Contact Languages and Music

Contact Languages and Music

EDITED BY

Andrea Hollington

Joseph T. Farquharson

Byron M. Jones Jr.

The University of the West Indies Press

7A Gibraltar Hall Road, Mona

Kingston 7, Jamaica

www.uwipress.com

© 2022 by Andrea Hollington, Joseph T. Farquharson and Byron M. Jones Jr.

All rights reserved. Published 2022

A catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Jamaica.

ISBN: 978-976-640-923-4 (print)

978-976-640-924-1 (ePub)

Cover design by Robert Harris

The University of the West Indies Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

1. Introduction

Joseph T. Farquharson, Andrea Hollington and Byron M. Jones Jr.

Part 1 Language, Music and Identity

2. Discoursing the State of a Caribbean Nation

Hubert Devonish

3. Dennery Segment ka mennen: Exploring the Dominance of Creole Languages in St Lucian Popular Music

Ronald T. Francis and R. Sandra Evans

4. Singing in Creole or Portuguese?: Santomean Musical Manifestations

Marie-Eve Bouchard

5. Wi Ful a Patan: A Quantitative Approach to Language Use in Jamaican Popular Music

Byron M. Jones Jr.

6. Styling through Rhyming: Gender and Vowel Variation in Jamaican Dancehall Lyrics

Nickesha Dawkins

7. Language Use in Peter Ram’s Soca Performances

Guyanne Wilson

8. Singing the King’s Creole: The (Ethno)Linguistic Repertoire of Clifton Chenier

Nathan A. Wendte

Part 2 Translocal Perspectives

9. Rap Kriolu Revisited: From the Transnational Diaspora to Cape Verde and Back

Christina Märzhäuser

10. Authentic Crossing?: Jamaican Creole in African Dancehall

Anika Gerfer

11. Jamaican in Transatlantic Contact Spaces: Linguistic Practices in African Reggae, Dancehall and Other Popular Musics

Andrea Hollington

12. Jamaric Reggae: Jamaican Speech Forms in Contemporary Ethiopian Reggae Music

Renato Tomei

13. Caribbean Identity in Pop Music: Rihanna’s and Nicki Minaj’s Multivocal Pop Personas

Lisa Jansen and Michael Westphal

List of Contributors

Index

Chapter 1

Introduction

Joseph T. Farquharson, Andrea Hollington and Byron M. Jones Jr.

Music and language have a manifold relationship: Language is a crucial part of many musical forms and practices, while musical features are seen in language as well. They share contexts, spaces and histories in many sociocultural expressive forms. Links between language and music have been explored by scholars in various contexts. For example, Jackendoff and Lehrdahl adapted Noam Chomsky’s linguistic generative approach to music. While this aimed at finding a common theoretical approach, studying universal musical grammar and a formal description of musical understanding, the approach does not seem to be very influential today. In recent decades, and especially since the beginning of the twenty-first century, sociolinguistic accounts of popular music have become quite common, such as hip-hop (Alim 2006; Alim, Ibrahim and Pennycook 2009; Terkourafi 2010) or reggae and dancehall (Devonish 1996, 1998, 2006; Devonish and Jones 2017; Farquharson 2005; Hollington 2016, 2018; Jones 2019). Exploring various connections of language and music as social practices opens up a large field of possibilities and perspectives.

This is where the present volume comprises and ties in chapters that seek to look at various intersections and connections of language and music. Different accounts shed light on language variation, the use of Creole language in music, language ideologies, authenticity, language and identity, the ethnography of communication, multilingualism and language contact, language attitudes, linguistic creativity and transnational flows. Instead of concentrating on a specific music genre, this volume presents a colourful collection of different practices in various music genres and styles, as well as in different parts of the world. The shared focus of this book is that each contribution sheds light on one or more aspects of (a) contact language(s) and the ways linguistic practices feature in and impact on various music styles.

Numerous creolized cultures, as well as societies characterized by linguistic pluralism and contact, have yielded rich musical practices in which contact languages are used. In many cases, music, as a social and cultural form of expression, has constituted a domain in which contact languages have gained prestige, preserved historical linguistic forms and served as strong markers of identity. Especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts, contact languages referred to as Creole have usually been regarded as low prestige varieties with little power, especially in official and political domains. Here, music has offered spaces in which Creole languages could not only flourish but also be celebrated as cultural heritage. Despite these important aspects, no book-length volume on the interplay of contact languages and music exists to date. This volume presents a number of original case studies from mainly anglophone Caribbean and African contexts that have not been discussed in previous works. It also explores some other contact varieties in francophone and lusophone contexts. Additionally, this volume aims at filling the aforementioned research gap by providing insights into a number of Creole language and musical practices from Jamaica to São Tomé, and from Louisiana to Trinidad and Tobago. Apart from documenting and analysing the use of contact languages in music practices, the volume seeks to explore, in particular, questions of identity and authenticity, which are addressed by the various contributors in their respective chapters with regard to methodological, theoretical and ideological standpoints and perspectives:

How is the intersection between contact languages and music deployed by artistes to construct and negotiate various identities?

How do the intersectionalities between contact languages and notions of race, authenticity, class and nationality play out in music?

How are linguistic performances in music by second-language speakers of contact languages assessed and evaluated as authentic by first-language and second-language speakers?

What is the basis of the evaluations made by audiences at home and abroad about the authenticity of contact languages as second languages in music?

Contact Languages and/in Music

The preparation of this volume has been dogged by the constant presence of the intervening slash between the conjunction and and the preposition in. At first, it was put in to leave the field as broad as possible as we worked out the exact scope of the volume. As the work progressed, it morphed into a marker of inclusiveness, signalling that we were interested in the confluence between contact languages and music as well as the ways in which the former are deployed in the latter. The coordinating conjunction does not preclude an interest in those communities where contact languages are present but in which they are excluded from one or more genres of local music (Farquharson 2017). While the majority of the chapters in the current volume deal with contact languages in music, we acknowledge that cases in which they are under-represented or absent from an entire song, genre or some sections of a song can be equally as informative. Although some work has been done over the years on contact languages and/in music, we believe that we have not even scratched the surface in exploiting the full potential of this academic pursuit.

The Subfields of Linguistics

For example, lyrics provide a ready source of raw data for linguistic analysis; however, the potential of lyrics as data has not been fully exploited by contemporary linguists. This is particularly telling for contact languages, many of which continue to be dominated by oral as opposed to scribal channels. In the areas of phonetics and phonology, of particular note are Devonish (2006), who looks at the manipulation of diphthongs in the service of rhyme schemes, and Dawkins (2016), who concentrates on the manipulation of vowels for stylistic purposes. The overwhelming majority of existing studies on contact languages and music belongs to the sub-discipline of sociolinguistics, and so it comes as no surprise that the variety of topics is quite large. For example, with regard to Jamaican music, there are works which apply Austin’s (1955) speech act theory and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness framework in relation to Jamaican dancehall songs that address the topic of sexuality, while others look at the link between diglossia and language use patterns in Jamaican folk and popular music (Devonish 1996; Farquharson 2005, 2019; Jones 2019). The latter ties in with works that investigate the sociology of language, such as Winer’s (1986) exploration of language use patterns in Trinbagonian calypso, Cooper and Devonish (1995) and Devonish and Jones (2017) on language in the popular music of post-Independence Jamaica, and Farquharson (2017) on the interaction between linguistic codes in both secular and religious music in Jamaica from the colonial period to the present. Other studies concentrate on meaning-making in songs by exploring the (non-)deployment of specific languages or language varieties by artistes in constructing/projecting a particular type of identity: the use of calypso in Costa Rica as a marker of Afro-Limonese identity (Herzfeld and Moskowitz 2004), or Haitian in the multilingual space of Montreal rap and its role in code-switching practices (Sarkar, Winer and Sarkar 2005). Moreover, especially in contexts characterized by migration and multilingualism, music practices involving contact varieties even become sites of language contact themselves, often illustrating complex language ideologies (Hollington 2016). In fact, language ideologies constitute an interesting domain for the study of the language and music intersection as both language and music are commonly employed by people to express, negotiate and promote language ideologies, attitudes and metalinguistic awareness (see, for instance, Sippola, Schneider and Levisen 2017).

Other studies focus on diachronic language use and change in contact situations, using music lyrics as data (Jones 2019). As the previous paragraph demonstrates, phonology, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are the better-explored areas in the study of contact languages and music. This is curious for the linguistic study of contact languages given that scholars constantly complain about the lack of readily available data. Because music represents a specific genre in which sometimes special language is used, scholars rarely turn to song lyrics for data for morphosyntactic studies. Jakobson’s (1960) poetic function of language focuses on how a code is used, and it also sheds light on the use of language. Rather than assuming that only the channel has changed, the role of the linguist would be to determine, for example, whether and to what extent morphosyntax, voice, ways of speaking and so on of the language(s) found in songs differ from that found in day-to-day speech and writing. In cases where there are several ways of phrasing a particular expression, is there a marked preference in singing for one way over another? Which roles are played by rhyme and style in this context? How do authenticity and aesthetics play into these practices? And how do individual practices by singers and musicians influence society at large?

Methods and Approaches

It has already been mentioned that what unifies this emerging field is the data that stands at the centre of analyses. It needs to be stressed, however, that data in this context is a very versatile phenomenon given the plurality of musical aspects, styles and practices that are investigated here. No method or approach has emerged as the way of studying contact languages and music, and rightly so! The heterogeneity that exists allows us to get a much broader view of both language and music. The field is dominated by qualitative approaches that focus on the pragmatic and discursive aspects of song lyrics, especially with regard to meaning-making and identity construction, but also include aspects of multilingualism, authenticity, style, language ideologies and attitudes. There is a real sense in which the works that apply quantitative methods to the study of contact languages in music are pioneering. In the quantitative paradigm, we are aware of the work of Dawkins (2016 and chapter 6, this volume), whose sociophonetic work unearths gendered patterns of language use that elude the naked ears but are clearly part of the competence of performers and audience members. Jones (chapter 5, this volume) explores the use of Jamaican and English in Jamaican popular music by making use of quantitative methods with a focus on variationist sociolinguistics. Gerfer (2018) explores nine phonetic variables, seven morphosyntactic variables and lexical features used by seven white non-Jamaican reggae artistes. Jones (2019) uses a corpus-based approach in examining the use of syntactic features in Jamaican and English in the lyrics of Jamaican popular music over a fifty-year period, using quantitative methods to map language change and mechanisms of such a change.

The Sociolinguistics of Globalization and Diaspora

Whether under forced or voluntary migration, people move across borders bringing their languages, songs, music practices and other intangible cultural artefacts. The high transglobal mobility of the past half millennium requires an approach that is sensitive to the sociolinguistic dynamics resulting from diasporic settings. This is starting to be addressed by an emerging eclectic approach being referred to as the sociolinguistics of diaspora. According to Hinrichs (2011, 1–2), the central questions of diasporic sociolinguistics are as follows:

What happens to individual heritage languages as they are transplanted into new settings, creating new dialect contact situations?

What happens to established models of sociolinguistic description?

What role does language play in the representational politics of diaspora communities?

Music provides an arena for the sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010) and the sociolinguistics of diaspora (Hinrichs 2011) to play out. This is evident in the global diffusion of African American English (also known as African American Vernacular English), not through migration but through old and new media. Music (e.g. rap and hip-hop) plays an important role in communities across the world, particularly in areas where young people feel marginalized and oppressed. Among migrants and their descendants, where the sociolinguistic dynamics of their host countries cause them to restrict use of their heritage language to private informal in-group interactions, music furnishes a public space for the use of the heritage language. This is true of Cape Verdean Creole by migrants in rap kriolu in diaspora communities in New England (United States), Lisbon and Rotterdam (Märzhäuser, chapter 9, this volume); Ghanaian Pidgin English and Nigerian Pidgin English (Naija) in the rap/reggae/dancehall of artistes from those nationalities living abroad; Jamaican Creole as used in the reggae and dancehall music produced by Jamaican migrants in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom; as well as Haitian in the rap music produced by Haitian migrants and their descendants in Quebec, Canada (Low, Sarkar and Winer 2009; Sarkar and Winer 2006). Where language is introduced to a new environment via migration, it is used in popular music in the host country, and music becomes one of the key sites of diffusion to other ethnolinguistic groups, both migrant and non-migrant.

Music bears testament to Blommaert’s (2010, 106) characterization of linguistic repertoires as truncated complexes of resources often derived from a variety of language, and with considerable differences in the level of development of particular resources. This is illustrated by the use of multiple codes in a single song, as described, for example, by Tomei (chapter 12, this volume) for reggae in Ethiopia; Sarkar, Winer and Sarkar (2005) for hip-hop in Montreal; and Hollington (chapter 11, this volume) for dancehall music in various African societies. Making full use of the sociolinguistic turntable that popular music provides, musical artistes produce highly interesting ways of linguistic interaction by drawing on and mixing resources from their linguistic repertoires.

Jansen and Westphal (2017) propose that singers become transnational linguistic agents, exposing a global audience to a creative bricolage of linguistic resources. This transnationalization is of particular importance to under-resourced languages, a category to which the majority of Creole languages belongs. What Jansen and Westphal (2017) describe for Rihanna is also true of several other artistes with a similar social and linguistic background, for example, Michi Mee and Kardinall Offishall in Canada (Farquharson 2019).

An interesting aspect is provided by the observation of the roles that language and music play in diaspora communities in the transnational spread of contact languages in the absence of the vast economic and institutional resources for dissemination available to big or more established standard(ized) languages. This process may involve several phases. First, the contact language gains a limited foothold in the host country when it is mainly used in closed networks by native speakers and their descendants among themselves. If the community is marginalized, or physically or culturally isolated, this may lead to fossilization or death after the first couple of generations. If the migrant community shares living and working space with members of the host community and other migrant groups and uses its language in public settings, then the language may be picked up by out-group individuals as an additional language or register. Despite the imbalance in resources many contact languages have, music opens up spaces for the establishment of communities of practice centred on informal language teaching/learning.

Jamaican dancehall music created in countries such as Ghana, Guyana, Nigeria, and Trinidad and Tobago creates a complex (socio)linguistic space. It is interesting to observe contexts where a contact language exists in a society and is in regular use when at the same time artistes enregister the original language associated with the genre (e.g. Jamaican) to index both linguistic and professional authenticity, while also utilizing the local contact language to establish ethnic bonds with their home audience. The complexities in these contexts might be further complicated by historical ties and parallel developments in the contact varieties that come into contact with each other in the respective music practices. In this way artistes make conscious use of heteroglossic strategies, leveraging their linguistic resources to connect to people, express complex identities and to expand their audience/market.

The various contributions to this volume are arranged in two larger sections, namely language, music and identity and translocal perspectives. Though all contributions touch upon aspects of identity with regard to language use in music in the respective contexts, the chapters in the first part focus more on local, national or regional contexts, while the chapters in the second part address issues of translocality, global linguistic flows and diasporic identities.

Overview of the Contributions

Part 1: Language, Music and Identity

Music and nationality are the focus of the contribution by Hubert Devonish (chapter 2). By investigating four songs from Trinidad and Tobago, the author looks at discourses of national identity and ethnic relations. Employing the notion of performative speech acts, he shows how artistes use different strategies of negotiating meaning and identity with their audiences. By switching between performer/narrator and performer/first-person participant, the artistes take on different personae and are thus able to engage in a multivocal discourse of negotiating (national) identity. The artistes use lyrics and music to affirm and deny performative speech acts, as the author illustrates.

Ronald T. Francis and R. Sandra Evans in chapter 3 explore Creole language use in St Lucia. By focusing on dennery segment, a recent musical genre developed on the island, the authors shed light on a new music phenomenon and investigate the roles language plays by employing Bourdieu’s practice theory, in particular the concepts of linguistic habitus and linguistic market. The authors illustrate and discuss the use of Kwéyòl and Vernacular English of St Lucia in dennery segment, and analyse language use in different sociocultural domains commonly found in the lyrics. Furthermore, the chapter sheds light on the local, regional and international influences and resonances of the music genre.

Chapter 4 by Marie-Eve Bouchard investigates language ideologies in the music of São Tomé and Príncipe. By looking at language choices and the use of Creole varieties, the author discusses the role of music and musicians with regard to the valorization and maintenance of the Santomean Creole languages. The archipelago is in the process of language shift in favour of the dominant language, Portuguese, and the use of Creole varieties in music, in particular Forro and Angolar, serves as a marker of identity and authenticity as the author illustrates.

Byron M. Jones’s chapter (chapter 5) provides an overview of the socially diagnostic factors that determine the use of Jamaican Creole and English in Jamaican popular music. The author does this by examining the frequency distributions of all eight factors that were identified in the onset of the study, after which the list was narrowed to include only the most salient factors, measured by their strength of association. The chapter links the saliency of these factors to changes in language attitudes in the wider Jamaican society.

Nickesha Dawkins in her sociophonetic study (chapter 6) introduces both a technical and a gender component. Through the measurement of acoustic features, focusing on vowel formants, she finds an unexpected pattern in the phonetic realization of vowels produced by dancehall artistes during performance. Both male and female artistes increase the pitch of vowels, raise the height of the tongue and produce the vowels as more front when addressing/targeting female audiences, but lower the pitch of vowels, lower the height of the tongue, and produce vowels as further back when addressing/targeting male audiences.

In chapter 7, Guyanne Wilson examines language use practices in Peter Ram’s performance of soca music. The author analyses samples of Ram’s studio recordings and live performances with the aim being to discover how Ram constructs identity through Creole use, what phonological patterns exist in his music and how these patterns change over time. The author concludes that performers have to navigate a linguistic space conditioned not only by stylistic preferences but also by issues of prestige, power and identity.

Nathan A. Wendte in chapter 8 presents a linguistic analysis of a corpus comprising fifty songs from the musical work of Clifton Chenier, the dubbed King of Zydeco. The author aims to show the interaction of Characteristic Louisiana Creole and Characteristic Louisiana French in Chenier’s work to better understand what language variety (or varieties) typify zydeco music (a Louisiana-based musical genre). The author concludes the chapter with a discussion stating that the linguistic description presented can expand our understanding of language’s diverse forms in zydeco music, which may prove helpful in ongoing Louisiana Creole language revitalization efforts.

Part 2: Translocal Perspectives

Christina Märzhäuser’s contribution (chapter 9) analyses the deployment of Capeverdean Creole in rap kriolu in the Cape Verdean homeland and its diasporas. The study takes a detailed ethnographic approach including song texts, interviews with MC’s and other involved individuals, analysis of social media platforms, and documentary and fictional films. Marshalling all of this evidence, Märzhäuser conducts what she refers to as a linguistic market analysis looking at how artistes, singers and producers contribute to and influence access to Capeverdean and the functional expansion of the language to deal with topics and themes not normally treated in homeland varieties.

Anika Gerfer’s chapter (chapter 10) takes up the sociolinguistic debates about crossing – the phenomenon of appropriating linguistic practices or emblematic language features of another cultural group – and the notion of authenticity. She explores African dancehall music and presents insights into song examples from Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. Her analysis investigates which linguistic features of Jamaican Creole have been used by African dancehall artistes. She discusses the implications of these instances of crossing with regard to authenticity by looking at the multilingual practices and contexts of the respective artists.

Andrea Hollington, in chapter 11, casts a wider net by looking at the musical production of several African countries and the dominant status of Jamaican language, despite the absence of any significant population of native speakers of Jamaican in these countries. She attributes the dominance of Jamaican language practices to the high global visibility of Jamaican music, as well as the historical and ideological links between Africa and Jamaica, her diasporic daughter. Exploring songs from English-official African countries, such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ghana and Nigeria, Hollington frames music as a site of transatlantic contact of genres (reggae, dancehall, African pop) and linguistic varieties (e.g. Ghanaian/Nigerian Pidgin English, Jamaican Creole, African American Vernacular English and Swahili). Her analysis reveals the conscious use of Jamaican linguistic practices alongside expressions that are probably motivated by shared worldviews and experiences shaped by historical social practices such as colonialism and exploitation.

When elements of intangible culture get transplanted from one location to another they often outlive the generation that transported them and take on a life of their own. This is the focus of Renato Tomei’s chapter (chapter 12), which looks at the musical and linguistic legacy of the Jamaican Rastafarian community in Ethiopia. Ethiopian youth take up not only the music of the community but also the accompanying language varieties (i.e. mainstream Jamaican Creole and Dread Talk). Tomei mines song lyrics, advertising and promotional material, social media posts, interviews, and audio/video recordings for Jamaican speech forms. His work uncovers a modern linguistic flow involving the incorporation of Jamaican words into music produced by Ethiopians corresponding to the decades-old ebb in which Jamaican singers (in Jamaica) incorporated Ethiopian words into their music.

In chapter 13, Lisa Jansen and Michael Westphal explore identity processes and the role of language in transnational and global music practices by Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. The authors shed light on the multilayered and diverse personas of these artistes and discuss their roles in promoting the spread of Caribbean English Creole. A qualitative multimodal analysis of the linguistic practices represented in the music and performances of these two artistes sheds light on the identity process expressed through creative performative means. Jansen and Westphal use the concepts of multivocality as well as multimodality in their analysis in order to present a nuanced picture of the translocal and global identities in pop music.

Conclusion

Although scholars have been studying contact languages and/in music for some time, the studies tend to be presented in disparate publications. This edited collection represents the start of a conversation that takes the topic to a new level by bringing together various case studies that together create a broad perspective on language and music in the contexts of migration, diaspora and language contact. It therefore adds to the body of knowledge on contact languages and music. There is scope for the application of various sociolinguistic models and theories that are suitable but have so far remained un(der)utilized. For example, Le Page and Tabouret-Keller’s (1985) acts of identity model should prove useful in exploring the music produced in diaspora communities by second and subsequent generations. Moreover, concepts of language and migration as well as creative ways of handling large linguistic repertoires (Lüpke and Storch 2013) can be fruitfully examined in music practices in many societies. Additionally, the study of contact languages and music has largely involved linguists working in disciplinary silos. We are yet to exploit the enriching insights to be gained from collaborating with scholars from other disciplines such as psychology, sociology and ethnomusicology. For example, the latter could contribute significantly to a true ethnography of communication where we investigate music as its own system of communication, not merely as a scaffold for the lyrics. Such an interdisciplinary project would study how the instrumentals work in tandem with the lyrics to produce complete communicative acts.

A final point is that when we first started preparing the concept of this volume, we had anticipated a much broader spread in terms of regions and linguistic contexts. The reader will notice that there is a heavy focus on Caribbean contexts, especially on the Jamaican language in both local and diasporic spaces. This might be evidence of the state of academic work on contact languages and music, which apparently has a lopsided concentration on either North American (hip-hop) or English and English-related language communities. This is a signal that there are still many interesting and unresearched phenomena to uncover. Therefore, we hope that this volume will also inspire further research on the multifaceted connections between language and music.

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Part 1

Language, Music and Identity

Chapter 2

Discoursing the State of a Caribbean Nation

Hubert Devonish

Introduction

Invited to the University of Cape Town in December 2018 to do a series of presentations, on my first visit to the African continent as a descendant of enslaved Africans in the Americas, I find my mind split in two. I look at the black Africans in the audience, allow myself a mental jaw drop and think, Aha! So this is Africa and these are Africans on their own continent. Then the other half kicked in. The black people in the audiences were a minority, very odd coming from the Caribbean where, depending on the country, audiences would either be made up predominantly of people of African descent or a mix of people of African and Indian descent. This wasn’t quite the Africa I was expecting to be confronted with on my first working day on the mother continent. And then one sees that the black people present do not act as confidently as I expect of people at home on their own continent. And then it dawns on me. This atmosphere and behaviour is very old-style Caribbean. And then comes the epiphany. Black majority rule in South Africa dates back to just the 1990s. My own experience of black people at least symbolically being in charge of their own postcolonial space is easily thirty years longer than that of the black South Africans in the audience. Maybe, after all, there is actually something we can teach. We can talk of our more than fifty-five-year experience on this postcolonial or, more properly, neocolonial road.

The message is simple. The elites who inherit the state at the end of colonization do so as part of a nationalist and political discourse carried on in the language of the European colonizing group. The mass of the population living within the borders of this new independent state have their own discourses. These are conducted in the mass vernacular languages rather than a language such as English and take place in an oral rather than written medium. These discourses, in the case of the Caribbean, frequently take place in the milieu of speech events associated with musical performance.

The present work, developed from the workshop presentations in South Africa, is part of a larger study on popular discourse on race, language and national identity in the former British Caribbean. The intent is to understand the content of debates on identity, nation and state as they take place among the ordinary folk, the masses, in their vernacular language varieties. Also under study are the discourse structures within which these debates take place. Of most important interest is how, if at all, the medium, in the form of language choice and discourse features, and the message interact with each other.

Discoursing Nation and the State

With countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean acceding to political independence beginning in the 1960s, there has been extensive discussion and debate around nation building. At core has been the relationship between the people and the new states which supposedly represent their national aspirations. Colonialism created arbitrary geographically based states. This it did either by forcing together people belonging to what were previously multiple nations or ethnicities, occupying that space, or importing people from other places and forcing them to work and exist in a new place which happens to be a European colony. On independence, the state and its supporting institutions are inherited by the elite to whom the departing colonizer hands over political control. The people, nations and ethnicities within the entity that is the postcolonial state are then forced to negotiate a relationship between each other and with the state. This is a study about the role of language in this negotiation, firstly in relation to the kinds of popular language discourse that take place and the issue of what role these play in the state that supposedly represents them and governs in their best interest.

The states which emerged in the postcolonial era are peculiar, best defined by what they were not. They did not naturally develop out of ethnic groups in a particular locality negotiating with each other, over time, albeit with the requisite use of force or threat of such use. They did not emerge as expressions of the history of the relationship between the peoples ruled by the state and the state itself. Rather, the Caribbean states which grew in the wake of European colonialism are constructed out of national and ethnic units forced together by the colonizer. Peoples find themselves together within the borders of a postcolonial state by virtue of having been forced together by colonialism. These were the classic plural societies produced by British colonialism as described by theorists at the time of independence, notably the Jamaican scholar M.G. Smith (1965).

The enforced coexistence within the newly independent formerly British Caribbean state, as just described, has to be rationalized and made acceptable to the citizens of the postcolonial state. This state responds to this challenge by developing an official discourse around the theme of unity,