Lesson 2: What is a language (and other related terms)?
Language
It is common in Jamaica to to hear the question being asked whether or not Jamaican Creole is a real language. In fact, some people may not even be comfortable using the word “language” as a description and instead opt for words like Creole, patois, dialect, or slang. The reason for this discomfort is not a linguistic or scientific one, the reason is more socio-political than anything else. If English—the language of the Bible, Shakespear, education, and the government—is a real language, then surely Jamaican Creole can’t be a language as well, right? Jamaican Creole seems to lack all the “important” things that are associated with real languages; it does not have an extensive library of publications stretching back centuries, it is not widely taught in schools, and it is never used for serious government business. If this is the criteria by which all languages are to be judged, then the vast majority of the world’s languages would never be considered real languages. This simply means that we would have to establish some basic universal criteria for a language. We can agree on the following:
A language should fulfill the communicative needs of its speakers
A language should reflect the heritage and cultural knowledge of its community
A language has a grammatical structure and rules that make it distinct
A language is acquired by children at home and serves as a marker of identity
These four characteristics of a language make no reference to the existence of books, or even a writing system for that matter. There is no mention of use in government or education. All of the criteria above are able to define a language regardless of its location, the time in history it is used, its use in formal contexts, and most importantly, the criteria make no reference to the prestige of the language. Why do we have so many different terms then? The easiest explanation is that words like Creole, language, dialect, and slang, all have technical meanings, but most persons are not aware of the subtle differences and do not use them in their strict technical sense.
Creole
A Creole language is a variety of speech that evolved out of a contact situation between two or more different language groups. This is what happened in the case of the Caribbean during the time of plantation slavery. The enslaved Africans spoke their languages and the plantation class spoke their European languages. Communication was necessary, but neither the time nor resources for formal language learning existed, so new languages had to evolve naturally. Linguists differ on the length of time necessary for a new Creole language to emerge, but there is general agreement that by the time a new generation of speakers grow up in the contact situation, a Creole language would’ve taken shape. Here are some facts about Creole languages in the Caribbean:
Patois/Patwa
“Patois” is a term of French origin which was initially used to describe the way that the poor and uneducated classes used French. It was used in a derogatory manner to indicate that the speech of the working class was less prestigious than that of the ruling class. Eventually, the term extended its use beyond France, and was applied to the French Creoles that started to emerge in the French colonies, and ultimately it was used to describe the English Creoles as well. The Creoles spoken in Jamaica, Dominica, St. Lucia, Trinidad and elsewhere are also called a patois. The term “Patwa” is simply the word spelled using the Jamaican writing system; it could be treated as a symbolic way of indicating that it is specifically referring to the speech of Jamaicans.Here is a snippet of the documentary"York @50: The way must be tried" that featured students from the very first JC1000 class back in 2008. As you will see the in the video, even though the language is being taught at a university, negative language attitudes still persist.
Dialect
A dialect is a regional variation for an existing language. If we take for example the English language, we will notice that the variety of English spoken in countries like the USA, Australia, Jamaica etc. all have certain differences in pronunciation and word meanings. All of these differences are dialectal in nature—differences that are common to that geographical location. Even the English spoken in Britain is a dialect of English. And inside England, there are several different dialects too—the “Queens English”, Cockney English, London English and so on. An easy way to think about the difference between a language and one of it’s dialect is that a language is a collection of a set of abstract grammatical rules. But once you use the language, what you produce is a dialect. Technically speaking, there is no substantive difference between a language and a dialect.
Slang
If dialects are geographical variations of a language, then slang could be considered temporal variations, that is, variation that is based in a specific point in time. Slang words and phrases come into existence and fade out just as quickly—they only remain around as long as they’re popular or useful. Every language has slang expressions, but no language is entirely slang. Sometimes people get confused by the fact that Jamaican Creole has slang terms for words from English, and end up thinking that Jamaican Creole is merely slang English. This of course is not the case.