http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20010510/cornwall/cornwall3.html

By Matthew J. Rosenberg, Associated Press Writer
KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP)

WAS REGGAE icon Bob Marley singing entirely in English when he recorded
his classic "Trench Town Rock"?

Linguists say no the Jamaican singer was using patois, a mixture of English and West African tongues spoken by slaves who were brought to this Caribbean island by European colonisers.

Now, nearly 40 years after Jamaica won independence from Britain, some people are beginning to argue that patois should be granted official status along with English.

"Politicians love to quote Bob Marley's 'free yourself from mental slavery' line all the time," said Carolyn Cooper, a literature professor at the University of the West Indies. "Ignoring patois is mental slavery, the worst kind. It's old colonial racism and classism."

In English, you might tell a waiter, "Bring me some shrimp." In patois, it becomes, "Kyai com gimmi a janga."

Proponents of using patois argue that since many Jamaicans have difficulty understanding English, it is shameful to conduct the business of official Jamaica, like Parliament, in a foreign tongue.

Anglophiles call patois "lazy English" and dismiss it as a vernacular.

"What intellectuals like to call another language is pure laziness," Morris Cargill, a white Jamaican newspaper columnist, said before he died last year. "You can't read Dickens or Jane Austen in patois."

Nobody debates that point.

Phonetic and grammatical system - the measure of "what makes a language distinct," said Michel DeGraff, a linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Most of the words in Jamaican patois, like other English Caribbean patois, are English words filtered through a distinct phonetic system with fewer vowels and different consonant sounds. Patois is written phonetically to approximate these differences.

A small amount of patois words, between 5 per cent and 10 per cent, are of African origin, like "nyam," to eat, or "duppy," which means ghost.

But the greatest divergence from English is in the grammar, which has origins in the languages of West Africa. For this reason, English and patois speakers often cannot understand each other, even though most of the words have English origins.

A clear example of West African grammar in Jamaican patois is the way verbs are formed in the past tense.

Instead of using a suffix like "ed," as in "walked," a patois speaker puts a word before a verb, like "deh." The English "I walked" becomes "me deh walk" in patois. The same is done in Haitian Creole by adding "te" before a verb to indicate past tense.

Linguists call this "tense marking," and "it is a common feature of West African languages," DeGraff said.

Linguists actually consider the name patois to be a misnomer for what Jamaicans speak. They prefer to call it a Creole a distinct language with African and European roots because a patois is considered a dialect of a European language.

Nearly all Jamaicans, regardless of class, speak patois.

Those who speak English fluently, mostly people from the middle and upper classes, tend to use patois for emphasis when they are angry, to affect a down-to-earth persona or to talk to someone of a lower class.

It is the reliance on patois that creates problems in places like the courts.

After a recent bail hearing on murder charges, a 26-year-old defendant asked a reporter whether a judge had said he could go home. What the judge really said was: "The defendant is remanded in custody without bail."

In patois the judge could have said: "Yah ago get lockup fi now; yah nah get bail."

Schools where patois-speaking children are thrust into a primarily English environment are also a concern for critics of English as the only official language.

"What good is it to teach a child an alphabet for a language he doesn't speak, that his teacher probably doesn't speak, and then make him read books in that foreign language?" said Hubert Devonish, a linguistics professor at the University of the West Indies.

Devonish's solution is to use patois to teach English. "We've already got a dictionary, a system for writing it," he said.

But some are sceptical.

"These kids are going to end up learning only patois," said Maryanne Wilson, a 35-year-old mother of two school-age children. "Then what? My kids are going to apply to school in America and write their applications essays in patois?"

The government says people have to come to an agreement over what role patois should have before can be considered as an official language.

"We hear the debate, but the issue is not settled as far as (the government) is concerned," said Information Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson.

To many patois speakers, the reliance on English by Jamaica's elite makes what Marley said in "Trench Town Rock" ring true: "No want you fi galang so; you want cold come I up."

It means, loosely, "I don't want you to behave like that; you're trying to keep me down."