The method and plan of this dictionary of Jamaican English are basically the same as those of the Oxford English Dictionary, but oral sources have been extensively tapped in addition to detailed coverage of literature published in or about Jamaica since 1655. It contains information about the Caribbean and its dialects, and about Creole languages and general linguistic processes. Entries give the pronounciation, part-of-speach and usage of labels, spelling variants, etymologies and dated citations, as well as definitions. Systematic indexing indicates the extent to which the lexis is shared with other Caribbean countries.

This guide indicates the ways in which Jamaican Creole differs from Standard Jamaican English. It is organized into four sections: words that look alike but mean different thing; words that are different but mean the same things; grammatical structures that are different but convey the same information; and idiomatic Speech or writing.

This volume gives a detailed overview of the varieties of English spoken in the Americas and the Caribbean, including regional, social and ethnic dialects (such as Southern US, Canadian or Chicano English) as well as Caribbean creoles from the Bahamas to Suriname. The chapters, written by widely acclaimed specialists, provide concise and comprehensive information on the phonological, morphological and syntactic characteristics of each variety discussed. The articles are followed by exercises and study questions. The exercises are geared towards students and can be used for classroom assignments as well as for self study in preparation for exams. Instructors can use the exercises, sound samples and interactive maps to enhance their classroom presentations and to highlight important language features.

An ability to speak Jamaican Standard English is the stated requirement for any managerial or frontline position in corporate Jamaica. This research looks at the phonological variation that occurs in the formal speech of this type of employee, and focuses on the specific cohort chosen to represent Jamaica in interactions with local and international clients. The variation that does emerge, shows both the presence of some features traditionally characterized as Creole and a clear avoidance of other features found in basilectal and mesolectal Jamaican. Some phonological items are prerequisites for “good English” - variables that define the user as someone who speaks English - even if other Creole variants are present. The ideologies of language and language use that Jamaican speakers hold about “good English” clearly reflect the centuries-old coexistence of English and Creole, and suggest local norms must be our starting point for discussing the acrolect.

This book presents an in-depth study of English as spoken in two major anglophone Caribbean territories, Jamaica and Trinidad. Based on data from the International Corpus of English, it focuses on variation at the morphological and syntactic level between the educated standard and more informal educated spoken usage. Dagmar Deuber combines quantitative analyses across several text categories with qualitative analyses of transcribed text passages that are grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and recent approaches to linguistic style and identity. The discussion is situated in the context of variation in the Caribbean and the wider context of world Englishes, and the sociolinguistic background of Jamaica and Trinidad is also explored. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, world Englishes, and language contact.

This remarkable new dictionary represents the first attempt in some four centuries to record the state of development of English as used across the entire Caribbean region.

This book offers an in-depth study of the overall syntax of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole, the first since Bailey (1966). The author, a Jamaican linguist, meticulously examines distributional and interpretative properties of functional morphology in Jamaican Creole (JC) from a cartographic perspective (Cinque 1999, 2002; Rizzi 1997, 2004), thus exploring to what extent the grammar of JC provides morphological manifestations of an articulate IP, CP and DP. The data considered in this work offers new evidence in favour of these enriched structural analyses, and the instances where surface orders differ from the underlying functional skeleton are accounted for in terms of movement operations. This investigation of Jamaican syntax therefore allows us to conclude that the 'poor' inflectional morphology typical of Creole languages in general and of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole in particular does not correlate with poor structural architecture. Indeed the free morphemes discussed, as well as the word order considerations that indicate syntactic movement to designated projections, serve as arguments in favour of a rich underlying functional map.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, 14 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Throughout the last centuries the English language spread all over the world first and foremost due to the colonial politic of its motherland: Great Britain. Especially in the Caribbean the British empire had a lot of colonies in the past - one, in fact the biggest one, of these was Jamaica. Being one of the world's many English-speaking countries it is worth studying especially from a linguistic point of view because it is one of the few Caribbean countries in which a standard English and an English-based creole have been employed almost since its colonization. To get a precise picture of what English is like in Jamaica one has to consider the history of the Jamaican languages as well as the present situation. As a standard variety and a creole coexist in Jamaica, one has to look at both of them in isolation and at how they influence each other. Therefore it will not only be of interest to examine the function and some of the linguistic features of Jamaican English and the Jamaican creole but also the post-creole continuum. First of all, a look at the history will make clear how the English language developed in Jamaica. The following chapters will deal with Standard Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole in particular and, finally, the examination of the post-creole continuum will make the consequences of the mutual influence of these two languages clear. David L. Lawton's text "English in the Caribbean" and the book Linguistic Variation in Jamaica: A Corpus-Based Study of Radio and Newspaper Usage by Andrea Sand will form a useful basis for the study of the English language in Jamaica and will be completed by other subject-relevant literature. The aim of this term paper is to provide an insight into the linguistic diversity in Jamaica and thus to i