Forms of speech and social demographic factors

The forms of speech created by this contact situation are multiple, as are their labels, including Black London English, British Black English, London Jamaican, London/Jamaican, British/Jamaican Creole, and such less-discriminating terms as Patwa (~ Patois), Creole, ‘dialect’, West Indian English, Afro-Lingua, and Nation Language (which specify no particular source or British community). Such names for language varieties and people, though worthy of sociolinguistic study, cannot be explored here. An important research problem, only partially attempted to date (Sebba 1993: 10), is to identify, constrain and describe the major modes of BrC.

One might not wish to call all the forms of speech described below by the label BrC, but they exemplify the variety of language within the community:

(1) a. Use of partly-assimilated vernacular elements of British English into Island Creole (e.g. accent, lexicon);

b. IslC that has undergone long-term accommodation to BrE, in face-to-face interactions by adult Caribbean immigrants (Wells 1973);

c. use of IslC in code-switching with BrE by people who natively speak both;

d. Creole-like speech learned young from native IslC-speaking family, by Afro-Caribbean native speakers of BrE;

e. Creole-like speech learned later from IslC-speaking peers, by Afro-Caribbean native speakers of BrE;

f. Creole-like speech learned late from non-native-IslC-speaking sources, and incorporated into BrE;

g. token elements of Creole speech, not sustained or sustainable, acquired unsystematically by Afro-Caribbean native speakers of BrE, or

h. …by non-Afro-Caribbean native speakers of BrE, and

i. emerging ethnically-distinctive varieties of BrE spoken primarily by Caribbean-origin Britons, incorporating various elements from Creole-like speech.

A range of factors combine in three major dimensions to shape these speech-forms: Caribbean family input (i.e. Jamaican/other English Creole/other Caribbean/none); community-type in Britain (i.e. urban South East England/other urban/rural, varying in degree of contact with London); and nativeness/degree of acquisition (i.e., acquisition from birth/before circa twelve years/afterwards; plus, generational status relative to immigration). While distinguishable in the abstract, these necessarily overlap in practice to produce the major modes of BrC, and are not exhaustive.

Little is known of linguistic variation according to classic sociolinguistic factors such as age, sex, and class, though it is clear that the great majority of BrC speakers are working-class, and that age has no simple relationship to generation of immigration. The complex role of ethnicity in acquisition has been explored mainly in terms of individual agency via “acts of identity” (LePage and Tabouret-Keller 1985), especially regarding assimilation into British nationhood and preservation of distinctive minority status. People of Caribbean heritage are of mixed background by definition, and mixing continues to occur in England across regional, social and racial lines. To the extent that “mixed-race” children represent linguistically heterogeneous family backgrounds, they will influence the development of BrC.