Dear Editor,

Everytime the importance of patois is raised there is an automatic groundswell of resistance from the refiner populace, as if the encouragement of the Jamaican creole somehow invades or infects the standard and quality of the English language. Yet there is no natural enmity between the two, except in one’s mind.

Patois has no interest in trespassing on the property of the English language to colonise and reconfigure it.

Even though we may choose to write it in random or unregulated ways, a standard for spelling and writing in patois does exist — a standard which is faithful to keeping the line between the two quite separate and different. Even the responses that we sometimes hear to patois expressions demonstrate that there is a separation in people’s minds. We may hear, for instance, someone mocking: “Dat a nuh English, a patwa dat,” which tells you that the distinction is already understood and that the threat or fear of corroding or corrupting the English language is redundant. There is no rivalry or threat of extinction to protect or defend. Also, the fact that someone is fluent in a given form of communication, like a mother tongue, for instance, does not displace his or her competence in any other language.

It is unfair, therefore, to blame patois for any shortcomings in the English department, whether in the classroom or elsewhere, since English is actually the primary language taught in schools and not the Jamaican creole.

The importance of a language should be about its utility first, and aesthetics and vanities after.

There are several First World economies and industrialised countries whose primary tool of conversation is not English, yet their language seems to serve them as well as that of any English-speaking country in the world.

But what may actually be the central motive against the formal recognition of the Jamaican creole is not its limit in use or its insufficiency in form or any such expedient excuses, it is simply the “awful sound” and the way it grates the ears and affronts the sensibilities of the cultivated and aristocratic class. In other words, patois may have become like a mirror, reflecting our own love of form over matter.

Homer Sylvester

Mount Vernon, New York

h2sylvester@gmail.com