Demonstratives in English and Chinese. Text and Cognition. 2004. xviii, 236 pp.
125 Lerner, Gene H. (ed.): Conversation Analysis. Studies from the first generation. 2004. x, 302 pp.
124 Vine, Bernadette: Getting Things Done at Work. The discourse of power in workplace interaction. 2004.
x, 278 pp.
123 Márquez Reiter, Rosina and María Elena Placencia (eds.): Current Trends in the Pragmatics of
Spanish. 2004. xvi, 383 pp.
122 González, Montserrat: Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative. The case of English and Catalan. 2004.
xvi, 410 pp.
121 Fetzer, Anita: Recontextualizing Context. Grammaticality meets appropriateness. 2004. x, 272 pp.
120 Aijmer, Karin and Anna-Brita Stenström (eds.): Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora.
2004. viii, 279 pp.
119 Hiltunen, Risto and Janne Skaffari (eds.): Discourse Perspectives on English. Medieval to modern.
2003. viii, 243 pp.
118 Cheng, Winnie: Intercultural Conversation. 2003. xii, 279 pp.
117 Wu, Ruey-Jiuan Regina: Stance in Talk. A conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles. 2004.
xvi, 260 pp.
116 Grant, Colin B. (ed.): Rethinking Communicative Interaction. New interdisciplinary horizons. 2003.
viii, 330 pp.
115 Kärkkäinen, Elise: Epistemic Stance in English Conversation. A description of its interactional
functions, with a focus on I think. 2003. xii, 213 pp.
114 Kühnlein, Peter, Hannes Rieser and Henk Zeevat (eds.): Perspectives on Dialogue in the New
Millennium. 2003. xii, 400 pp.
113 Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Linda L. Thornburg (eds.): Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. 2003.
xii, 285 pp.
112 Lenz, Friedrich (ed.): Deictic Conceptualisation of Space, Time and Person. 2003. xiv, 279 pp.
111 Ensink, Titus and Christoph Sauer (eds.): Framing and Perspectivising in Discourse. 2003. viii, 227 pp.
110 Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.): Discourse
Constructions of Youth Identities. 2003. viii, 343 pp.
109 Mayes, Patricia: Language, Social Structure, and Culture. A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and
America. 2003. xiv, 228 pp.
108 Barron, Anne: Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics. Learning how to do things with words in a study
abroad context. 2003. xviii, 403 pp.
107 Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.): Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term
Systems. 2003. viii, 446 pp.
106 Busse, Ulrich: Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus. Morpho-syntactic variability of second
person pronouns. 2002. xiv, 344 pp.
105 Blackwell, Sarah E.: Implicatures in Discourse. The case of Spanish NP anaphora. 2003. xvi, 303 pp.
104 Beeching, Kate: Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French. 2002. x, 251 pp.
103 Fetzer, Anita and Christiane Meierkord (eds.): Rethinking Sequentiality. Linguistics meets
conversational interaction. 2002. vi, 300 pp.
102 Leafgren, John: Degrees of Explicitness. Information structure and the packaging of Bulgarian subjects
and objects. 2002. xii, 252 pp.
101 Luke, Kang Kwong and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou (eds.): Telephone Calls. Unity and diversity in
conversational structure across languages and cultures. 2002. x, 295 pp.
100 Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. and Ken Turner (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 2.
2003. viii, 496 pp.
99 Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. and Ken Turner (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 1.
2003. xii, 388 pp.
98 Duszak, Anna (ed.): Us and Others. Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures. 2002.
viii, 522 pp.
97 Maynard, Senko K.: Linguistic Emotivity. Centrality of place, the topic-comment dynamic, and an
ideology of pathos in Japanese discourse. 2002. xiv, 481 pp.
96 Haverkate, Henk: The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood. 2002. vi, 241 pp.
95 Fitzmaurice, Susan M.: The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English. A pragmatic approach. 2002.
viii, 263 pp.
94 McIlvenny, Paul (ed.): Talking Gender and Sexuality. 2002. x, 332 pp.
93 Baron, Bettina and Helga Kotthoff (eds.): Gender in Interaction. Perspectives on femininity and
masculinity in ethnography and discourse. 2002. xxiv, 357 pp.
92 Gardner, Rod: When Listeners Talk. Response tokens and listener stance. 2001. xxii, 281 pp.
91 Gross, Joan: Speaking in Other Voices. An ethnography of Walloon puppet theaters. 2001. xxviii, 341 pp.
90 Kenesei, István and Robert M. Harnish (eds.): Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse.
A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer. 2001. xxii, 352 pp.
89 Itakura, Hiroko: Conversational Dominance and Gender. A study of Japanese speakers in first and
second language contexts. 2001. xviii, 231 pp.
88 Bayraktaroğlu, Arın and Maria Sifianou (eds.): Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries. The
case of Greek and Turkish. 2001. xiv, 439 pp.
87 Mushin, Ilana: Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance. Narrative Retelling. 2001. xviii, 244 pp.
86 Ifantidou, Elly: Evidentials and Relevance. 2001. xii, 225 pp.
85 Collins, Daniel E.: Reanimated Voices. Speech reporting in a historical-pragmatic perspective. 2001.
xx, 384 pp.
84 Andersen, Gisle: Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. A relevance-theoretic approach to
the language of adolescents. 2001. ix, 352 pp.
83 Márquez Reiter, Rosina: Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. A contrastive study of requests
and apologies. 2000. xviii, 225 pp.
82 Khalil, Esam N.: Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse. 2000. x, 274 pp.
81 Di Luzio, Aldo, Susanne Günthner and Franca Orletti (eds.): Culture in Communication.
Analyses of intercultural situations. 2001. xvi, 341 pp.
80 Ungerer, Friedrich (ed.): English Media Texts – Past and Present. Language and textual structure. 2000.
xiv, 286 pp.
79 Andersen, Gisle and Thorstein Fretheim (eds.): Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude.
2000. viii, 273 pp.
78 Sell, Roger D.: Literature as Communication. The foundations of mediating criticism. 2000. xiv, 348 pp.
77 Vanderveken, Daniel and Susumu Kubo (eds.): Essays in Speech Act Theory. 2002. vi, 328 pp.
76 Matsui, Tomoko: Bridging and Relevance. 2000. xii, 251 pp.
75 Pilkington, Adrian: Poetic Effects. A relevance theory perspective. 2000. xiv, 214 pp.
74 Trosborg, Anna (ed.): Analysing Professional Genres. 2000. xvi, 256 pp.
73 Hester, Stephen K. and David Francis (eds.): Local Educational Order. Ethnomethodological studies
of knowledge in action. 2000. viii, 326 pp.
72 Marmaridou, Sophia S.A.: Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition. 2000. xii, 322 pp.
71 Gómez-González, María de los Ángeles: The Theme–Topic Interface. Evidence from English. 2001.
xxiv, 438 pp.
70 Sorjonen, Marja-Leena: Responding in Conversation. A study of response particles in Finnish. 2001.
x, 330 pp.
69 Noh, Eun-Ju: Metarepresentation. A relevance-theory approach. 2000. xii, 242 pp.
68 Arnovick, Leslie K.: Diachronic Pragmatics. Seven case studies in English illocutionary development.
2000. xii, 196 pp.
67 Taavitsainen, Irma, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta (eds.): Writing in Nonstandard English.
2000. viii, 404 pp.
66 Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.): Historical Dialogue Analysis. 1999.
viii, 478 pp.
65 Cooren, François: The Organizing Property of Communication. 2000. xvi, 272 pp.
64 Svennevig, Jan: Getting Acquainted in Conversation. A study of initial interactions. 2000. x, 384 pp.
63 Bublitz, Wolfram, Uta Lenk and Eija Ventola (eds.): Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse.
How to create it and how to describe it. Selected papers from the International Workshop on Coherence,
Augsburg, 24-27 April 1997. 1999. xiv, 300 pp.
62 Tzanne, Angeliki: Talking at Cross-Purposes. The dynamics of miscommunication. 2000. xiv, 263 pp.
61 Mills, Margaret H. (ed.): Slavic Gender Linguistics. 1999. xviii, 251 pp.
60 Jacobs, Geert: Preformulating the News. An analysis of the metapragmatics of press releases. 1999.
xviii, 428 pp.
59 Kamio, Akio and Ken-ichi Takami (eds.): Function and Structure. In honor of Susumu Kuno. 1999.
x, 398 pp.
58 Rouchota, Villy and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.): Current Issues in Relevance Theory. 1998. xii, 368 pp.
57 Jucker, Andreas H. and Yael Ziv (eds.): Discourse Markers. Descriptions and theory. 1998. x, 363 pp.
56 Tanaka, Hiroko: Turn-Taking in Japanese Conversation. A Study in Grammar and Interaction. 2000.
xiv, 242 pp.
55 Allwood, Jens and Peter Gärdenfors (eds.): Cognitive Semantics. Meaning and cognition. 1999.
x, 201 pp.
54 Hyland, Ken: Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. 1998. x, 308 pp.
53 Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt: The Function of Discourse Particles. A study with special reference
to spoken standard French. 1998. xii, 418 pp.
52 Gillis, Steven and Annick De Houwer (eds.): The Acquisition of Dutch. With a Preface by Catherine
E. Snow. 1998. xvi, 444 pp.
51 Boulima, Jamila: Negotiated Interaction in Target Language Classroom Discourse. 1999. xiv, 338 pp.
50 Grenoble, Lenore A.: Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse. 1998. xviii, 338 pp.
49 Kurzon, Dennis: Discourse of Silence. 1998. vi, 162 pp.
48 Kamio, Akio: Territory of Information. 1997. xiv, 227 pp.
47 Chesterman, Andrew: Contrastive Functional Analysis. 1998. viii, 230 pp.
46 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra: Narrative Performances. A study of Modern Greek storytelling. 1997.
xvii, 282 pp.
45 Paltridge, Brian: Genre, Frames and Writing in Research Settings. 1997. x, 192 pp.
44 Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca and Sandra J. Harris: Managing Language. The discourse of
corporate meetings. 1997. ix, 295 pp.
43 Janssen, Theo and Wim van der Wurff (eds.): Reported Speech. Forms and functions of the verb.
1996. x, 312 pp.
42 Kotthoff, Helga and Ruth Wodak (eds.): Communicating Gender in Context. 1997. xxvi, 424 pp.
41 Ventola, Eija and Anna Mauranen (eds.): Academic Writing. Intercultural and textual issues. 1996.
xiv, 258 pp.
40 Diamond, Julie: Status and Power in Verbal Interaction. A study of discourse in a close-knit social
network. 1996. viii, 184 pp.
39 Herring, Susan C. (ed.): Computer-Mediated Communication. Linguistic, social, and cross-cultural
perspectives. 1996. viii, 326 pp.
38 Fretheim, Thorstein and Jeanette K. Gundel (eds.): Reference and Referent Accessibility. 1996.
xii, 312 pp.
37 Carston, Robyn and Seiji Uchida (eds.): Relevance Theory. Applications and implications. 1998.
x, 300 pp.
36 Chilton, Paul, Mikhail V. Ilyin and Jacob L. Mey (eds.): Political Discourse in Transition in Europe
1989–1991. 1998. xi, 272 pp.
35 Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.): Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic developments in the history of English. 1995.
xvi, 624 pp.
34 Barbe, Katharina: Irony in Context. 1995. x, 208 pp.
33 Goossens, Louis, Paul Pauwels, Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn, Anne-Marie SimonVandenbergen and Johan Vanparys: By Word of Mouth. Metaphor, metonymy and linguistic action
in a cognitive perspective. 1995. xii, 254 pp.
32 Shibatani, Masayoshi and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.): Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics. In
honor of Charles J. Fillmore. 1996. x, 322 pp.
31 Wildgen, Wolfgang: Process, Image, and Meaning. A realistic model of the meaning of sentences and
narrative texts. 1994. xii, 281 pp.
30 Wortham, Stanton E.F.: Acting Out Participant Examples in the Classroom. 1994. xiv, 178 pp.
29 Barsky, Robert F.: Constructing a Productive Other. Discourse theory and the Convention refugee
hearing. 1994. x, 272 pp.
28 Van de Walle, Lieve: Pragmatics and Classical Sanskrit. A pilot study in linguistic politeness. 1993.
xii, 454 pp.
27 Süter, Hans-Jürg: The Wedding Report. A prototypical approach to the study of traditional text types.
1993. xii, 314 pp.
26 Stygall, Gail: Trial Language. Differential discourse processing and discursive formation. 1994.
xii, 226 pp.
25 Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth: English Speech Rhythm. Form and function in everyday verbal
interaction. 1993. x, 346 pp.
24 Maynard, Senko K.: Discourse Modality. Subjectivity, Emotion and Voice in the Japanese Language.
1993. x, 315 pp.
23 Fortescue, Michael, Peter Harder and Lars Kristoffersen (eds.): Layered Structure and
Reference in a Functional Perspective. Papers from the Functional Grammar Conference, Copenhagen,
1990. 1992. xiii, 444 pp.
22 Auer, Peter and Aldo Di Luzio (eds.): The Contextualization of Language. 1992. xvi, 402 pp.
21 Searle, John R., Herman Parret and Jef Verschueren: (On) Searle on Conversation. Compiled
and introduced by Herman Parret and Jef Verschueren. 1992. vi, 154 pp.
20 Nuyts, Jan: Aspects of a Cognitive-Pragmatic Theory of Language. On cognition, functionalism, and
grammar. 1991. xii, 399 pp.
19 Baker, Carolyn and Allan Luke (eds.): Towards a Critical Sociology of Reading Pedagogy. Papers of the
XII World Congress on Reading. 1991. xxi, 287 pp.
18 Johnstone, Barbara: Repetition in Arabic Discourse. Paradigms, syntagms and the ecology of language.
1991. viii, 130 pp.
17 Piéraut-Le Bonniec, Gilberte and Marlene Dolitsky (eds.): Language Bases ... Discourse Bases.
Some aspects of contemporary French-language psycholinguistics research. 1991. vi, 342 pp.
16 Mann, William C. and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.): Discourse Description. Diverse linguistic analyses
of a fund-raising text. 1992. xiii, 409 pp.
15 Komter, Martha L.: Conflict and Cooperation in Job Interviews. A study of talks, tasks and ideas. 1991.
viii, 252 pp.
14 Schwartz, Ursula V.: Young Children's Dyadic Pretend Play. A communication analysis of plot structure
and plot generative strategies. 1991. vi, 151 pp.
13 Nuyts, Jan, A. Machtelt Bolkestein and Co Vet (eds.): Layers and Levels of Representation in
Language Theory. A functional view. 1990. xii, 348 pp.
12 Abraham, Werner (ed.): Discourse Particles. Descriptive and theoretical investigations on the logical,
syntactic and pragmatic properties of discourse particles in German. 1991. viii, 338 pp.
11 Luong, Hy V.: Discursive Practices and Linguistic Meanings. The Vietnamese system of person reference.
1990. x, 213 pp.
10 Murray, Denise E.: Conversation for Action. The computer terminal as medium of communication. 1991.
xii, 176 pp.
9 Luke, Kang Kwong: Utterance Particles in Cantonese Conversation. 1990. xvi, 329 pp.
8 Young, Lynne: Language as Behaviour, Language as Code. A study of academic English. 1991. ix, 304 pp.
7 Lindenfeld, Jacqueline: Speech and Sociability at French Urban Marketplaces. 1990. viii, 173 pp.
6:3 Blommaert, Jan and Jef Verschueren (eds.): The Pragmatics of International and Intercultural
Communication. Selected papers from the International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, August 1987.
Volume 3: The Pragmatics of International and Intercultural Communication. 1991. viii, 249 pp.
6:2 Verschueren, Jef (ed.): Levels of Linguistic Adaptation. Selected papers from the International
Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, August 1987. Volume 2: Levels of Linguistic Adaptation. 1991. viii, 339 pp.
6:1 Verschueren, Jef (ed.): Pragmatics at Issue. Selected papers of the International Pragmatics
Conference, Antwerp, August 17–22, 1987. Volume 1: Pragmatics at Issue. 1991. viii, 314 pp.
5 Thelin, Nils B. (ed.): Verbal Aspect in Discourse. 1990. xvi, 490 pp.
4 Raffler-Engel, Walburga von (ed.): Doctor–Patient Interaction. 1989. xxxviii, 294 pp.
3 Oleksy, Wieslaw (ed.): Contrastive Pragmatics. 1988. xiv, 282 pp.
2 Barton, Ellen: Nonsentential Constituents. A theory of grammatical structure and pragmatic
interpretation. 1990. xviii, 247 pp.
1 Walter, Bettyruth: The Jury Summation as Speech Genre. An ethnographic study of what it means to
those who use it. 1988. xvii, 264 pp.

Codeswitching on the Web

Transcription

Similar documents

Jamaica Process

Waddies

Wolmer`s BANQUET Flyer 4

june newsletter - Jamaica Relief Ministries

ANDY LIVINGSTON Entry - Jamaica Cultural Development

Newsletter_September2008 - Jamaican Self-Help

CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS ON JAMAICA`S BIODIVERSITY