I read the "article" on patois by Franklin Johnston which appeared on July 31 in your paper with mounting horror and incredulity. The author is clearly a stranger to any notions of logic, and moreover makes wild, sweeping statements about language which have no foundation in fact.

The very first paragraph is a farrago of nonsense: what does he mean by "good language drives out bad"? Which are these so-called "good" languages, and which are the "bad"? He appears to place Greek and Latin in the "bad" category, since he claims they have disappeared (does he really not know that there exists a language called modern Greek, and that Italian descends in a direct line from Latin?).

However, he then confusingly goes on to say that these languages "embrace the grand writings and tenets which underpin Western civilisation" (how exactly does a language "embrace" writings and tenets?). He concludes with a complete non sequitur, remarking that "even Jamaicans ("even"??) studied (Latin)". So what?

In his effort to belittle the mother tongue of 95 per cent of the population of Jamaica, he states that "patois has no history or artefacts to explore; no ancient ruins or writings to translate. Patois is a means of speech evolved by people deprived of instruction in their native languages and the languages of their masters". This statement would merely be ludicrous, if the confusion, ignorance and prejudice which it reveals were not so tragic.

Confusion, because he is putting the cart before the horse: it is language that comes first, since it is the marker that defines a people, who make and later write their history and leave their monuments to posterity. When the ancient Greek peasants sang the songs and recited the tales which, centuries later, were written down and called The Iliad and The Odyssey, they did not do it in an "ancient" language - it was merely the everyday language of farmers, shepherds and fishermen. A language doesn't suddenly emerge as "ancient" - the songs of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and many others will only be "ancient" to generations far in the future.

Ignorance, because of the truly laughable definition of patois - and let's give it its proper name, Jamaican Creole. This is one of a number of contemporary Creoles, but which share features of some much older languages, such as Middle English or moyen français, which would have been called Creoles too, had the term existed at the time. As a Jamaican, to read a text written in moyen français is to marvel at the way in which the encounter between Vulgar Latin (the language of the soldiers, administrators and settlers who governed the Roman provinces) and the Celtic languages spoken before Rome colonised Gaul produced a language with features so similar to Jamaican Creole, which itself is born of the encounter between the English of the (often) Welsh managers and (largely) Irish overseers and the African languages of the people they had trafficked as slaves. In other words, Creoles have arisen throughout history, as the ebb and flow of wars and conquests have brought different languages into contact.

Ignorance too, because Mr Johnston seems not to realise that children learn their mother tongue, not from teachers, but from their family and social environment. By the time they reach primary school they already are well grounded in their mother tongue, and formal schooling develops and builds on that base. Hence the tragedy of education in Jamaica - for decades we have pretended that children were coming into the education system knowing English, whereas with the exception of a tiny minority this was and is patently untrue.

Children have therefore been plunged into a linguistic environment which was alien and hostile, feeling belittled and humiliated for not having a command of English, blamed for something over which they have no control. The number of brilliant children who have thus been denied the benefits of an education simply because of their lack of English must be immense, and we are all the poorer for it.

Prejudice, which had me shaking my head in disbelief when I came to his contention that it could never be possible to have "patois books in law, chemistry, plumbing, art, and patois websites, and (.) translators and interpreters employed in patois at the Seabed Authority". Those books will be written when we take a decision to write them, just as one day in 842, it was decided to write one of the texts of the Serments de Strasbourg, a treaty of alliance, in the emerging language of those in France who no longer spoke Latin.

Instead of examining the absurd prejudices with which we have all grown up in our post-colonial situation, people like Mr Johnston bury their heads firmly in the sand, loudly denying that Jamaican Creole is a language. Well, if it isn't a language, how is it possible for people to communicate in it? Or does he think the Jamaican people walk around making arbitrary noises with their mouths?

When Mr Johnston feverishly denies that Jamaican Creole is a language, what he really means to say is that, in his opinion, it is a language of no account, and by extension those who speak it are of no account either - for how else could it be possible to maintain with a straight face that the majority of a population should be deprived of the right to receive their education in their own language?

No-one is denying the current importance of English as a world language, nor that when it comes to learning foreign languages, English needs to be given priority. However, just as no-one in their right mind would demand that Swiss German children, for example, abandon their mother tongue (Schwiezerdeutsch) on the first day of primary school and function in Hochdeutsch, a language which they have not yet been taught, so it is outrageous to maintain that Jamaican children should as a matter of policy be deprived of the possibility to learn in their mother tongue and to be taught English thoroughly and properly.

In Switzerland, switching between the dialect and the standard form of German is the norm, since the Swiss realised long ago that with bilingualism you get the best of both worlds. Miss Lou made the same point many years ago, as Mr Johnston himself acknowledges, so why the resistance to bilingual education in Jamaica?

Annie Rose Kitchin is an international conference interpreter at the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium.

annie.kitchin@ec.europa.eu

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