JG - Patois Bible in Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean context

From my archive of press clippings:

Jamaica Gleaner

Patois Bible in Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean context

published: Sunday June 29, 2008

Gosnell L. Yorke, Contributor

WHAT IS true mainly of the coastal regions of Africa and elsewhere in the world is also true of the Caribbean as a whole - including Jamaica. And that is: we have witnessed the not-yet-fully understood global linguistic phenomenon involving what scholars have called the "pidginisation" and, ultimately, the "creolisation" of the various languages of Europe and elsewhere - be it Dutch, English, French or Spanish in the case of the Caribbean. As we know, these four aforementioned languages were imperially imposed on our African ancestors who were forced, against their collective wills, to toil as slaves on several sugar plantations throughout the Caribbean; to work as hewers of wood and drawers of water. Because our ancestors, by and large, were not allowed to live and work together in their ethnic groups (or tribes), they were not able to communicate with each other through the use of their mother tongues - be it Akan, Balanta, Igbo or Yoruba from West Africa or wherever. This situation not only helped to discourage our enslaved ancestors from plotting their escape from their masters' dehumanising treatment (or worse) but it also meant that our ancestors were forced to creatively adopt and adapt the language of their European masters as well. This created a complex situation in which the various European languages, serving as lexifier languages, were blended with the various African mother tongues to produce, over time, some new bona fide languages we now call Creoles (not dialects). 'Divide and rule' That is, pidginisation and later creolisation were made inevitable by the slave masters' linguistic policy of 'divide and rule'. In sociolinguistic terms, the more powerful European 'High' or H language was brought into contact with the relatively powerless African 'Low' or L language. This accounts for the fact that the Caribbean is now one of the best places on the planet to study the creolisation of such European languages. For example, out of a total of about 80 Creoles spoken worldwide, about 30 of them are spoken right here in the Caribbean, alone.

Read the whole article here.

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Dr Gosnell L. York, is professor of religion in the School of Religion and Theology at Northern Caribbean University (NCU) and a former translation consultant with the Africa Area of the United Bible Societies - the parent body of the Bible Society of the West Indies.