ONE would have thought that 50 years into our Independence project we would have settled such issues as what modes of communication are appropriate for our nationals and is Jamaican (Patois) a legitimate language? We are still grappling with the notions of whether English is our official language or if Jamaican (Patois ) is a an appropriate vehicle for academic instruction. Hardly a day passes without some comment being made in our newspapers on the value of English as a mode of communication or the importance of bilingualism among Jamaicans.

I have read a number of letters to the editor which have sought to misinterpret the position of Professor Carolyn Cooper and her promotion of the use of Jamaican.

What is clear to me is that some of these fierce advocates of the use of English seeking to discredit Professor Cooper would be well advised to learn the language since their representation of her views betray a weakness in comprehension of the tongue they so passionately espouse. Let me say that I am one of those persons who believe that English is not our native tongue and therefore should be taught as a foreign language. I first came to this conclusion as I taught Spanish at my alma mater, St George’s College, for a year after leaving sixth form. I quickly came to the realization that I really needed to teach English to my students in order for them to get a better understanding of Spanish.

The fact is that in most instances students were expected to learn English through immersion which incidentally is one of the most effective ways of acquiring any language.The problem, however, is that most of us are really not exposed to English in our daily routines even those who are from backgrounds in which the language is supposedly spoken. In fact I discovered that those students who had a clearly defined distinction between how they spoke and how they wrote were much better at expressing themselves grammatically than those who presumed that they were proficient in English because it was spoken at home.

Clearly there were exceptions as there were those who spoke and wrote the language very well.Those however were students who knew the mechanics of English and did not learn the language solely through immersion. Many students who came from backgrounds where it was thought that English was spoken often operated under the misguided notion that they mastered the grammar which often was not the case.

The fact is that many persons with graduate and professional qualifications do not know why it is correct to say: “If I were you”. Most are not familiar with the subjunctive mood unless exposed to a foreign language. There are not many of us who know the difference between the past tense and the past participle. How many of us know when to use “that” instead of “which”? How many times have we been to weddings only to hear the groom rise to thank those present,” On behalf of my wife and I” which most guests would perhaps consider to be grammatically correct but is in fact a blunder. These errors can only be avoided if English is taught as a foreign language and not presumed to be our native tongue. Disagreement of tenses, mixed metaphors and dangling modifiers are often the stock in trade of our local newscasts yet we continue to labour under the myth that we speak English. He who knows not and knows not he knows not?

What is even more interesting is that I was able to use my knowledge of Jamaican grammar to teach Spanish a point I have made in my article “Speaky Spokey” which appeared in the Jamaica Observer in 2006 and has been quoted in a number of international journals. I showed my students that syntactically Spanish and Jamaican shared some common features which I brought to the service of my instruction. For example, in Jamaican we say, “Mi nuh si nobaddy” which sees the use of the double negative a feature which is deemed unacceptable in standard English. However, Spanish does use the double negative. “No vi a nadie”, literally would be translated as “I did not see no one” when translated from Spanish to English.

I also demonstrated to my students other similarities between the sentence structures of Jamaican and Spanish, one such is the position of the direct and indirect object pronouns. In English we say, “Give it to me” in which case the direct object pronoun precedes the the indirect one. In both English and Jamaican the reverse is true. In Jamaican we say “Gimme it” The Spanish say “Damelo” which literally says “Give me it”. My experience as a young teacher demonstrated that not only was Jamaican a language with it’s distinctive syntactic structure but that that it would be useful in the teaching of other tongues.

The fact is that there are a number of Japanese and Germans among other nationalities who can speak Jamaican but do not understand English. Jamaican is a distinctive language and the detractors of Professor Cooper should accept this. There is a group of people on the Colombian island of San Andres who understand Jamaican and Spanish but would have great difficulty following a conversation in English. These residents of San Andres are descendants of Jamaicans who moved to this island, controlled by the Spanish speaking territory on the mainland. There is greater linguistic distance between English and Jamaican than there is between Portuguese and Spanish. I am able to read most documents in Portuguese though I never formally learned the language. We need to applaud the efforts of Professors Devonish and Cooper in trying to privilege the use of Jamaican against considerable odds. The fact is that there are philologists who use a combination of linguistic and genetic markers to determine the historical dispersal of people’s across the planet. Whenever a language dies, which is far more frequent than we imagine, we lose another opportunity to delve into our past and understand where we are coming from. We need a facility in both English and Jamaican which is simply what Professor Cooper and her allies are advocating. If only some of those who so fiercely defend the use of English would gain a useful command of it maybe we would not have so much confusion. Patois not a language a weh dem a chat bout?

cpamckenzie@gmail.com