Velma Pollard

In post-plantation societies like Jamaica, the European language became respected while the native Creole language was disrespected. However, the two languages are actually closely related. Jamaican writers, including myself, blend the formal colonist language with the native language, enriching Jamaican literature. LANGUAGE AND JAMAICAN LITERATURE by Belma Hallard Disrespected literatures are written in disrespected languages. Those languages are usually disrespected when the status of people who speak them is low. In post-plantation societies, a respected language is the European language, which was brought with the people who colonized the country. The native disrespected language was usually the Creole word developed in the plantation environment where overseers speaking European languages and enslaved people speaking West African languages interacted. In Jamaica, the respected official language became English, and the native disrespected language was the native and popular Jamaica Creole. These two languages are lexically related and give the impression of being closer than they are in fact. But Jamaican Creole is still regarded as broken English by people who are not paying attention to the linguistic analysis which indicates a strong structural relationship with certain West African languages. These two languages, the colonial and the popular native Creole, have accommodated each other in the Jamaican environment. That is because the speaker and their situation determine its use. A fascinating feature of this accommodation is the ability of an individual to switch from one language to the other within the same speech event. I hope to illustrate how I and other Jamaican writers infuse the formal talk, the official colonist language in which most of us write with the popular Jamaican native language. The result has been to enrich the fabric that has become the language in which Jamaican literature is written.