Jamaican postcolonial writing practices and metalinguistic discourses as a challenge to established norms and standards

Abstract

There are moments when people imagine languages differently, sometimes even radically rethinking “language” beyond the conventional idea of “language” itself as a coherent entity. Such moments tend to coincide with, or be triggered by, other historically significant occasions such as the casting off of the yoke of cruel colonial ministries, or the search for a new collective sense of self, previously stigmatized. Often accompanying such reimaginings is a new embodied and euphoric sense of self, suddenly made possible through language, together with the realization that language has the power to form other subjectivities. This chapter considers a singular and brief moment of such reimagining. It is the reimagining of Portuguese in the dawning of a post-colonial, independent Mozambique.

Scaling Language Boundaries: Inclusion, Commensurability, and a Caribbean Coloniality

“…Importantly, the internet and social media have become sites of alternative linguistic agency and creativity for creole speakers (Hollington 2020;Mufwene 2020), yet online standardization trends in creole orthography (Hinrichs 2004) threaten a recursive d ej a vu that may project the colonial standardizing episteme onto creole writing (Fenigsen 1999). We need a continued attention to the decentering of the power to control the production of linguistic artifacts (e.g., grammars, dictionaries, exemplary texts) from the speakers; the subordination of speakers-producers to the linguistic tools; and the objectification of the processes of linguistic standardization which makes them appear impersonal, authoritative, and aperspectival.…”

From Africa to Jamaica and back: the Atlantic as a dynamic linguistic contact zone

“…Several theories about the origins of Pidgins and Creoles, their development, grammatical structure and lexicon, and their relations to other languages etc., have been proposed since then, and many have been contested. While a thorough review of the various theoretic positions and views would go beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to point out that there are several problematic issues in the creolistic paradigm which led to substantial criticism (for a more detailed discussion of the problematic nature of Creole Studies, see for instance Ansaldo and Matthews, 2007, Hollington, 2015, 2020. I want to highlight three problematic aspects of Creole Studies, namely (1) the historic context in which Creole Studies emerged, (2) the terminology, and (3) the lack of linguistic evidence that so-called Creole language form a typological unit ("creole exceptionalism").…”

“…In Jamaica, for instance, despite the fact that language attitudes are changing and that there are also positive attitudes towards Jamaican which are gaining momentum, many people still believe that English (as the colonial language of prestige and power) is better than Jamaican (see BECKFORD WASSINK, 1999, THE JAMAICAN LANGUAGE UNIT, 2005, FARQUHARSON, 2007, HOLLINGTON, 2015, 2020.…”

“…One aspect that remains important in this debate about the Creole linguistics' paradigm is that its theories of the emergence of Creole language and its terminology focus on the description and analysis of language contact as processes that "happen" to the contact variety due to universal processes or imperfect learning, etc. Therefore, these theories assign a rather passive role to the speakers and linguistic innovators rather than highlighting their agency in the creation and development of the contact language (see FARACLAS, 2012, HOLLINGTON, 2020. This contribution aims at drawing attention to conscious language practices in the dynamic Atlantic contact area.…”