The black man’s burden?: Language and political economy in a diglossic state and beyond

ZAA 2015; x(x): xxx–xxx

Joseph T. Farquharson*The Black Man’s Burden? – Language and Political Economy in a Diglossic State and BeyondAbstract: The article looks at language as capital, with particular reference to the Jamaican language, highlighting the parallels and interactions between the eco-nomic and linguistic systems. In the ongoing discourse on language in Jamaica, Jamaican Creole has generally been viewed as a problem. It is normally the first excuse offered for why many Jamaican children do poorly in English in high-stakes examinations, and is often seen as a hindrance to social and economic advance-ment both locally and internationally. By looking at the expansion of the language in several ‘new’ domains, and drawing on research in linguistics which deals with this expansion, the article argues that Jamaican has been undergoing a revaluation which has the potential to place economic power in the hands of its speakers. This project is important because the Jamaican language has normally been viewed as a burden for Black Jamaicans. The word burden in the title is being used not in the sense of an onerous task which one is obligated to do, but in the sense of a hin-drance, something one should get rid of. The question mark signals that I wish to interrogate the perspective which labels the language as an obstacle for its speakers.

DOI 10.1515/zaa-2015-0016

1 IntroductionIn various ways, the Caribbean has been for sale (sometimes on sale) since the end of the fifteenth century. However, its sale has generally been negotiated by people who do not own it and in ways that leave locals at a disadvantage. This was true in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries when indigenous populations were decimated or displaced while distant crowns stole and ‘sold’ their land as a location where lower- and middle-class Europeans could escape the economic hardships of Europe in the early modern period and quickly accumulate wealth. Since the late nineteenth century, the Caribbean has been advertised to the global

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*Corresponding author: Dr. Joseph T. Farquharson, Center for Inter-American Studies (CIAS), University of Bielefeld, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany, e-mail: [email protected]

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market as a paradise destination offering sand, sea, and sun to tourists. Instead of improving the lot of the local poor in any significant way, tourism tends to feed existing inequalities. For example, in some Caribbean countries the sand and sea are privately owned by non-Caribbean people and the access of natives to these spaces is restricted; a practice which owners justify as being necessary because of local problems with crime and violence. However, a decent portion of profits goes to private investors and corporations based outside of the Caribbean.

Selling out the Caribbean’s natural resources has often left the poor worse off but I would like to suggest that there is another ‘natural’ resource, namely lan-guage, which we can ‘sell out’ without the negative effects of the sale of those resources which are linked to the natural environment. The paper focusses on Jamaica as the prime example of a country that can convert linguistic heritage into financial resource. Jamaica is among the countries with the highest public debt in relation to GDP. Most of the means of production are still owned by the non-Black (usually White) minority, who depend on the non-White (mostly Black) majority to sell its labour and become managers of other people’s wealth and ‘factory floor’ workers. Given this configuration of the economic space, questions surrounding the value of privately and publicly owned goods are determined by the minority.

The current article looks at language as capital, with particular reference to the Jamaican language, highlighting the parallels and interactions between the economic and linguistic systems. In the ongoing discourse on language in Jamaica, Jamaican Creole (hereafter, Jamaican) has generally been viewed as a problem. It is normally the first excuse offered for why many Jamaican children do so poorly in English in high-stakes examinations, and is often seen as a hin-drance to social and economic advancement both locally and internationally. By looking at the expansion of the language in several ‘new’ domains, and drawing on research in linguistics which deals with this expansion, the article argues that Jamaican has been undergoing a revaluation which has the potential to place economic power in the hands of speakers. This project is important because the Jamaican language has normally been viewed as a burden for Black Jamaicans. The word burden in the title is being used not in the sense of an onerous task which one is obligated to do, but in the sense of a hindrance; something one should get rid of. The question mark signals that I wish to interrogate the perspec-tive which labels the language as an obstacle for its speakers.

2 Diglossia Meets Class in a Developing CountryThe linguistic situation in Jamaica is normally defined as a (post-)creole con-tinuum (DeCamp 1971) with varieties arranged linearly from a pure Creole at

Q2: Please check the use of Creole and creole throughout and amend if required

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one end (i.e., the basilect) to a standard variety of English at the other (i.e., the acrolect), and various mixed varieties (i.e., mesolects) between those two extreme poles. In DeCamp’s formulation, the continuum is essentially a modern (post- Emancipation) phenomenon which is expected to result in the ultimate disap-pearance of the Creole variety as more people shift to the acrolect due to formal education (which is delivered in English) and the global prestige of the English language. Although the continuum model is often contested, it is still referenced in the literature as a convenient, though imperfect, way of describing the linguis-tic landscape. Personally, I favour a model in which there are two distinct lan-guages in the space which interact with each other in various ways that can be accounted for by using established terms such as borrowing, code-switching, and code-mixing. In critiquing the view that the continuum is a recent phenomenon, Alleyne (1980), using the data compiled by Lalla and D’Costa (1990) argues that high variability as a result of code-mixing of English and Creole was a feature of the Jamaican linguistic landscape long before Emancipation.

Rather than characterising the Jamaican space as a (post-)creole continuum, I concur with Devonish that it is diglossic (Devonish 2003, 158). According to Fer-guson (1959):

Diglossia is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dia-lects 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 section of the community for ordinary conversation. (Ferguson 1959, 435)

Using Ferguson’s definition as a point of departure, Devonish reframes diglossia in the context of the (Commonwealth) Caribbean as ‘conquest diglossia,’ seeing that the high (H) variety is an external variety which was historically imposed on conquered/enslaved peoples (Devonish 2003, 158). Nevertheless, we still have the functional split between the H variety, used for formal interaction, and the English-lexicon Creole (the L variety) used predominantly in intimate and non-formal situations. Early historical accounts suggest that diglossia has been a feature of Jamaican linguistic practice since at least the eighteenth century (cf. Long 2002 [1774], 426), although it probably was not as ideologically moti-vated as it became in the twentieth century.

The Jamaican language arose in an economy that placed heavy empha-sis on production for export; an economy in which Black speakers of Jamaican were unrecognised as producers, in the longstanding devaluation of labour (trumped by capital) and of those who have only their labour to contribute to the

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marketplace. Blacks were also undervalued as consumers given their status as property and their low spending potential. Both the formal local economy and trade with international partners were controlled by a handful of White monolin-gual speakers of English (government agents, financiers, estate owners, etc.) and a managerial class (overseers, book-keepers, artisans), bilingual in English and Jamaican. As recently as the 1960s – the decade of Independence – the general composition of this hierarchy had not changed significantly, and since the 1970s the only real change has been the shrinkage of the monolingual English-speaking class to be replaced by an English-dominant bilingual bourgeoisie which appears to be more determined in maintaining the diglossic status quo.

Status quo preservation has always served the interests of the Jamaican petite bourgeoisie so that maximal distinction can be maintained between them and the proletariat class and their sense of having arrived can remain undisturbed. This state of affairs also holds true in the linguistic domain and manifests itself in the popular ideology that frames the language situation in terms of an English/Creole dichotomy.1 More importantly, it is the ideology of middle class bureau-crats who oversee policy-making processes. This means that the expansion of Creole use into domains that are controlled by the higher classes tends to affect the surface, but not the foundations of the superstructure. In a post-colonial society such as Jamaica where political independence was more an act of formal negotiation rather than the product of class upheaval and revolution, the change from the ‘physical relationship[s] of constraint’ (Foucault 2000, 342) which typify the system of chattel slavery/colonialism to the dynamic relationship of power in an ideologically neo-colonial nation-state produces a ticking time bomb. This can be illustrated by a letter to the editor of the Daily Gleaner in the early 1940s, by C. Pox, who by her own admission is a Jamaican who only speaks ‘the King’s English’:

[…] but there are many of us, who, although we make no pretence about being unable to understand the dialect, are, at the same time, pleased to flatter ourselves that we can both speak and understand the King’s English as well as any Englishman, and take exception to any inferences to the contrary. (Pox 1940)

Pox was taking issue with a pronouncement made by a ZQI2 announcer “that on the whole, the [average] Jamaican could understand dialect better than he could

1 This dichotomy was also noted by DeCamp, although he rejected it in favour of his post-creole continuum model (DeCamp 1971, 350).2 Radio broadcasting in Jamaica began in 1939 when the government used the equipment of John Grinan, a private citizen, to make public broadcasts. The station was named ZQI in 1940.

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the King’s English, so why all this fuss about using it in the Jamaica Broadcast” (Pox 1940). Witness here the unapologetic middle-class arrogance displayed by Pox that as a Jamaican who does not understand the language used by the major-ity of Jamaicans, she still considers herself to be representative of the average Jamaican. This sort of response is the discursive manifestation of the post-colonial angst of the monolingual-English (and English-dominant) Jamaican bourgeois that (s)he will become marginalised if the Jamaican language gains ascendancy. The fear is irrational; given that English, and English alone, is the language of both the Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses, the onus still rests heavily on the Creole-speaking section of the population to adapt and ‘measure up’ in formal domains.

In its own homeland, the Jamaican language is still measured by prejudiced standard language ideologies by those who have the power to make/affect policy decisions. Seeing that Jamaican was formed in the context of the exploitation of enslaved Africans, it constitutes part of the experience of colonialism that many people would like to forget (Farquharson 2007, 260–261). I would like to propose that rather than seeing Jamaican as a burden of colonialism made heavier with memories of exploitation, it can provide opportunities for the social and economic advancement of the formerly oppressed. The suggestion will definitely come up against the common dismissal that the language is not able to function on the world stage because of its humble beginnings and the fact that it has not yet been standardised. However, this argument is outdated and flies in the face of the reality on the ground. It ignores the fact that all of the things for which Jamaica is known and celebrated internationally are products of the working class. Among these we could mention Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), international activist for Black liberation and advancement; Bob Marley (1945–1981), world-renowned reggae superstar; Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man; religious expressions such as Rastafari, and music forms such as ska, reggae, and dancehall. Many of these individuals and phenomena were accepted and celebrated internationally before they received any worthwhile consideration by middle- and upper-class Jamai-cans. As we will see in Section 3, this pattern of external adoption preceding local acceptance also holds true in the area of language.

3 Globalisation and the Linguistic Blind SpotAlthough the Jamaican language has traditionally been associated with a (rural) poor, un(der)-educated demographic, this view does not coincide with either the historical or contemporary facts (cf. Lalla and D’Costa 1990). Negative attitudes

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to Jamaican are attested as early as the eighteenth century (cf. Long 2002 [1774], 426); however, the hostility that we encounter in the press starting around the middle of the twentieth century is largely absent from these early comments on the language of (mostly) Black Jamaicans. This was very much in keeping with the views that were held by most citizens of the British Empire in that period with regard to non-standard(ised) dialects of British English. In fact, it is not surpris-ing that the beginning of hostility towards the language roughly coincides with the implementation of universal adult suffrage in Jamaica, i.e., when adult Jamai-cans of all races, social classes, and linguistic backgrounds got to participate in the political decision-making process. This period also coincides with Louise Bennett’s consistent use of Jamaican in print and in the audiovisual media, which blossomed into activism for the acceptance and preservation of the language. In the first half of the twentieth century, when English-dominant Jamaicans and British expatriates controlled the means of production and the political process, Jamaican Creole posed little challenge to English. However, changes in race, class, and socioeconomic dynamics since Independence have shaken the foun-dations of a power structure that holds English to be the only language through which upward social mobility can be achieved.

There is no doubt that Jamaican has an ideological value for its speakers but does it have any other kind of value? Hall, Jr. (1966, 136) recalls that several of the participants attending the first conference on Creole languages held in 1959 at Mona (Jamaica) had queries such as whether there was “utilitarian value in the study of Jamaican Creole.” Jamaican novelist John Hearne echoes Hall’s sen-timent: “The question rests on whether Creole is an adequate language for the modern world” (Hearne 1990). The written evidence demonstrates that up to two decades ago, the question of the (real-world) value of Creole had disappeared neither from public nor from academic discourse. The question was once again raised by linguist Manfred Görlach while discussing the lexicographic descrip-tion of Pidgins and Creoles:

It is quite a different matter whether it is helpful, or legitimate, to provide PC [i.e., pidgin and creole] languages, possibly including those existing only in spoken forms, with orthographies, grammars and dictionaries, and thereby completely change the ‘ecology’ of the languages in question. (Görlach 1995, 156)

Görlach’s sentiment is predicated on the belief that there is an unbiased natural law that governs which languages/varieties get standardised and what role each language is supposed to play in a society. If this is not a covert way of stating that some languages are more equal than others, it is at least indicative of the selec-tive amnesia from which many people suffer with regard to the development and

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spread of standard languages such as English. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century Richard Mulcaster, English lexicographer and pedagogist, pointed out that English was “of small reatch, it stretcheth no further than this Iland of ours, naie not there over all” (qtd. in Quirk 1985, 1). However, many modern scholars and laypeople now subscribe to a sanitised version of the spread of English that divorces it from its imperialist history. However, Fishman reminds us that:

The much vaunted English language was widely considered no more than a crude Johnny-come-lately creole little more than half a millennium ago, and its remarkable rise in the interim should prompt us to realize that it could yet experience a similarly remarkable reversal of fortune while other tongues might yet supplant it in its most valuable functions in centuries yet unseen. (Fishman 2010, xxv)

Even a cursory survey of the great imperial programmes of the past should reveal that few nations have ever conquered the world using someone else’s language. This is an echo of the idea expressed by Antonio de Nebrija in the prologue to the first grammar of Spanish, “que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio: y de tal manera lo siguió: que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron.”3 Therefore, the spread of a language has more to do with cultural and political factors, and the attitude of native speakers towards the language. The change in the ecology of English took place not through natural selection, but through the deliberate design of statesmen, grammarians, and other scholars. For example, John Adams, the second president of the USA, in a letter to the President of Congress (dated 24 September 1780) admonishes him to set up an academy for “correcting, improving, and fixing the English language” and thereby “doing eve-rything in their power to make the language they speak respectable throughout the world.”4

Given that the Jamaican language has traditionally been associated with poverty and backwardness, the logical expectation of the establishment was that the language would dwindle and disappear as the population became more educated, and as more educated people became upwardly mobile. This appears to have been the view at least since the eighteenth century when Edward Long lamented that young people of European ancestry who were born on the island were speaking like the slaves and education would remedy the situation. In the

3 Translation: “language has always been the companion of empire: together they began, grew and flourished” (trans. JTF). Interestingly, Nebrija’s grammar of Castilian (i.e., Spanish) was pub-lished the same year that Christopher Columbus made his first journey across the Atlantic and encountered the New World. 4 See  < http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/officialamerican/johnadams/>

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1950s, an unsigned article in the Daily Gleaner reported Edwin Allen, Minister of Education, as saying that “dialect could help no one but a few comedians” ( Anonymous 1954). More recently, Karl Johnson in a letter to the editor of the Jamaica Gleaner warns that:

It is indeed absurd that as part of a global village where we need to extricate ourselves from the abyss of Third World imprisonment, our focus is on elements of our culture that can’t move us forward. (Johnson 2012)

This is proof that in contrast to the attitude taken towards English, many laypeo-ple and scholars have a defeatist attitude when it comes to the standardisation of Jamaican. This defeatist attitude is often presented under the guise of practical-ity. A very good example is provided by the following quotation:

If I’m asked what my opinion is as a linguist, I would say: Why do anything about it [Jamai-can Creole]? If it’s going to continue, it will continue despite anything that’s done. I can see that there are certain words and expressions which are very characteristic of folk speech, many of them very pleasant and good. But as a practical means of world communica-tion, it cannot compete with the Standard. And, practically, I would not spend public money to teach it. That would be a false form of ‘patriotism.’ (Tanna 1999, emphasis by JTF)

This quotation is significant because it is from linguist Frederic G. Cassidy, who was one of the first scholars to have published a monograph dealing with the grammar of Jamaican (Cassidy 1961). That monograph was followed up several years later with a monumental by-product, the Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cassidy and Le Page 1967), the first dictionary of a Creole language to be com-piled on historical principles. Cassidy’s perspective is that lobbying for the stand-ardisation of Jamaican as a display of patriotism is misplaced and that financial resources should not be wasted on such a project because Jamaican cannot compete with English as a language of international communication. The same sentiment was expressed recently in a letter to the editor of the Jamaica Gleaner by a writer who identifies him-/herself as Professor Red Head. The writer refers to the lobby for the formal recognition of Jamaican as “worshipping at the shrine of foolishness in the name of patriotism” (Professor Red Head 2012).5 This surpris-ingly frequent view was also applied to music by a journalist in the Daily Gleaner6 in the early 1980s:

5 This fear is irrational because no linguist has ever suggested that Jamaica become a monolin-gual Jamaican-speaking state. Those linguists who go a step further have advocated for Jamaican to be made an official language alongside English, not the sole official language.6 The Jamaica Gleaner and the (Daily) Gleaner are the same newspaper.

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If we expect to really corner the international market, deejays are not going to do it. Their music, although it will sell where Jamaicans reside abroad, is too vernacular for foreigners and cannot make the break-throughs we are seeking. It remains popular only because it is so simple. (B.H. 1982)

In a more recent letter to the editor another writer points out that:

Electronic technology has contracted the world into a global village. The ‘Jamaican’-speak-ing population is only .041 per cent of the world’s population. Who are we going to convince to learn Patois in order to do business with us? Our relevance in the world depends on our ability to supply a need and negotiate a reasonable price. (Tucker 2012)

Ironically, it is the same electronic technology that Tucker identifies as the reason for the contraction of the world into a global village which has signifi-cantly advanced the globalisation of the Jamaican language. On social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and in internet forums such as Jamaicans.com, Jamaicans choose quite frequently to communicate in Jamaican (Creole). Take for example the Facebook group ‘You’re Probably From Jamaica (W.I.) If…,’ which had a little over 33,000 members at the end of 2014. Probably more than 50 percent of the posts made to the group are in Jamaican or include portions in that language. This percentage increases significantly if we include comments made on posts. For example, my own random check revealed that 17 (68%) of the 25 comments made on a post in late 2014 clearly involved Jamaican Creole.7

B.H. and Tucker hold a very limited view regarding the ability of Jamaicans to make a significant impact in the global marketplace without ‘internationalis-ing’ our products. This internationalisation involves (a) making our music less vernacular (which I interpret as using less Jamaican Creole) and reducing the number of local themes; and (b) interacting with the other players in the market-place in English, which after all, is the global lingua franca. To dissect Tucker’s view, he assumes that Jamaica’s relevance in the global marketplace lies in its role as a consumer of goods and services produced elsewhere. Also, given the fact that Jamaica is such a small market, its need for external goods and services might very well outweigh the need of external capitalists to sell to us in order to remain profitable. In other words, we need them more than they need us. There-fore, the assumption is that in this global marketplace, the only real power of a small nation-state like Jamaica is its ability to negotiate reasonable buying prices in the language of the marketplace – English. Of course, it is also assumed that

7 Only comments with sufficient structural and orthographic signals to indicate that the writer intended Jamaican and not English were counted.

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the country’s various suppliers would all have bowed to the totalising effect of English, and would need convincing in order to learn Jamaican.

Those who reason like Tucker have missed (or ignored) the fact that over the past four decades Jamaican has become a transnational language. There is a growing body of research (cf. Hinrichs 2006, 2011, 2014; Lacoste and Mair 2012; Mair 2013b; Farquharson and Jones 2014) which provides evidence for, and dis-cusses the spread of, the Jamaican language beyond Jamaica’s national borders. Using the system developed by de Swaan (2001) for World Englishes, Mair has classified Jamaican as a super-central (non-standard) variety, which places it on the same level as varieties such as British English and Australian English, and directly below the globe’s hyper-central variety, American English (Mair 2013b, 263).

This change in prestige has been facilitated by the migration of hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans over the period to the metropoles of the UK, the US, and Canada, and the establishment of large diaspora communities in those places. This mass migration, commencing in the decades directly preceding Independ-ence, has been one of the major channels for the export of Jamaican culture, including language. Therefore, Jamaican is being used not only by Jamaicans at home, but also by those who migrated, and by subsequent generations born in the diaspora (cf. Sebba 1993). The globalisation of the Jamaican language has also been facilitated by the international popularity of Jamaican musical forms such as ska, reggae, dancehall; art forms such as dub poetry; sports icons such as Usain Bolt; and foods such as jerk chicken/pork, and patties.

The gatekeepers in Jamaica have generally viewed globalisation as a phe-nomenon that gives Jamaicans as consumers of international goods and ser-vices access to the rest of the world, and have undervalued brand Jamaica in the process. Working class and lower-middle class Jamaicans have demonstrated that in addition to facilitating local access to international products, globalisa-tion can also be harnessed for the internationalisation of local goods. Jamaica’s working class has been engaged in this process for approximately four decades in the spheres of music, food, and language.

4 Language as a ‘Commercial’ ToolGiven that speakers of Jamaican have outnumbered monolingual speakers of English in Jamaica since about the early eighteenth century, it is safe to conclude that Jamaican has been the dominant language in the Jamaican marketplace for approximately three centuries. However, as a non-standardised and stigamatised

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language, its use and role have largely been restricted to the informal sectors of the economy. English has maintained its position as the language of the board-room, the (formal) manufacturing industry and the language of written contracts. The hegemony of English can also be noticed in the print and electronic media in their role as capitalist entities, as well as their being outlets for other capitalist entities to reach various audiences/markets via advertisements.

Before the 1980s, broadcasts and advertisements in the language of the majority were extremely rare on Jamaican radio and television, and most of those which appeared sporadically were mostly for entertainment or used humour as their main rhetorical device.8 Interestingly enough, the first radio programme in the Jamaican language began airing less than one year after the start of radio broadcasting in Jamaica. The eponymous programme, ‘John Canoe,’ sparked a vibrant debate in the national daily (i.e., the (Daily) Gleaner), touching topics such as appropriateness, necessity, audience reception, the language competence of the presenter, and the implications of the programme for education (delivered in English). One particular voice in the debate stands out because it not only sup-ports having a ‘dialect programme’ for a limited number of times per week, but also suggests that such a programme could become good enough to be exported to foreign networks:

I am all for a native-dialect programme two or three times a week. There is nothing to have an inferiority complex about, and the chances are we might produce something unusual that is good of its type – that would go from ZQI to the NBC. (Allwood 1940)

As far as I am aware, this refreshing idea was never pursued and for the follow-ing three or so decades the use of Jamaican on radio was mostly restricted to programmes meant for entertainment (e.g., radio dramas). Even those which had didactic aims achieved those through comedy.

In the commercial world and in the world of commercials/advertisements there are two main indicators of the paradigm shift that has been taking place over the past three decades. These are: (i) the increase in the use of Jamaican in advertising; and (ii) the rise in the use of Jamaican in the naming of businesses and brands. From the beginning, English has been the default language of adver-tising. Justification for this comes, of course, from the fact that English is Jamai-ca’s de facto official language. However, it also hinges on the tacit assumption of companies and advertising agents that they are speaking to the anglophone monied class.

8 For example, Louise Bennett’s ‘Miss Lou’s Views,’ which aired on radio and television shows such as ‘Oliver,’ ‘Oliver at Large,’ and ‘Lime Tree Lane’ (1988–1997).

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Language is just one of the factors involved in what we could refer to as the ‘Jamaicanisation’ of media in Jamaica, especially the advertising space. Jamai-can/Caribbean popular music also played a role in the transformation. The early steps in the Jamaicanisation of the electronic media space involved the use of Caribbean or Jamaican music in the background with English voice-overs. This gradually changed to the insertion of Jamaican (Creole) words and phrases to add local colour, and since about the 1980s we have had radio and television ads that are predominantly in Jamaican, but the voice of authority at the beginning and end still tends to be an English-speaking voice (cf. Westphal 2015, this issue).

Over the past fifteen years there has also been an increase in the use of Jamai-can in the naming of companies and brands. Because Jamaican draws much of its vocabulary from English it is often difficult to assign product and company names to Jamaican (as opposed to English) with certainty. However, we can nor-mally draw conclusions based on the specific orthographic choices eye-dialect users make. Some spellings signal attempts at representing the Jamaican (Creole) pronunciation of the name, e.g., Wata [wa:ta], a brand of bottled water. Other names which fall into this category are: Bigga, Ting, types of sodas; Outameni ( <  out of many), a theme park; Fyah FM, a radio station; and Patwa Apparel, a clothing company. The other category comprises company and product names that exhibit lexical choices reflecting Jamaican Creole rather than English, e.g., Matie Sauce, a product line containing sauces and dips; Peppa Di Pot, one of Matie Sauce’s products; 10 Fyah Side, a product line containing sauces and jams; Slam, a brand of condoms; Tallawah, a brand of beer; Mekyah, a brand of bottled water; Cooyah, a clothing company; Brawta Restaurant, Nyamings, Dukunoo Deli, and Dukunoo Den Cafe, all restaurants; Irie FM, a radio station; and Bung Bang, the name of a frozen drink sold in small plastic bags.

The Jamaica Biscuit Company, Ltd is a prominent example of a company that employs more Creole than usual in its marketing. The slogan for its product Snackers is rendered in Jamaican: ‘di taste weh a run di place’ (det taste rel prog det place). It has also staged a competition called ‘Snackers Run di Place Quiz,’ and during its Facebook campaign for the Snackers product the majority of the posts to their page was done in Jamaican (or a mixture of Jamaican and English). In the informal economy, an increasing number of roadside shops and stalls bears names that suggest Jamaican Creole rather than English (cf. Dray 2004).

In the early days, most if not all radio and television advertisements were in English. Apart from the obvious fact that this state of affairs prevailed because English has been the official language of the country, we can also add the obser-vation that Jamaica’s modern manufacturing industry was still young and most of the products advertised on the airwaves were from companies that had their headquarters outside of Jamaica. English was the ‘natural’ choice. Additionally,

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the early dominance of English, to the exclusion of Jamaican, reveals the assump-tion of companies and marketing agents that television was geared towards an English-speaking audience – television then being a good of ostentation. The common reason given by those who reject Jamaican, or those who believe that it should not be given any formal recognition, is that it will cut Jamaicans off from the global English-using community. However, no thought is given to the fact that this monolingual approach to development indirectly uses language as a means of cutting off opportunities to Creole-speaking Jamaicans at home.

The emerging enregisterment (cf. Agha 2003; Johnstone et al. 2006) of Jamai-can in these domains is certainly due in part to the change in attitudes towards Jamaican in recent decades (cf. Jamaican Language Unit 2005); however, it is probably more an outgrowth of capitalist motives rather than the result of language-related patriotism in and of itself. It should be noted, however, that these uses of the language do not really go against the grain. They still keep us in domains attached to creativity and entertainment which for a long time have been the ‘acceptable’ domains circumscribed for it even by advocates such as Louise Bennett (Devonish 1986, 88).

5 Selling LanguageAs mentioned before, the language of industry and general capitalism in

Jamaica has traditionally been English, but the space is becoming increasingly more open to the use of Jamaican. Evidence for this was explored in Section 4 when we looked at the steady rise in the use of the Jamaican language in brand and company names, and in print and electronic advertisements. We already know that the language has been indirectly marketed over the past four decades as a result of the internationalisation of Jamaican reggae and dancehall music (cf. Sebba 1993; King and Jensen 1995). In this section we look at some other domains into which the language is expanding and how these innovative, non-traditional uses imply that the language is ripe for commodification. In Section 3 we looked at the globalisation of brand Jamaica, especially in the domain of language in spite of the undervaluation of the brand at home. This coincides with the view of dub poet, Yasus Afari (1993), in his piece ‘Pat Wah Talking’:

And by the time oonu de deh’Bout a worry and fretOonu woulda ’memba seyWi noh export patwah yetSo oonu fi manufacture it(And) export it like a jet. (Yasus Afari 1993)

14      Joseph T. Farquharson

In the poem Yasus Afari calls on the Jamaican Parliament to use the Jamaican language so that the public can understand. In the excerpt, he suggests to our leaders that the only reason they are still worrying about balancing the budget is because they have forgotten that Patwa has not yet been (formally) added to our list of exports. His advice to policy-makers is that they ‘manufacture’ the lan-guage (probably a hint at language planning) and export it as quickly as possible. This is an evolved position which views the language not just as a vehicle for crea-tive expression (e.g., poetry, music), but also as an economic good; an entity that can be converted into cash.

While the debate rages on in Jamaica about whether Jamaican should be given official status alongside English and/or used in education, there is clear evidence that there is an international demand for the language. The Jamaican public is still very tentative about the use of Jamaican in education, both as the language of instruction and as an object of learning; however, I would like to suggest a more oblique approach to language planning. In this approach, Jamai-can would be elaborated specifically to support its commodification. The basic assumption is that the language which has economic value can do far more in the way of status planning than debates aimed at convincing the public. As we will see shortly, the international demand for Jamaican justifies the language-as-commodity approach being advocated here. We have the example of English, which moved from a small, relatively unknown language several centuries ago to a global lingua franca that is the main commodity in a multi-billion dollar indus-try. This move was due in part to a very deliberate agenda to spread the English language and British culture around the globe. See, for example, Burgh’s remark that the founding of the British Council in 1934 was an event that “marked the start of a determined effort to an enduring understanding and appreciation of Britain in other countries through cultural, educational and technical coopera-tion” (1985, vii). Not surprisingly, the British Council has played an active role in the development of the discipline called English Studies, and the related industry.

Current indications are that there is a demand for the Jamaican language in Jamaica’s diaspora communities especially among second and third generation Jamaicans who did not learn the language (fully) from their parents. For example, in 2009, at the request of parents, the Calderstone Middle School (under the direc-tion of the Peel District School Board in Toronto, Canada) included Jamaican Creole as one of the courses offered in its Saturday-class programme (Anonymous 2009). Also, since 2008, York University in Canada has been offering courses in Jamaican language and culture. These are modest efforts but they problematise popular sentiments in Jamaica that nobody outside of Jamaica would want to learn Jamaican.

The Black Man’s Burden? – Language and Political Economy      15

Jamaicans at home have also overlooked the growing desire among people who have no Jamaican ancestry to learn the Jamaican language. As a result, the demand for the language has outstripped the supply of didactic material and (potential) language learners are providing their own unguided solutions by cre-ating communities on social media where they can learn the language and share their knowledge.

While outlets that serve middle- and upper-class interests continue to restrict written Jamaican Creole to literary undertakings, more writing is being done in Jamaican Creole (by more people) compared to a decade or two ago. More impor-tantly, much of this writing is being done by ordinary Jamaicans in the public domain via internet forums, comment threads on websites, and social media plat-forms. This has resulted, indirectly, in the creation of raw, unstructured corpora of the language, and what we could refer to as the democratisation of orthogra-phy, as users work out ways of representing the language in writing.9 Incidentally, the growing public use of the language in writing simultaneously increases the value of the language to non-native speakers, and it provides those who wish to learn Jamaican as a second language (JSL) with a larger body of data to support their learning.

Table 1 gives a comparative overview of social media trends related to self-declared language use and ‘likes.’10 The table compares Jamaica with: (i) Trinidad and Tobago, the next largest English-official Caribbean country, based on popu-lation size; (ii) Nigeria, another country whose non-standardised variety (Naija/Nigerian Pidgin) is also in the process of transnationalisation; and (iii) Sweden, a developed country with a population not much greater than that of Jamaica, whose language has official status.

While Jamaica has an internet penetration rate of 54% (1,582,227), only 43% (680,357) of the internet-using population is on Facebook. Nevertheless, over 1.3  million Facebook users claim to be speakers/users of Jamaican and over 42,000 have liked the language on Facebook. Compare this to Nigeria, which has twice as many users on Facebook as the population of Jamaica, but with just a little under 300,000 Facebook users who claim to be users of Nigerian Pidgin and only 5062 likers. Sweden has a very high internet penetration rate; however, when we compare the number of Facebook users in Sweden with its internet-using

9 On the use of Jamaican in internet forums see Mair (2013a) and Mair and Pfänder (2013). For interesting phenomena in the area of orthography in computer-mediated communication see Deuber and Hinrichs (2007), and Hinrichs and White-Sustaíta (2011).10 Data on country population, internet users and internet penetration accessed on 2 December 2014 from  < http://www.internetworldstats.com/list2.htm> and data on the number of Facebook users per country taken from  < http://www.internetworldstats.com> on the same date.

16      Joseph T. Farquharson

population, we get a rate which is a little below that for Jamaica. Nevertheless, this still amounts to close to 5 million Swedes on Facebook, and even with this large number of Facebook users (about 7 times that of Jamaica), Sweden still lags behind Jamaica percentage-wise in the number of Facebook users who indicate that they use Swedish. Percentage-wise, Jamaica has a higher number of Face-book users who indicate that they use/speak the language than countries with a higher internet penetration (e.g., Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago), or countries with more users on Facebook (e.g., Nigeria, Sweden).

There are currently no fewer than ten Facebook groups and pages devoted to Jamaican. Among these are a couple of groups which appear to have been started by non-Jamaicans and whose membership comprises all or mostly non-Jamaicans. The group ‘Jamaican Patwa Speakers in Uganda’ has roughly 40 members who apparently are all Ugandan nationals; hence, non-native speak-ers of Jamaican. Another Facebook group, ‘JAMAICAN PATOIS LESSON,’ pre-sents an even more interesting situation. Its impressive membership count of 5414 makes it the largest group on Facebook devoted to the Jamaican language. Interestingly though, the group is administered by four Ghanaians.11 There are other social media initiatives with more didactic aims such as ‘Jamaican Sinting,’ a Facebook page with over 8700 members, administered by Jaynia Samaroo, a native speaker.12 Another page, called ‘Jamaican patwah lesson’ (with 1380 likes) is linked to the website learnjamaican.com, which sells audio lessons for US$ 49.99. There is clearly a demand.

Table 1: Internet and Facebook use for Jamaica, Nigeria, Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago and self-declared language use.

Country  Total pop.   Int. users   Fb users   Lang. users   Lang. likers

Jamaica   2,930,050   1,581,100   677,960   1,377,236   42,418T & T   1,223,916   780,858   484,780   22,000   787Nigeria   177,155,754   67,319,186   6,630,200   290,000   5062Sweden  9,723,809   9,216,226   4,950,160   3,819,604   79,843

11 Cf. another group with the interesting name ‘JAMAICAN PATWA PROMOTION TO INTER-NA-TIONAL LANGUAGE’ with 501 members and an administrator who is from Ghana.12 ‘Jamaican Sinting’ also has a Twitter handle and a Youtube channel with the same name. The Youtube channel has over 15,000 subscribers and the introductory video had received 136,930 views at the time of writing this article. Views on Jamaican Sinting’s videos range from a low of 3658 to a high of 410,386.

The Black Man’s Burden? – Language and Political Economy      17

One under-explored avenue for promoting Jamaican language and culture, as well as cashing in on the creative use of the Jamaican language, is anima-tion. Several Jamaican animations are currently hosted on Youtube. Prominent examples are: ‘Mek Wi Laugh,’ ‘Cabbie Chronicles,’ ‘YaaDi: The Series,’ ‘Dutty Bwoy,’ ‘Clean Game,’ ‘Jus Fi Fun,’ ‘Jamaican Show,’ and ‘Betrayal.’ Some of these have been extremely popular – an indication that there is a market for this sort of output. For example, ‘Dutty Bwoy 6: The Return of the Gaza Man,’ which was uploaded on 24 April 2012, had 326,704 views as of 1 December 2014, and the six episodes of ‘YaaDi: The Series’ had individual view counts ranging from a low of 89,437 to a high of 260,740. It is interesting, but not surprising, that the dominant language of these works of animation tends to be Jamaican. Again, this speaks to the demand for, and economic viability of the language. As a way of increasing the audience for animation (in Jamaican), the animation industry can be married to the language-teaching industry to support language learners searching for tar-get-language material to improve their competence.

As mentioned before, the commodification of language is by no means a novel idea. It appears to be the default view of the world’s current hypercentral language (English) and supercentral languages such as French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili.13 The main difference is that these are all standard-ised languages with long-established norms for writing and teaching. However, the success of these codes in the linguistic marketplace is tied to the fact that native speakers themselves recognise the use-value of their own languages. In the case of Creole languages, which are historically low-prestige varieties, we may need to attack the problem the other way around, i.e., by demonstrating that they have earning power.

The suggestion for the further commodification of Jamaican is being made in the context of a Jamaica which has a declining agricultural sector and industry and service sectors that are finding it difficult to compete locally and interna-tionally with cheaper goods and services. Tourism, as one of the country’s main-stays, is dependent on the demand for sand, sea, and sun. However, the tourism industry is fragile given issues resulting from climate change, the fact that the country is located in a hurricane zone, and competition from other (non-)Carib-bean countries which offer the same or better attractions. In light of the global demand for Jamaican culture – including language – language tourism appears to be a more sustainable route to economic development. However, Jamaica runs

13 The commodification of languages is dealt with in works such as Heller (2003), Cameron (2012), and Mair (2014). See de Swaan’s (2001) global language system, which classifies languag-es as peripheral, central, supercentral, and hypercentral.

18      Joseph T. Farquharson

the risk of being left behind in this venture seeing that Jamaican Creole is fast taking the route that Kachru pointed out about English in the mid-1980s, i.e., ‘the mechanism of its diffusion, by and large is, being initiated and controlled by the non-native users’ (Kachru 1985, 14).

6 Resetting IdeologiesTo conclude, I return to the question mark in the title. It asks us to interrogate the popular perspective which sees the Jamaican language as a hindrance to the socio-economic progress of working and lower middle class (mostly Black) Jamai-cans; a burden that should be got rid of as quickly as possible. We have seen that this sentiment is the product of a history of diglossia in which Jamaican, the low (L) language, was associated with servitude, poverty, and general powerlessness. Here we can invoke the contemporary Jamaican slang expression a so di ting set (foc so det thing set ‘that’s just how things are’), as a verbal encapsulation of this view. The worldview that underlies a so di ting set is born of the daily struggles of average Jamaicans against a system that refuses to treat them as equals, or to value the language they speak natively. When viewed in this light it is easy “to understand how people’s subjectivities and identities are constituted and how people may comply with their own oppression” (Pennycook 1995, 54), as they navigate their existence in a society where they are in the majority but find them-selves outside of the spheres of power.

While there is unlikely to be a political or social upheaval in Jamaica to shake the hegemony of English, there are signs that ideologies are slowly being reset with regard to the value of the Jamaican language. In Jamaica, the work of cultural activists and linguists has helped to raise the status of the Jamaican language. However, the language is still kept in check by the ideological state apparatuses which remain unapologetically English-oriented. Jamaican has made some inroads into domains once dominated by English, such as radio and television advertisements, and the naming of products, brands, and companies. However, I have pointed out that this is probably the result of capitalistic oppor-tunism rather than a complete acceptance of the language and belief in its value. In any case, such capitalist moves are needed to demonstrate that the language has economic value.

The proposal in the present article for the further commodification of the language is made in light of the presence of a substantial demand for the lan-guage both by children and grandchildren of Jamaicans in the diaspora and other (mostly young) persons across the globe who are attracted to Jamaican music and

The Black Man’s Burden? – Language and Political Economy      19

culture. Evidence of the potential market for the language was gathered from an informal survey of the use of the Jamaican language on Facebook, the number of groups and pages devoted to it, and the number of Facebook users who declare themselves to be users of the language. The article also pointed to animation in Jamaican as a promising area for further development, especially in its potential to support a language-teaching industry. Given the fact that the Jamaican lan-guage has not yet been standardised, this proposal will require a radical resetting of current language ideologies which tend to be guided by standard-language practices. However, there are indications that the change is already in progress. The Jamaican language is becoming a powerful example of how globalisation, migration, and transcultural exchange can completely shift the dynamics at play in the political economy of a language.

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Article note: This article was prepared in the context of the BMBF-funded project “The Americas as Space of Entanglement(s)” at the Center for Inter-American Studies, Bielefeld University.