Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Bayreuth (Lehrstuhl für Englische Sprachwissenschaft), course: English - based Pidgin and Creole Languages (and beyond), 7 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Dealing with linguistics, one clearly realises that language is anything else but a static subject. Actually, language finds itself in constant change and is shaped by its speakers and the situation they are in. One of the many influences that form language has always been contact with new people and different languages, which for example happened when the Britains began to explore the world and brought English to the new continents. Many different new varieties and languages developed, one of them being Jamaican Creole. Far away from Great Britain it found its niche in Jamaica, where it is spoken by many as their native language. Pidgins and Creoles are a well-explored subject in linguistics. But what happens when these languages return to the home countries of one of their root - languages? One of the classic examples is London Jamaican, spoken mostly by black immigrants and their descendants in London. In this paper I am going to outline the history and sociolinguistic situation of London Jamaican and its characteristic features regarding grammar and phonology. Also, I will describe how two extremely distinct varieties, Jamaican Creole and London English, have influenced each other and how London Jamaican functions in everyday contexts. In the early 16th century European nations began exploring the world and soon secured their newly gained territories by making them their colonies. The Caribbean Islands, including Jamaica as well, were colonized by the British, Spanish, Dutch, French and others. Together with the languages of the natives and of Africans, who came to the Caribbean as slaves, there was a strong demand for a common language to make communicatio

London Jamaican provides the reader with a new perspective on African descent in London. Based on research carried out in the early 1980s, the author examines the linguistic background of the community, with special emphasis on young people of the first and second British-born generations.

Beryl Loftman Bailey's book was one of the first published on the Jamaican Creole language.

"An important addition to studies of the genesis and life of Jamaican Creole as well as other New World creoles such as Gulla. Highlighting the nature of the nonstandard varieties of British English dialects to which the African slaves were exposed, this work presents a refreshingly cogent view of Jamaican Creole features." --SECOL Review "The history of Jamaican Creole comes to life through this book. Scholars will analyze its texts, follow the leads it opens up, and argue about refining its interpretations for a long time to come." --Journal of Pidgin & Creole Languages "The authors are to be congratulated on this substantial contribution to our understanding of how Jamaican Creole developed. Its value lies not only in the linguistic insights of the authors but also in the rich trove of texts that they have made accessible." --English World-Wide "Provides valuable historical and demographic data and sheds light on the origins and development of Jamaican Creole. Lalla and D'Costa offer interesting insights into Creole genesis, not only through their careful mapping of the migrations from Europe and Africa, which constructed the Jamaican society but also through extensive documentation of early texts. . . . Highly valuable to linguists, historians, anthropologists, psychologists, and anyone interested in the Caribbean or in the history of mankind." --New West Indian Guide

Creole languages are characteristically associated with a negative image. How has this prestige been formed? And is it as static as the diglossic situation in many anglo-creolophone societies seems to suggest? This volume examines socio-historical and epistemological factors in the prestige formation of Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles and subjects their classification as a (socio)linguistic type to scrutiny and critical debate. In its analysis of rich empirical data this study also demonstrates that the uses, functions and negotiations of Creole within particular social and linguistic practices have shifted considerably. Rather than limiting its scope to one "national" speech community, the discussion focusses on changes of the social meaning of Creole in various discursive fields, such as inter generational changes of Creole use in the London Diaspora, diachronic changes of Creole representation in written texts, and diachronic changes of Creole representation in translation. The study employs a discourse analytical approach drawing on linguistic models as well as Foucauldian theory.

Large-scale migration after WWII and the prominence of Jamaican Creole in the media have promoted its use all around the globe. Deterritorialisation has entailed the contact-induced transformation of Jamaican Creole in diaspora communities and its adoption by ‘crossers’. Taking sociolinguistic globalisation yet a step further, this monograph investigates the use of Jamaican Creole in a web discussion forum by combining quantitative and qualitative methodology in a sociolinguistic ‘third wave’ approach. In the absence of standardised orthography, one of the central aims of this study is to document the sociolinguistic styling and grassroots (anti-) standardisation of spelling norms for Jamaican Creole in the web forum as a virtual community of practice. An analysis of individual repertoire portraits demonstrates that conventionalised spelling variants co-occur with basilectal Jamaican Creole morphosyntax in ‘Cyber-Jamaican’ as the digital ethnolinguistic repertoire of the discussion forum. The enregisterment of this ethnolinguistic repertoire is closely tied to staged performance, which establishes the link between ‘Cyber-Jamaican’ and the negotiation of sociolinguistic identity and authenticity via stance-taking.

Hold Tight is the book that kick started the 'Grime Library'. Bursting into bookshops in July 2017 to rave reviews and a sold out event at Rough Trade East, Hold Tight paved the way for Grime-related books such as Wiley's Eskiboy, Dan Hancox's Inner City Pressure and DJ Target's Grime Kids.This new edition of Hold Tight features new chapters, a brand new introduction from Boakye and a brand new cover. Celebrating over sixty key songs that make up Grime's DNA, Jeffrey Boakye explores the meaning of the music and why it has such resonance in the UK. Boakye also examines the representation of masculinity in the music and the media that covers it. Both a love letter to Grime and an investigation into life as a black man in Britain today, Hold Tight is insightful, very funny and stacked with sentences you'll want to pull up and read again and again.

A synchronic sociolinguistic study of Jamaican Creole (JC) as spoken in urban Kingston, this work uses variationist methods to closely investigate two key concepts of Atlantic Creole studies: the mesolect, and the creole continuum. One major concern is to describe how linguistic variation patterns with social influences. Is there a linguistic continuum? How does it correlate with social factors? The complex organization of an urbanizing Caribbean society and the highly variable nature of mesolectal speech norms and behavior present a challenge to sociolinguistic variation theory. The second chief aim is to elucidate the nature of mesolectal grammar. Creole studies have emphasized the structural integrity of basilectal varieties, leaving the status of intermediate mesolectal speech in doubt. How systematic is urban JC grammar? What patterns occur when basilectal creole constructions alternate with acrolectal English elements? Contextual constraints on choice of forms support a picture of the mesolect as a single grammar, variable yet internally-ordered, which has evolved a fine capacity to serve social functions. Drawing on a year's fieldwork in a mixed-class neighborhood of the capital city, the author (a speaker of JC) describes the speech community's history, demographics, and social geography, locating speakers in terms of their social class, occupation, education, age, sex, residence, and urban orientation. The later chapters examine a recorded corpus for linguistic variables that are phono-lexical (palatal glides), phonological (consonant cluster simplification), morphological (past-tense inflection), and syntactic (pre-verbal tense and aspect marking), using quantitative methods of analysis (including Varbrul). The Jamaican urban mesolect is portrayed as a coherent system showing stratified yet regular linguistic behavior, embedded in a well-defined speech community; despite the incorporation of forms and constraints from English, it is quintessentially creole in character.