God taak Jamiekan tuh

God speaks Jamaican too. As He does all the other 6,500-plus languages of the world. And this evening at 6 o'clock, the Bible Society of the West Indies will be officially launching Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment at the Bethel Baptist Church.

The New Testament, of course, claims as its central theme the story of salvation through Jesus Christ, the Messiah, for all the peoples of the world, "fi evri konchri, chraib, piipl, an evri langwij" (Rev 14:6). As one of the best known of its verses, Jan 3:16, put the matter: "Kaa, yu si, Gad lov di worl so moch dat im gi up im wan dege-dege Bwai Pikni, so enibadi we chos inn aim naa go ded but a go liv fe eva."

The rendition in Jamiekan appears strange for a number of reasons. One respondent in a press vox pop told the interviewer, in Jamiekan, "Mi nuh undastan one Gad almighty ting weh mi just read. Ah swear, I don't understand anything." Jamiekan having never been codified in writing and all Jamaican readers being familiar with the written code of English, any codification of Jamiekan, compared to written English, will appear strange before familiarisation. But suppose it is English which is strange?

other 'strange' languages

Some Jamaicans have met the 'strange' accent marks of Spanish and French, and a few will know that Hebrew and Arabic, using very strange script, are read from right to left. Chinese, Japanese and Korean, with their own strange scripts, are read vertically top to bottom and from right to left. So much for the 'right way' of doing language.

Another vox pop respondent felt that the translation of the Scriptures into Jamiekan in some ways may be a "mockery of God". Jamiekan is good for street talk, for domestic affairs, for 'tracing', and supremely for comic relief in-between patches of English, standard or non-standard, but not for worship and for any serious business.

Jamiekan, as codified in the Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment, is superior to written English in at least one key point. English is a non-phonetic language. The syllables of words do not faithfully correlate with the sounds intended. The Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment uses the phonetic Cassidy-Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) system, making it appear strange alongside familiar English but making the language very easy for any preliterate beginner not 'spoiled' by written English.

The Cassidy-JLU system was developed by linguist Frederic Cassidy and the language unit of the University of the West Indies (UWI). The language sounds like how it looks on paper. As 'Fos Ting Fos bifou Yu Go iina di JNT' (Preface) explains, "Yu kyan call it se, piipl fi se evri letta ar gruup a letta jos laik ou dem si it rait dong, kaa every leta onggl mek fi gi wan soun iina di language. Dis mek piipl kech di langwij iiziya wen dem si it rait dong, speshali di piipl dem we onggl taak Jamiekan, di wan dem we a yuuz Jamiekan fi lorn fi riid an rait, di wan dem we jos jos a lorn fi read and rait, an di wan dem we onggl rait an riid it wan an tuu taim."

You will have to buy the text for an English translation! The Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment, smartly, has run an English rendition alongside the Jamiekan and uses the King James Version in English, which many Jamaicans believe to be God's mother tongue, as the parallel English text.

A language has certain defining features. It has to have a substantially distinctive vocabulary (its own words). It has to have its own syntax, the set of grammatical rules by which words and punctuation (or intonation in spoken language) are arranged and used to convey meaning. It has to have its own idiomatic arrangements, its set of non-literal, figurative meanings ('doan draw mi tongue') understood without explanation in a cultural community. In speech, a distinctive language will have its own system of pronunciation. Jamiekan has a wicked metaphorical richness and dynamism unmatched by any other language on the planet. It is in the lyrics of popular music, in casual street talk. We spin metaphors like gigs.

could be a language

Jamiekan linguistically qualifies as a language, despite all the prejudices against it, most of them based on flat-out ignorance about the nature of language and how languages work on a planet with nearly 7,000 recognisable ones of them.

The Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment is also in oral form on MP3 CD.

Jamaican, of course, has a continuum of varieties, like any other dynamic language, and the Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment chose a particular register of the language. But the language is now formally codified. It has literature. And, as has been often the case over and over again, its first piece of official literature is the Bible.

Stuck on an island as we are with the language of the colonial masters and the Kreol (Creole) created from the languages dashed together in the crucible of slavery, we tend to be very unaware of language continuums. Running across the northern Mediterranean, for example, the languages shade into each other as neighbouring people interact.

The same is true in places like India and Africa, with their multitude of peoples and tongues thrown together in small geographic spaces and in dynamic interaction. These people, even when preliterate, are typically multilingual, switching between several languages with great ease and using mixed bridge languages for communication as necessary.

It was the King James Version of the Bible (a national linguistic project which celebrated 400 years last year) more than anything else which standardised the English language, with its multifarious dialects, and spellings and punctuation in writing. Luther's translation of the Bible into the 'vulgar' tongue (i.e., the language of the common people) did the same for German.

While some 2,000 recognised languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers, and only about 300 languages have more than one million speakers, 2.7 million people at home can speak and understand Jamiekan, and others in the diaspora can. But to a great many of these speakers, the written codification of Jamiekan is an unworthy waste of time and effort. Someone once
wisecracked that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Jamiekan is a Kreol. It is a distinct creation of a lingua franca from the language mix of colonisation and slavery. Heavily influenced by English, it is not merely broken English, or a dialect of English. Other Kreols are very much around, often with greater standing as accepted and acceptable languages and with written codification like the French-based Haitian Kreol and Mauritian Kreol. Many of the people of Mauritius, I discovered when I visited, are smoothly trilingual in Kreol, French and English. All are at least bilingual, reflecting their colonial history and the ease of learning and switching multiple languages from childhood.

positive codification

The Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment is a project of the Bible Society of the West Indies, backed by foreign money and resources, of course. The Bible societies, going back to the dawn of the 19th century with the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804, have translated the Scriptures into hundreds of languages. The Bible, in whole or in part, has now been translated into more than 2,500 languages, with Jamiekan now added to the list.

An important spin-off from distributing the Scriptures to the peoples of the world in their own language is the codification of many of these languages in writing. Now that Jamiekan is codified, we can more meaningfully engage the controversy over the use of the language in education, business and government.

In 2003, African linguist, polyglot (he speaks six languages and reads four more) and United Bible Societies Bible translator, Professor Aloo Osotsi Mojola, visited Jamaica, and I wrote a column (September 18, 2003) on his speech delivered at the UWI. The mother tongue, Mojola told his audience, is the language of the heart, the language of the belly, of the being, the language in which people cry out to God. People have cried for joy at the official launching of the Bible in their own language, as some will do at Bethel Baptist this evening.

Mojola cited several examples of what Bible translation has done for languages and cultures, including the Yoruba Bible of West Africa, translated by a slave-turned-scholar and bishop, and the Swahili Bible of East Africa. These translations encoded the languages in written form, provided standardisation, stimulated literacy, and facilitated the use of these native African tongues as official languages in writing for state purposes and for education. I brought home a Swahili/English dictionary from Tanzania.

It is a human right to use the mother tongue, Mojola argued. Jamaican is not broken English; it is the language of a people which shares the beauty and dignity of other languages. Jamaicans need to be liberated from the burden of feelings of inferiority over using a 'broken language'. Linguistically, there is no 'pure' language, the seasoned linguist pointed out.

The Bible claims spectacular power for itself: "Kaaz wen Gad taak, a laik se di sitn dem we im se alaiv, av powa an kyan du tingz!" (Iibruu 4:12). A powerful linguistic revolution will be launched at Bethel this evening. Jamiekan is now a written language with literature - and there's no going back.

Martin Henry is a communication specialist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.