Intersections of language rights and social justice in the Caribbean context

Front matter

Intersections of language rights and social justice in the Caribbean context

Edited by

Studies in Caribbean Languages

Contents

Preface iii Introduction vii

1 #problematic: Using English for social justice advocacy in Creole-speaking societies Clive Forrester 1

2 We want justice: Linguistic discrimination in Jamaica’s public formal domains and the people’s cry for justice Kadian Walters 27

Preface

In the summer of 2020, the Society for Caribbean Linguistics (SCL) was scheduled to have its 234 Biennial Conference at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago. Plans were already well underway from the year before and scholars from across the world were getting ready to make their usual trek to the conference in a warm and accommodating Caribbean destination. Abstracts had started coming in close to the end of 2019 and by February 2020 a rudimentary conference schedule had started to take shape, all the while news of some new flu variant was making the rounds on the news circuits. Then, almost out of nowhere, the world came to a screeching halt in March when a global pandemic was declared. The SCL executive committee hoped that a conference would have been a possibility by August, but we had to pull the plug a few months before. The 23"? Biennial SCL Conference was canceled.

I sent out a proposal for a panel on language and the law during the call for papers and received two abstracts to be considered for the panel. Along with my paper, the panel had three presenters when the conference was canceled. It occurred to me shortly after the cancellation that this would be a good opportunity to convert the panel into a publication focusing on language rights in the Caribbean context. I extended the invitation to contribute a chapter to a few more individuals and received two more positive replies, bringing the number of contributions to five. It became apparent fairly quickly that this was a good decision since a published volume could accommodate many more contributions than a conference panel that is usually capped at four papers, and a full publication would encourage authors to develop their ideas beyond the scope of what was expected for a conference paper. By the end of 2020, all the contributions were ready for peer review and SCL’s Studies in Caribbean Languages book series hosted by Language Science Press was the obvious choice.

The summer of 2020 also saw a surge in the social pandemic of anti-black racism, sparked by a tragedy in the USA which then reverberated across the globe in the form of protests and rallies, but also in the form of policy changes. The timing of this volume is apropos as it gives us the opportunity to reflect on the anti-black racist origin of attitudes towards Caribbean Creole languages, and helps us forge new directions in the ways that we study and interact with these

Preface languages. Linguists and other researchers interested in the connections between language and the law are likely to find the discussions in this volume useful, as well as individuals interested in the sociology of language, and advocacy in its broadest sense. The content is suited for a range of readers spanning senior undergraduates to established academics and could serve as targeted reading material for courses that have a language and law component or more generally, syllabi that highlight social issues surrounding Caribbean languages.

Several of the authors in the present volume have looked at communicative issues coming out of the courtroom context where a Creole-dominant speaker has had to interact with officers of the court who use a standard(ised) European language. This is a common site for investigation since there is a “safe” bet that a Creole-speaking member of the public is likely to encounter challenges regarding effective communication in an ‘alien’ discourse space such as a courtroom. There are, however, other adjacent areas of research that are concerned with language and the law in the Caribbean context, but not necessarily with discourse patterns and interpretation issues inside the courtroom. This volume focuses primarily on one of those areas — language rights. Each author interrogates the issue of language rights from a different perspective; whether through the lens of social justice, the right to an interpreter in court, or strategies for addressing linguistic discrimination, but we all converged on a singular observation — significant work is still needed in this area.

The present volume is the second collection of essays dealing with language rights in the Caribbean context. The first such collection was Brown-Blake and Walicek (2013), “Language Rights and Language Policy in the Caribbean,” the second issue of the Sargasso Journal of Caribbean Language, Literature and Culture. They presented a snapshot of the status of language policies (or the lack thereof) in a select few Caribbean territories; most notably Jamaica, St. Lucia, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. The Brown-Blake and Walicek collection contained a mixture of original research and reflections from Caribbean linguists spanning three distinct generations. There was an interview with Mervyn Alleyne, one of the “older heads” in Caribbean linguistics, contributions from Hubert Devonish and Marta Dijkhoff, senior academics in the subfield, and chapters from Clive Forrester and R. Sandra Evans, newly minted PhDs at the time. The Brown-Blake and Walicek volume appeared only a year after the creation of the “Charter on Language Policy and Language Rights in the Creole-speaking Caribbean” was established at a meeting at UWI, Mona in 2011. The energy and expectations of the linguists and language advocates who met to draft the charter were high and the document represented the first attempt at articulating a fairly robust list of rights for speakers of Caribbean languages.

iv

Ten years later, the energy and expectations are still high, but as the present collection of essays demonstrates, many of the challenges still remain; the spectre of linguistic discrimination is ever present, communicative issues in the courtroom persist, and policymakers are still reticent about defending indigenous languages in the region. If anything, what the present volume demonstrates is that even though the goals of the charter on language rights are yet to be fully realized, there are still opportunities for language advocates of all stripes to devise impactful strategies in the ongoing struggle for the recognition of language rights. Caribbean language advocacy has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go. This current collection of essays is meant to bring us slightly closer to that point.

Clive Forrester Waterloo, Canada.

Introduction

It is not altogether clear how to categorize matters of language rights within their proper disciplinary foci. Is it a branch of linguistics, or a branch of law? Which set of researchers should ideally take charge of articulating the parameters and goals of this area? Linguists command expertise in language and communication but lack the depth of knowledge required to interrogate or critique human rights instruments. Lawyers are skilled at evaluating human rights legislation but lack proficiency in analyzing language issues in the micro- and macro-linguistic arenas. The linguist and the lawyer, proficient in their separate areas of research and cognizant of each other’s blindspots, can bring a collaborative perspective to the emerging area of linguistic rights in the Caribbean region. This volume aims to accomplish exactly that, i.e., to provide researchers from these two backgrounds with a platform to engage in rigorous interdisciplinary dialogue on language rights.

Admittedly, the current volume is not a law book. It is decidedly oriented towards issues central to Caribbean linguistics, notwithstanding the fact that two of the contributors are trained lawyers (Brown-Blake and Murray). The goal in each contribution is not so much to point out the gaps in legislation in relation to language rights, but rather to highlight how current language-related issues in the Caribbean make it difficult for Creoles and other minoritised languages to be recognised as languages that should even be afforded rights. Indeed, the very idea of language rights is such a novel concept in the Caribbean that legislative gaps are to be expected even if we refuse to accept them in perpetuity. The contributors to this volume acknowledge what is absent from the legislative framework or the public consciousness as the case might be, and in turn, recommend strategies for ways in which full language rights recognition can become integrated both into the law as well into public life.

The first chapter (Clive Forrester) explores attitudes toward discussions of language rights from the standpoint of speaker perception. Forrester analyzes samples of comments to an online newspaper responding to an article on language rights in an attempt to define a role for the Caribbean linguist in bringing analytical expertise to these issues. Forrester goes on to argue that the role of the linguist as it relates to language rights is not so much to commandeer the process

Introduction but rather to serve the community interests from within the same community, and in the same discursive styles common in the community, as opposed to aloof, English-dominant, academic discursive styles as some online commenters suggest. This chapter is important in laying a foundation for the place of linguistic expertise in issues of language rights generally, but also specifically within the Jamaican context where language rights are seen as merely an academic preoccupation.

Kadian Walters highlights the issue of linguistic discrimination in Chapter 2 when she turns attention to the uneven service given to speakers of Jamaican Creole when interacting with public servants in government offices. Walters juxtaposes the use of Jamaican Creole in public marketing campaigns to promote civic duties such as recycling and safe driving, with linguistic discrimination from public servants when face-to-face with speakers of Jamaican Creole. This contrast is made all the more striking against the background of a recent language attitude survey that echoes a similar sentiment from the first survey done in 2006 — the public supports the use of the Jamaican language in public formal spaces. Walters argues that the government’s failure to act on mounting research that indicates that linguistic discrimination occurs and that Jamaicans are in favour of seeing their language in formal contexts is tantamount to ignoring the people’s “demand for justice”.

The next two chapters handle different aspects of communication in the courtroom space. The first of these comes from Celia Brown-Blake in Chapter 3 with her examination of the role of the linguist in delivering expert witness testimony. She focuses on a case tried in the USA involving a speaker of Creolese (the English-related Creole in Guyana) and the use of an expert witness report — from linguist Hubert Devonish - in determining whether the accused individual was sufficiently competent in English to knowingly waive his Miranda Rights. Brown-Blake’s discussion centers on two of the primary challenges with giving expert witness testimony for Creole speakers: (i) the perception that differences between English-related Creoles and Standard English are insignificant, and (ii) lawyers believe they are experts at language anyway and therefore need no further expertise to make a submission on a linguistic matter. Brown-Blake, being one of the two lawyers in this volume, manages to bridge the two competing issues of legal obligations when making an arrest and communicative obligations during the said arrest.

Robertha Sandra Evans’ discussion in Chapter 4 explores the access to language-related rights afforded to speakers of St. Lucian French Creole - Kwéyòl. The data used for the discussion in this chapter comes from interviews carried out with St. Lucian police officers who were questioned about the procedure viii used when interacting with a Kwéyòl speaker. Similar to the findings in Brown- Blake’s presentation in Chapter 3, Evans highlights that the police officers take communicative competence in Kwéyòl for granted simply by virtue of having grown up in St. Lucia. This situation is compounded by the fact that, from the officers’ own admission, efforts are made to ensure that speakers of Standard French get the services of an interpreter as stipulated in the St. Lucian Charter of Rights. Evans gives concrete examples from courtroom interactions on the kinds of misinterpretations that occur when Kwéyòl speakers are not extended the same kind of courtesy.

The final chapter closes this volume with an overview of the legal and sociolinguistic hurdles in the way of ensuring the recognition of Creole speakers’ full linguistic rights in the courtroom context. Murray and Anglin focus their argument on Jamaica, but the similarities to the situation which exists in the St. Lucian legal framework are unmistakable. As such, many of the hurdles identified in this chapter, as well as the recommendations for overcoming them, are applicable to any Creole language situation. This final chapter is important since it is the sole chapter written entirely by non-experts in the field of linguistics - Murray is trained in the law, and Anglin is trained in advocacy — and affords the reader the opportunity to look at the problem from the perspective of law and social justice advocacy.

Chapter 1

#problematic: Using English for social justice advocacy in Creole-speaking societies

Language advocacy in the Caribbean arguably has a fairly extensive history dating back to the colonial era when poets, storytellers, singers, and theatre practitioners started to disrupt the status quo and dared to create art using the local Creole languages in the region. This unwitting act of advocacy was bolstered by the fact that these same creatives managed to gain the approval of their communities in calling for the respect and recognition of Creole languages as “real” languages alongside their European counterparts. Once linguists took up the mantle and started to lobby the government for formal recognition of language rights, the support started to dissipate. Caribbean academics who engaged in language advocacy became seen as “elites”, who were already proficient in a European language and were interested in “imposing” the local Creole languages on marginalized speakers.

This chapter investigates the dominance of the English language in matters of social justice even among societies where a Creole language is the national language. The data in this study comes from a corpus of reader responses in an online forum to newspaper articles dealing with language rights. Shielded by the veil of anonymity, and bolstered by social media style “up-votes”, forum users are emboldened to be combative in their online commentary. I argue that in its attempt to seek equality and inclusion, social justice discourse instead fosters inequality and exclusion by alienating large, and sometimes vulnerable, portions of society who lack the dexterity in English to engage in social justice dialogue. I assess the #problematic implications of this paradigm for language advocacy in the Caribbean and propose a shift towards a social justice dialectic grounded in local Creole languages.

Clive Forrester. 2023. #problematic: Using English for social justice advocacy in

Creole-speaking societies. In Clive Forrester (ed.), Intersections of language rights and l social justice in the Caribbean context, 1-25. Berlin: Language Science Press.

1 Introduction

Social justice discourse, for better or worse, has taken on heightened importance in recent years and has been at the forefront of various advocacy movements all over the world in the last decade. A cursory glance at social justice movements between the Arab Spring of 2010 (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica 2015) and the George Floyd protests in 2020 (Taylor 2021), reveals how easily a protest that starts in one location can then emerge in several different spots globally. Social media is an ever-present arsenal in advocacy work and when combined with the twenty-four-hour news cycle it is not unusual that protests in far-flung regions of the world could be united around a singular concept, as expressed by a singular hashtag, even when advocates hail from different linguistic backgrounds. Jamaica, given its proximity to North America, is of course not excluded from these surges of social justice advocacy and it is not uncommon to see active and prolonged engagement with these issues on social media platforms. Indeed, Creole-speaking societies are all too familiar with tackling oppressive and discriminatory ideas, not least of which are concerned with language use. But how are imported social justice discoursive techniques, largely articulated in English, handled in predominantly Creole-speaking societies? How does this paradigm shape the attitudes of Creole speakers toward the very idea of social justice? Given the multitude of ways in which Caribbean life and identity have been characterized by injustices, it would not seem necessary to go and import one, let alone one that did not already exist in the Caribbean in some shape or form.

In fact, it is not the social injustice that is imported, but rather the discursive apparatus used to communicate and interrogate these issues. One such language-related social issue is linguistic human rights, which has entered the Caribbean discursive consciousness either through foreign media, but more likely through the work of local academics. Deliberations about language rights issues rarely, if ever, occur in the Creole language of the majority and are usually situated in contexts such as newspaper columns or editorials and in restrictive academic forums. The deliberations are meant to benefit the majority but do not incorporate their modes of communication nor sites of interaction. Devonish (2014) addresses this issue in an article published by the Jamaica Gleaner where he suggests that unless the government starts to communicate in the local language of the citizens, there will always be a communicative divide between the governed and the government. It is thus not accidental that discussions about human rights, social justice, intersectional privilege, and the like, are met mostly with ambivalence from the public at large. In worst-case scenarios, these same discussions are ironically seen as an external imposition, whether from foreign operatives or local elites, meant to further oppress poor Jamaican citizens. This chapter argues that this occurs partly because there is no widely accepted, grassroots discursive apparatus to deal with aspects of human rights such as language rights. What presently exists is perceived as contrived, external, and an imposition.

2 What is “social justice language”?

Generally speaking, social justice language refers to the range of terms and phrases used to describe all the different areas of social justice. This could incorporate terms used to describe different forms of discrimination such as racism, ableism, and sexism; terms for platforms of advocacy like feminism; and theoretical paradigms associated with social justice like intersectionality (Human Rights & Equity Service, Dalhousie University 2021). Only a few of these terms would pop up regularly in casual conversation - most notably those related to discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or race — and the few that do would feature prominently on social media. The fact is, the use of social justice terminology is primarily restricted to niche academic audiences, who may or may not be actively engaged in advocacy, and who are usually operating in a linguistic context dominated by the standardized variety of a European language (Coppola 2021). Even if the concept of social justice is not foreign to Creole-dominant Caribbean communities, the modern discursive apparatus certainly is. Jamaica of course is no stranger to social justice concerns given its centuries-long legacy of colonialism. Every plantation revolt during the time of slavery, as well as the organized civil unrests shortly after slavery had ended, could all be considered acts of resistance to oppression. But it was not until the early 1930s with the emergence of Rastafari that one of the earliest, systematic, and indigenous social justice movements took root in Jamaica. The Rastafari arose as a decidedly Pan-Africanist movement with ideological influences drawn heavily from the teachings of Marcus Garvey and shaped by the harsh and oppressive socio-economic realities that working-class Jamaicans were facing at the time (Edmonds 2012). One of the main philosophical ideas of the movement is that all oppressed African descendants should actively seek liberation through the rejection of all things “Babylon”! and a return to the motherland of Africa (Chevannes 1994). What is most fascinating about the Rastafari is the development of a language - specifically, a discursive

“Babylon” is broadly used to describe anything associated with former colonial powers. Institutions such as the government, school system, and church are treated as coming under the heavy influence of Babylon, the direct antithesis to the “Livity” (lifestyle) of the Rastafari.

apparatus — that is used to articulate and affirm the ideological stance of the movement.

Pollard (2009) treats the language of the Rastafari (or “Dread Talk”) as a lexical expansion of the existing language of local Jamaicans, Jamaican Creole. Pollard (2009: 5) suggests, “What seems to be emerging is a certain lexical expansion to accommodate a particular, and for some people, a more accurate way of seeing life in Jamaican society.’

The same phenomenon is described by Schrenk (2018) as a “reanalysis” of Jamaican Creole rather than merely a lexical expansion since “Rasta talk is predominantly based on calculated adjustments to perceived English lexical items.” Whether expansion or reanalysis, what is certain is that the linguistic ingenuity of the Rastafari was prompted by two primary factors: (1) the Rastafari needed a deliberate style of discourse to simultaneously challenge oppression and uplift the consciousness of the individual, and (2) neither Jamaican Creole nor English could satisfactorily fulfill this role. A new code had to be developed to frame and negotiate social justice matters through the lens of the Rastafari themselves, and this gave rise to Rasta Talk.

The specifics of Rasta Talk, however, are not integral to the discussion here. What matters is the fact that the Rastafarian community noticed the linguistic vacuum for social justice terminology that was relevant to their perspectives, and went about filling that vacuum. Admittedly, though Rasta Talk has withstood the test of time, it has not evolved to a point where it could serve as the discursive apparatus for social justice on a national level within Jamaica. This is neither a criticism of the Rastafari nor their linguistic ingenuity, but instead a statement about the new linguistic vacuum created by the complex ways in which social justice reasoning has changed and has started to infiltrate Creole-dominant societies, specifically as it relates to language rights. Rasta Talk might have successfully equipped its speech community to talk about issues of socio-economic and racial oppression, and a need for consciousness-raising for all Black persons, but how would it deal with, for example, intersectional privilege? What discursive apparatus exists in Creole dominant speech communities to explain the privilege differential between a poor cisgendered heterosexual dark-skinned basilectal speaker, and a poor gender-nonconforming light-skinned acrolectal speaker? These are complex questions that are made all the more difficult to answer by the fact that they are laden with technical English terms.

In many ways, Creole-speaking societies have been haphazardly navigating these very issues from time immemorial. Intersectional identities and privilege dynamics are nothing new to Jamaica and the wider Caribbean—they did not suddenly appear with the advent of social media. What is different since the explosion of social media and the mass consumption of North American content is that Jamaicans are now exposed to social justice concerns from the perspectives of the global north, in particular the USA and Europe in the discursive apparatus of those territories. In an ironic acceptance of the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, some Jamaicans seem to think that the social justice ideas that exist in the global north are non-existent in Jamaica, presumably because an indigenous discursive apparatus is not seen. This is not the case. Social justice issues related to various types of discrimination, intersectional privilege, and human rights have always been a part of Jamaican life. What has not been as prominent is a method of discussing these issues using the Jamaican language as opposed to English. This phenomenon, I argue, has resulted in attitudes ranging from ambivalence to hostility whenever these same issues are broached in society.

3 Language rights in the right language

Language advocacy has a fairly long, and checkered, history in Jamaica. Most Jamaicans would agree that the first bonafide language advocate for the recognition and appreciation of Jamaican Creole was the late Hon. Louise Bennett- Coverley, or “Miss Lou.” Miss Lou was writing and performing original poems, stories, and folk songs in Jamaican Creole from as early as the 1930s up until the time she died in 2006. What set her apart from her contemporaries in music and poetry at the time was that for her, the language was not merely a vehicle to deliver her artistry, but in her eyes, an emblem of national pride and an artifact worthy of both study and promotion (Morris 2014). Her influence was as wide as the Jamaican diaspora, and she had the attention of all sectors of Jamaican society, from the head of state to the working-class woman in the city markets. She was simultaneously celebrated for elevating the status of the language and chided for moving attention away from Standard English, yet, through it all, her message remained constant and her position resolute - the Jamaican language is a legitimate language. Miss Lou was doing language advocacy work before it had a name (Forrester 2022).

There is however one area of language advocacy that Miss Lou’s work did not explore in great detail, and that is the rights of the speakers of Jamaican Creole. Indeed, the idea that individuals could receive certain kinds of human rights provisions based purely on the particular language they used is a novel idea in Jamaican public consciousness and one which, even in the twenty-first century, has yet to fully catch on. Miss Lou used Jamaican folklore, comedy, and literature as her tools in her campaign for language advocacy, and while her advocacy no doubt laid the groundwork for what later followed, it simply was not enough to break into the frontier of language rights. For that, it would take a more targeted lobbying of the government, using the language of the government, and supported by research-based evidence. Miss Lou’s work was, and still is, paramount in this endeavour, but the next leg on the journey to language rights recognition was led by the academic community, most notably linguistic and literary scholars such as Hubert Devonish and Carolyn Cooper.

This is where the public support started to run dry. Even when the guardians of the Standard English status quo in Jamaica disagreed with Miss Lou’s position on the validity of Jamaican Creole, she was at least humorous and therefore tolerable. From a political standpoint, Miss Lou was entirely non-threatening, and her primary domain of influence was from the stage. Academics like Devonish, however, meant serious business. He is an internationally respected full professor in the linguistics department who made a submission to the parliament to amend the Charter of Rights to include freedom from linguistic discrimination (Jamaican Language Unit 2011). Cooper, though she did not directly lobby the parliament, proved no less an annoyance to the establishment, with her weekly bi-lingual column, “(W)uman Tong(ue)” published in The Observer national newspaper, as well as delivering her inaugural lecture in Creole on the occasion of her promotion to full professor of literature. Both Devonish and Cooper, who have each published in Jamaican Creole, have consistently faced a level of public backlash and vitriol that would not normally be directed at Miss Lou.” This is in large part due to the fact that while Miss Lou only encouraged national pride in the language, academics like Devonish and Cooper wanted to take Miss Lou’s advocacy to its logical conclusion and were calling for having the language constitutionally recognized, made official alongside English, and used as the language of instruction in primary schools. This was a pill that proved too difficult to swallow without the sugarcoating of Miss Lou’s humour.

This brings us to the present state of affairs as it relates to language advocacy in Jamaica. It is an undertaking almost completely concentrated in the voices of a small group of academics, no more than ten, all of whom were mentored, trained, or influenced by Devonish. The public sentiment, based on comments posted on

’Devonish and Cooper are now retired professors but have left a legacy of work calling for the acceptance of Jamaican Creole in more formal domains of usage such as government and education. Additionally, they’ve supervised and mentored scores of graduate students and junior academics who have continued this advocacy in various forms of linguistic and literary research.

newspaper messaging boards and on social media, is that the present generation of language advocates (inclusive of Devonish and Cooper), comprise an elite academic cabal, themselves already adept at Standard English, who want to keep ordinary folk down by “forcing” Jamaican Creole into public formal domains. In an unusual turn of events, tangible realizations of language rights advocacy such as constitutional recognition and Creole use in education are seen as a pointless academic preoccupation and a “foreign” imposition that will disadvantage the very people it seeks to assist.

Devonish himself has spoken extensively about the derisive views of the educated elite in Jamaica as it relates to language rights. Devonish & Carpenter (2020: 55) state:

The mass media in Jamaica, notably radio, television, and newspapers, over the last three decades at least, has been the arena for the “chaterrati” and their views on what has come to be labeled the “Patwa-English Debate.’ The educated elite, the chattering classes or the “chaterrati” whose views dominate the traditional mass media, have treated this topic as a form of blood sport, as a target for literate and literary jibe.

An interesting conundrum now presents itself. Devonish and Carpenter suggest that the views of the educated elite, or the chaterrati as they call them, have permeated the mass media in Jamaica and have transformed the discussions around language recognition and rights into a pointless combat of opposing opinions. Yet, one of the most persistent public criticisms of the new language advocates, in particular Devonish and Cooper, is that they are the educated elite hell-bent on using their academic machinations to force the Creole issue against the wishes of the masses. Both sides—the language advocates and their vocal public opposition—are accusing each other of elitism!