My teacher says...": Attitudes of Jamaican students towards Jamaican Creole

Alicia Beckford

Fri. 9-10:40 C

Do young speakers of Jamaican Creole (JC) consider it to be a language, and for what range of communicative purposes do they believe it to be appropriate? How do variables such as gender and adolescent in-grouping interact with attitude scores? Creole linguists have for more than 3 decades emphasized the contributions of the various contact languages to the Creole, the systematic nature of the code, etc. However, the impact of the work of linguists on public opinion is unclear. This study has undertaken to discover what message children are hearing in their schools, what extra-curricular influences are helping them to form their opinions, and what those opinions are. Two tools for quantifying relevant information within the context of a rural Jamaican community have been developed, one to assess network strength, the other, dialect attitudes.

There is evidence that arguments asserting the viability of JC are influencing public opinion. Morgan (1983) found that positive attitudes of secondary school principals toward Creole usage in schools were positively correlated to that school's mean success rate in the Standard English sections of Common Entrance and CXC exams. In 1989, The National Association of Teachers of English in Jamaica stated that "...in linguistic terms the Jamaican Creole is a perfectly autonomous...language system", adopted the position that Jamaicans are bilingual, and called for an end to the denigration of JC in the schools. Christie (1995), however reporting on attitudes toward JC expressed by columnists writing in Jamaica's primary newspaper, the Gleaner, between 1989 and 1994, found that while Jamaican "dancehall" music, electronic and print media are increasingly using JC, traditional prejudice against it survives at all levels of the population.

Data for the present study were collected between January and March, 1995, in Gordon Town, a rural community east of Kingston. Individual interviews and participant-observer sessions were conducted within a judgment sample of 51 respondents (27 children and 24 adults). Attitude Indicator Scores were assessed for each individual to determine positive/negative disposition toward JC, and individual understanding of its structure and distribution. I also investigated the degree to which respondents "import culture" to determine whether exposure to urban Kingston, American and British values (including media listening/viewing patterns) contributes to dialect attitudes. Network strength indicator scores (adapted from Lippi-Green, 1989, for use in Jamaica) were assessed for each individual as a means of investigating the possible function of dense and multiplex community ties as a conservative force influencing linguistic behavior. This study looks closely at the networks of the high-school aged respondents: their voluntary associations, kinship, and time of residence in the community. Network theory (Milroy & Milroy, 1992) predicts that linguistic behavior, linguistic attitudes included, will be influenced by traditional forces disfavoring the Creole, but also by local norms favoring the Creole. It is within this tension that children's attitude-formation is occurring.

This study provides clear evidence that for the younger residents of this small, tightly-knit rural community, the question is no longer whether JC is a language, but rather, for which social circumstances (both domain and addressee) its use is appropriate, and whether Creole fluency detriments fluency in "Standard" English. Interestingly, the present data show clearly that respondents are more willing to be addressed in JC in a variety of domains than they are willing to use it themselves under similar circumstances. The range of domains in which children are willing to use JC is in fact broader than those accepted by their elders. Respondents were invited to distinguish between such terms as "slang", "broken English" and "patois", with enlightening results.

References

Christie, P. (1995) Attitudes to Creole: some Jamaican evidence. Paper presented at the Society for Pidgin and Creole Languages, New Orleans, January 1995.

Lippi-Green, R. (1980) Social network integration and language change in progress in a rural alpine village, Language and Society, (18)2. Cambridge: Cambridge.

Milroy, L., and Milroy, J. (1992) Social network and social class: Toward an integrated sociolinguistic model. Language in Society, 21.

Morgan, H.W. (1983) An analysis of the attitudes of Jamaican principals toward Creole usage in secondary schools. Ph.D. dissertation, Texas Southern University.