British Creole: phonology

British Creole (BrC) is spoken by British-born people of Caribbean background whose parents, grandparents or great-grandparents migrated to Britain since 1948. It is an ethnic variety, rather than a regional or local one. BrC is the product of dialect contact between West Indian migrants, the largest group of whom during the period of critical formation (1950–1970) were Jamaican, and vernacular varieties of urban English English (EngE). I use dialect contact advisedly in view of the relative structural similarity between Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles (CarECs) and EngE, especially at the phonological level; the alternative, language contact, suggests the non-genetic relation between these varieties that most creolists assert, primarily on the basis of contrasts in morphology and syntax.

Because of the Jamaican input, most apparent at the lexical and grammatical level, BrC has been described as “a collection of local British varieties of J[amaican] C[reole]” (Sebba 1993: 139). This verdict derives from grammar-focused descriptions, however, which privilege the range of varieties most divergent from British English (BrE), and may not reflect the complexities of phonological variation and assimilation to British models, especially for UK-born speakers. Grammar-focused investigations of BrC (as most of them are) insist that “intermediate forms [...] [a]re sufficiently few in number to be excluded” from analysis (Edwards 1986: 50). This is not true of phonology. Moreover, as phonological markers of BrC are often the easiest to acquire, and present the weakest claim to British Black identity, as the range of speech including them is much wider than the range including only core grammatical features.

Languages brought by immigrant minorities to a new urban environment typically suffer one of two fates. They may die out as and when the immigrants or their descendants assimilate fully into the target society, and become native speakers of one of its existing varieties (often contributing a few loanwords, a grammatical construction or phonological pattern or two). They may be maintained as minority languages, serving the needs of an in-group which remains culturally distinct. This is the stance from which existing treatments of BrC are written: they emphasize its retention of Jamaican features, its systematic nature and distinctive properties. There are good social and pragmatic reasons for doing so in the case of discriminated languages and groups, quite apart from linguistictheoretical imperatives.

Much more rarely, a deeper fusion of incoming and target languages occurs, wherein significant elements of language structure are retained, serving the social purposes of a group which becomes established on the local scene but never fully assimilates, often for reasons of oppression and discrimination. African American Vernacular English (AAVE), assuming its input languages included a (Caribbean or American) plantation Creole as well as African ancestral varieties, is a very relevant example. In such cases, analysis that focuses purely on retention of conservative features and systemic distinctness would miss much of what is most important. The description below presumes that a similar outcome (partial retention and incomplete assimilation) is possible for BrC, and deserves attention.