Louis Marriott, Contributor

Jamaica's ambassador of culture, the late Louise Bennett-Coverley, in Toronto, Canada, earlier this year. - Contributed

My late father's formal education ended at primary level. However, as other members of his immediate family, he aimed always to speak standard English. Although otherwise an ardent nationalist - he was the 109th member of the People's National Party - he insisted that his children should communicate in English.

Once, one of my younger sisters ventured, "Im tell mi seh."

"Child," snapped our father, "what was that?"

A startled child quickly corrected herself: "He told me say."

My little sister's confused reaction showed that she shared with a large percentage of our population a misguided notion that our national language is "bad English", "broken English", a dialect of English, or patois.

I am no linguist, but I have had the good fortune to have studied Spanish and Latin in high school, to have travelled widely, and to have been a creative writer, mainly of drama, over the past 50 years. This exposure has given me insights into the issue of language usage in Jamaica which I believe to be relevant to the debate that has raged for a number of years and, which has been revved up by the recent passing of the foremost matriarch of the Jamaican language, the Hon. Louise Bennett-Coverley.

Fishermen's speech

In the late 1950s, I wrote a playlet for the Government Broadcasting Service designed to encourage fishermen to equip their boats with outboard motors. It was a "two-hander", mainly a conversation regarding the merits of the outboard motor. It was sent to the Government Fisheries Officer to authenticate or correct the technical information in the work.

The text was returned with no change whatsoever in the information, but beautifully retyped with my vernacular conversation between two Jamaican fishermen now translated into impeccable standard English dialogue.

On my first visit to Curacao, in 1967, I noticed that the hotel chambermaids spoke better English than the average secondary-educated middleclass Jamaican. On inquiry, I learnt that they compulsorily learnt four languages in primary school - their native Papamiento, the imperial/ colonial Dutch, and the two dominant languages of the region, Spanish and English. Also, there were two daily newspapers in papamiento serving a population of slightly more than a hundred thousand.

'University of Brixton'

In 1970, I was commissioned by the English by Radio Department of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to write a drama series to facilitate communication between Jamaicans living in Britain and members of the host population. I set the series in the Jamaican community of Brixton and titled it "The University of Brixton". Each episode began: "Welcome to the University of Brixton. You won't get degrees or diplomas here, but you can get a first-class education."

Among the cast were some notable Jamaican actors - Charles Hyatt, Mona (Chin) Hammond, Frank Cousins, Karl Binger and myself. The narrator was Gerry German, a Welshman who spent some years in Jamaica as principal of Manchester High School.

The BBC engaged Dr. John Wells, now Professor of Phonetics but then Lecturer in linguistics at the University of London, to be my linguistic advisor. A young Englishman, Wells had done his PhD thesis at Cambridge University on an aspect of the Jamaican language. For his field work, he had spent eighteen months living at Bundy Lane, a deprived community off Old Hope Road near Swallowfield, and from time to time took a portable tape recorder and a notebook to various parts of the country to record the nuances of Jamaican speech.

There was no doubt in his trained mind that Jamaican was a legitimate language - not a dialect or patois. His rationale was that although many Jamaican words were derived from English and some West African languages - following a common formula in the evolution of languages - there was now a distinct Jamaican lexis and a Jamaican grammar that was a great deal more regular than English grammar.

He introduced me to Beryl Loftman Bailey's classic Jamaican Creole Syntax, which immediately became my Bible of the Jamaican language.

Respect for Jamaican

An intriguing feature of the University of Brixton was that both John Wells and the BBC, the final arbiter of the English language, wanted full recognition and respect to be accorded to the Jamaican language. Its integrity should not be questioned. The issue was simply one of effective and harmonious communication between members of the Jamaican community living in Britain and the host population.

This I found to be in sharp contrast to the situation in Jamaica, where many of our decision-makers and opinion-leaders have a disrespectful and/or condescending attitude to our language.

In my exchanges with John Wells, I became more and more aware of the extent to which many of our better-educated middleclass citizens who imagine themselves to be highly proficient in English really speak and write bad English. This provided me with copious material for dramatic situations, mostly of the comic variety. A typical example was the Jamaican who broke a glass when cautioned by his English companion to be careful not to break it. He deliberately broke it because his interpretation of a commonly used English idiom was precisely the opposite of its standard English meaning.

Bizarre debate

Following my return to Jamaica in the early 1970s, I became aware of the intense debate that was taking place regarding language education. I have found it a bizarre debate because the anti-Jamaican case consists of vehemently countering a proposition that no one has advanced.

My understanding is that some educators would like to teach the Jamaican language to Jamaican schoolchildren, not to displace English but in addition to English. They believe that studying the structure of their own language will make it easier for them to cope with English or any other language. A number of persons think this unnecessary because, they argue, our children already know Jamaican, so they do not need to study it in school.

Why then, I ask, do English children study English?

Another argument is that Jamaican should not be taught because of the small number of people worldwide who speak it.

So why did they teach me Latin in school? And what about the large number of people outside our shores, especially young people, who are very interested in Jamaican culture, including our language? And why are English universities now offering courses in the Jamaican language?

To be continued next week.