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The Acrolect in Jamaica the Architecture of Phonological Variation

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The acrolect in Jamaica The architecture of phonological variation G. Alison Irvine-Sobers language Studies in Caribbean Languages 1 science press Studies in Caribbean Languages Chief Editor: John R. Rickford Managing Editor: Joseph T. Farquharson In this series: 1. Irvine-Sobers, G. Alison. The acrolect in Jamaica: The architecture of phonological variation. The acrolect in Jamaica The architecture of phonological variation G. Alison Irvine-Sobers language science press G. Alison Irvine-Sobers. 2018. The acrolect in Jamaica: The architecture of phonological variation (Studies in Caribbean Languages 1). Berlin: Language Science Press. This title can be downloaded at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/203 © 2018, G. Alison Irvine-Sobers Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN: 978-3-96110-114-6 (Digital) 978-3-96110-115-3 (Hardcover) DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1306618 Source code available from www.github.com/langsci/203 Collaborative reading: paperhive.org/documents/remote?type=langsci&id=203 Cover and concept of design: Ulrike Harbort Typesetting: Felix Kopecky Proofreading: Amir Ghorbanpour, Amr Zawawy, Andreas Hölzl, Dietha Koster, Eitan Grossman, Ezekiel Bolaji, Felix Hoberg, Gerald Delahunty, Ivica Jeđud, Jean Nitzke, Jeroen van de Weijer & Rosetta Berger Fonts: Linux Libertine, Libertinus Math, Arimo, DejaVu Sans Mono Typesetting software:Ǝ X LATEX Language Science Press Unter den Linden 6 10099 Berlin, Germany langsci-press.org Storage and cataloguing done by FU Berlin Contents Abbreviations iii 1 Ideologies of the acrolect and English in Jamaica 1 1.1 The (Jamaican) acrolect ....................... 1 1.2 Sense 1: The acrolect as defined by structure ........... 4 1.3 Sense 2: The acrolect as the outcome of language acquisition .. 7 1.4 Sense 3: The acrolect as defined by its speakers .......... 13 1.5 Sense 4: The acrolect as an idea of Jamaican English ....... 18 1.6 Aims and methods of the study .................. 23 1.7 Data collection ............................ 24 2 Phonological variation in the Jamaican acrolect 29 2.1 Why consider phonological variation? ............... 29 2.2 The phonological variables and their variants ........... 32 2.3 Features commonly identified in the literature (Group A) .... 33 2.3.1 Basic JC and JE phoneme inventories ........... 35 2.3.2 Word initial glottal fricative /h/ .............. 35 2.3.3 The interdental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ ........... 39 2.3.4 The low back stressed vowel /ɔ/ .............. 41 2.3.5 Pre-consonantal/pre-rhotic mid tense vowels /e/ and /o/ 43 2.3.6 The word initial velar stops /k/, /g/ ............ 45 2.4 Features not widely discussed in the literature (Group B) .... 47 2.4.1 The word final unstressed vowel in words that end in-er 47 2.4.2 The vowel in the final syllable -tion ............ 48 2.4.3 The alveopalatal affricate .................. 49 2.4.4 Post-vocalic rhoticity .................... 52 2.4.5 Word-final clusters ..................... 54 2.5 Discussion .............................. 58 3 Sociolinguistic variation in Jamaican English 63 3.1 Level of education .......................... 63 3.1.1 Group A variables and education ............. 66 Contents 3.1.2 Group B variables and education ............. 71 3.2 Gender ................................ 78 3.2.1 Group A variables and gender ............... 81 3.2.2 Group B variables and gender ............... 86 3.3 Parent’s background ......................... 92 3.3.1 Group A variables and background ............ 95 3.3.2 Group B variables and background ............ 98 3.4 Speaker age ............................. 101 3.4.1 Group A variables and age ................. 103 3.4.2 Group B variables and age ................. 106 3.5 Hypercorrection in the JAMPRO sample ............. 109 3.6 Constructing the acrolect, Standard Jamaican English ...... 114 4 Sociolinguistic Variation in JAMPRO 121 4.1 JAMPRO: One site of promoting a SJE ideology ......... 121 4.1.1 Jamaican institutional discourses on language ...... 122 4.1.2 The JIDC/JAMPRO: Their construct of the Jamaican lan- guage situation ....................... 128 4.2 Frontline staff – The public face of JAMPRO ........... 132 4.2.1 Group A variables in frontline staff ............ 140 4.2.2 Group B variables in frontline staff ............ 142 4.3 Discussion .............................. 144 5 Conclusion 149 5.1 The architecture of phonological variation in the Jamaican acrolect 150 5.2 An endonormative definition of SJE phonological features ... 157 Appendix A: Prepared script for all interviews of JAMPRO informants 161 A.1 Personal data collected ....................... 161 A.2 Data on patterns of workplace interaction ............ 162 A.3 Data on working at JAMPRO .................... 162 Appendix B: Profiles of JAMPRO informants 163 Appendix C: Parent’s Occupation 167 References 169 Index 183 Name index ................................. 183 Subject index ................................ 187 ii Abbreviations AJE Acrolectal Jamaican English CXC Caribbean Examinations Council EBE Educated Belizean English IAE Internationally Acceptable English JAMPRO Jamaica Promotions JIDC Jamaica Industrial Development Corporation JNEC Jamaica National Export Company JNIP Jamaica National Investment Promotions JSA JAMPRO Staff Association JTB Jamaica Tourist Board KMA Kingston Metropolitan Area MSE Metropolitan Standard English PJS Putative Jamaican Standard SJE Standard Jamaican English 1 Ideologies of the acrolect and English in Jamaica 1.1 The (Jamaican) acrolect The Jamaican language situation was described very early on by linguists suchas Le Page (1960) and DeCamp (1961; 1971) as a linguistic continuum, formed primar- ily from the historical sociolinguistic contact of speakers of various Niger-Congo languages and several dialects of English. Similar continua have also been iden- tified in Guyana, Belize, Trinidad and Barbados (see the discussion in Winford 1997: 233–236). The polar varieties of this theoretical construct, the continuum, are basilectal Creole and “standard” English (discussed below), which have been treated as separate linguistic systems by some linguists (for example Bailey 1971 (Jamaica); Devonish 1978 (Guyana), and more generally Alleyne 1980 and Win- ford 1997) and which are linked by a seamless range of intermediate lects identi- fied as the mesolect. These intermediate varieties have been explained in a number of ways.They have been attributed to: decreolization (Bickerton 1973; DeCamp 1971), due to the targeting of English by Creole speakers with varying levels of access to the pres- tige or high variety; or to basilectalization brought about by increasing numbers of West Africans arriving over time and acquiring approximations of approxi- mations of English (Mufwene 1996; 2001)1; or to the social stratification of plan- tation communities from the earliest stages of language contact (Alleyne 1980). This continuum is depicted as … a continuous spectrum of speech varieties whose extremes are mutually unintelligible, but which also includes all possible intermediate varieties (DeCamp 1971: 28), ranging from the speech of the most backward peasant or labourer to that of the well-educated urban professional (DeCamp 1961: 82). 1Chaudenson (2001) describes a similar process of basilectalization for French-lexicon Creoles. 1 Ideologies of the acrolect and English in Jamaica It is to this sociolinguistic discussion that W. A. Stewart (1965: 15–16) added the terms acrolect and basilect, (the label mesolect came later). In his description of “Washington Negro speech” he wrote, I will refer to this topmost dialect in the local sociolinguistic hierarchy as acrolect (from acro- “apex” plus -lect as in dialect). In most cases what is meant by “Standard English” is either acrolect or something close to it. At the other extreme is a kind of speech which I refer to hereafter as basilect (from basi- “bottom”). (…) In between basilect and acrolect, there are anum- ber of other dialect strata, and it is in this middle range that the majority of adult Washington Negroes probably belongs. Acrolect, the focus of this dissertation, is the name for the upper end of the continuum and, while in many cases the term is not explicitly used, it has been defined in the literature in a number of clearly related ways. General descriptions of acrolect speak of, • the “topmost dialect in the local sociolinguistic hierarchy” (W. A. Stewart 1965: 15); • the stereotype of the educated standard, focussed by institutions of educa- tion, the media, and white collar employment (Le Page 1988: 34–35); • a “high, prestigious language or variety of a language” in any speech com- munity (McArthur 1998: xvii). Acrolect here is essentially a community of speakers’ idea of the speech pat- terns of those positioned at the top and centre of their social space. It is in par- ticular speakers, in those perceived to be of relatively high social status, that we initially locate the acrolect in a community and idealise their ways of speak- ing as “good” or necessary. This then makes the acrolect coterminous with “the standard” for members of communities with that type of metalinguistic labelling. This view of the acrolect is also reflected in many of the definitions appliedto the Caribbean generally and Jamaica specifically: • the educated counterpart of the lexifier in the Creole speech community (Chaudenson 2001: xi (n1)); • the English of educated nationals of the Caribbean used in formal social contexts,
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