EDUCATION Minister Andrew Holness is concerned about the use of patois eclipsing the more globally acceptable Queen’s English among Jamaicans.

He wants Jamaican youth, especially, to understand that their future in a global environment rests on their ability to converse in the universal tongue, English.

“I think Jamaicans have to understand that English is an extremely important language in the world,” Holness told journalists at this week’s Observer Monday Exchange. “It is not one or the other, we must be able to speak English.”

He said that there needs to be greater respect for the English language in the face of overwhelming use of the local dialect in day-to-day communication.

Holness, who is likely to become the new leader of the governing Jamaica Labour Party and Jamaica’s ninth prime minister next month, also said that while he respects Jamaican creole, he is particularly displeased by the creeping predominance of broken English on the local airwaves.

“I have a problem with how the radio and television stations in Jamaica operate, that they just merge the two (dialect and English). Students get very confused. You have to make a distinction that on the formal stage, the language is English,” he insisted.

Regarding conflict in the classroom over which language is more appropriate for teaching, Holness insisted that English must be the predominant language in the formal school system.

“We have a major challenge as to whether it must be patois or English,” said Holness. However, he also cited the skilful use of proper English by national cultural icon Louise ‘Miss Lou’ Bennett, who was fluent in both, but used them appropriately for emphasis in delivery of her poetry.

“When you listened to Miss Lou, she was doing one of her well-known presentations for the BBC, she spoke perfect English and then she went into her dialect, translating.”

Holness insisted that the schoolroom is the best place to establish among the youth what it is to truly be Jamaican in a global context.

In recent years, the issue of whether patois should be taught in schools or used by teachers during lessons has been hotly debated, with even a patois Bible and dictionary being produced.

Proponents of using the dialect in the classroom setting have argued that children should be taught in the language they use most when not in school and that to do otherwise would be exclusionary.

But the education minister disagrees.

“I don’t buy this argument that I am excluding people because they can’t speak English. We must make people begin to read and write English so that we can properly communicate,” he said. “Survival of Jamaica doesn’t depend on (just) Jamaicans, who are two or three million people in a seven-billion-person world. For us to be viable, we need to speak not just English, but Spanish and French and other languages. We must put this language debate to rest,” insisted Holness.