Letter of the Day | Language is an essential factor in the development of identity

THE EDITOR, Madam:

I must applaud The Gleaner for its consistent editorial features on the language crisis in Jamaica. Permit me to mention two of those significant features, ‘Justice Sykes rules for Patois’ (March 6, 2020) and a most recent editorial, ‘Patois and the liberation of English’ (May 31, 2022). The topics reveal the content with clarity. I gather from those reports that the discussion on this linguistic crisis must be grounded in the history and culture of Jamaica. Culture is the defining feature of a people’s identity; and by way of the language, culture is transmitted from one generation to another. It is the slave language that, by and large, is responsible for the development of a national culture in Jamaica. Language is an essential component of culture in terms of the development and preservation of collective thinking and shared values and traditions. If language is repressed or disappears, then culture dies. I repeat, language is an essential factor in the development of identity. The non-recognition of Patois as an official language is tantamount to the lack of respect of the people who are speakers of that language.

Language is transmitted culturally; it is learned, for example, from parents to children, within the social groupings from which they belong. The school’s curriculum in Jamaica regarding teaching and learning is authoritarian, as well as it is grounded in the hubristic qualities of British cultural imperialism that advanced the idea that English is central to the British civilising process. This is a hegemonic question.

The western perceptions about African peoples define the nature of Patois. Many of the philosophers of the 17th- to 18th-century ‘Age of Enlightenment’ did not hide their racist thoughts about Africans; and so, too, was Thomas Carlyle in his 1840s essay, Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.

More brutal on the perception of black people was the presentation made to the British anthropological society in 1866 on the barbaric ‘The Negro and Jamaica’, a speech that not only demeaned the ex-slaves in Jamaica, but it was also a treatise on the justification for the massacre of a very high percentage of the black leadership and prosperous black people, and their robust communities that were burnt to the ground after the hanging of Paul Bogle in 1865. The discrimination and victimisation of Patois, Patois-speaking people and race politics in Jamaica is rooted in this tradition.

There is all this talk that Patois is not international, and that it cannot produce scientists. But equally, it should not be advanced that English is the only language associated with progress and prosperity. Patois has been neglected by the status quo; it was never considered an area for development though it is the language that gives to the world a great and infectious culture. In an interview in 1994, Lee Kuan Yew said that it is a dangerous thing to deprive people of their ethnicity and language. Recognising that English, in Singapore, is the language of education and business, it was taught in the school as a second language. In Prosperity: The Cultural Connection ( The New York Times, June 20, 1993), noted author Lawrence Harrison writes that “a nation’s economic fortunes are not determined just by its policies, technology and resources, etc; there is another powerful factor: culture”.

LOUIS E.A. MOYSTON , PhD

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