New Technology Aiding Old Tongue In Jamaica

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KINGSTON, Jamaica - At the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica, there are about a dozen dusty books exploring patois, the unique local dialect that mixes West African and English words.

But at Cybervillage, an Internet cafe across from the police station, several computer screens are alive with e-mails flashing colorful patois phrases.

"Leff mi nuh," one young woman writes, asking someone to stop sending her e-mails because they were getting a bit too steamy.

Another cafe customer types, "I'll gosee me fambly on Satcherday" - he is planning to visit his relatives on Saturday.

Jamaican patois - a loosely structured but popular tongue that traces its roots to the era of slavery and has long competed with English in this Caribbean nation - is making something of a comeback, thanks mostly to 21st century technology.

Its resurgence, especially among young cybersurfers, has been so dramatic that some residents are using the momentum to give the dialect a more formal linguistic structure, with the eventual goal of elevating it to official status in Jamaica alongside English.

"It's funny how advanced technology is facilitating wider use of this old language," said Carolyn Cooper, a professor of English in Literature at the University of West Indies, who refers to the language as "Jamaican." "Most linguists argue that this is a dialect of English, but most Jamaicans feel it's their own distinct language."

Much like the debate four years ago over the use of Ebonics in US schools, the idea of elevating a dialect like patois to official status has sparked controversy, especially in a country often preoccupied by questions of national identity. Once a part of colonial Spain, Jamaica is an independent British commonwealth nation but has deep immigrant ties to the United States.

Patois' promoters argue that the dialect is spoken in Jamaica as much as English and that most poor and rural residents use patois more for their daily lives. Government policies, they say, should reflect that reality.

But opponents consider patois a kind of "lazy English" and insist the country's main political, educational, and economic matters should be conducted in English.

One problem with Jamaican patois, however, is its lack of structure. Most specialists and residents agree there is no one version of the tongue. Words can vary in meaning and spelling from city to farm or from one province to another.

Since the language has been largely passed down by mouth, not through books, the grammar of patois has long been difficult, if not impossible, to pin down - another essential requirement if proponents are going to convert it from vernacular to language.

That's where the Internet comes in. Over the last few years, dozens of Jamaican-related Web sites have created their own patois glossaries, bulletin boards, and chatrooms where writers tell their stories or talk to each other in patois.

Most of the sites offer basic pronunciation guides with little or no explanation of grammatical rules. But as more people get used to writing in patois, experts say, there will be more places to find guidance on issues like syntax and verb tense.

"We are providing a structure to a dialect that hasn't had it before," said Xavier Murphy, the 33-year-old creator and owner of www.jamaicans.com, a Florida-based Web site that has several patois bulletin boards. "About 80 percent of our users write in patois. Sometimes you have to go back and reread what someone's saying because everyone writes it differently, but it's definitely the most active place on our site."

Patois may become more prevalent on the Internet if the government succeeds in its plans to expand Jamaica's technology sector by creating 40,000 jobs and investing $113 million to build a new high- tech infrastructure.

Joelle Cohen, a 30-year-old Jamaica native who works as a computer analyst in Maryland, writes versions of stories like Cinderella in patois for the Internet.

"There are more sites and even computer software in patois that might help bring more structure," Cohen said in a telephone interview. "Right now people just write it the way they want. But a pumpkin in patois is still pumpkin."

The explosion in patois' presence on the Internet is also a result of the large Jamaican immigrant communities that have sprouted over the last three decades in the United States, Britain, and Canada, Murphy and other Jamaican computer specialists said.

Nearly 90 percent of Jamaicans are descendants of West African slaves who spoke Ashanti and were brought to the island by Spanish and English settlers. Over time, Ashanti words were mixed with English to create patois.

Most linguists consider patois to be made up mostly of English words that have been filtered through African pronunciations. They categorize it as a dialect, not a distinct language, comparing it to other Caribbean Creole languages such as Haiti's, which also blends words from Africa and Europe.

Nearly everyone in this country of 2.5 million learned patois at home or among friends at an early age. Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae icon who died in 1981, often used patois in his lyrics. But most Jamaican schools, especially those in affluent areas, teach only in English.

Although English is the official language, many of the country's government and business elites speak patois. But it seems unlikely the government will support the move to give it official status.

"English is what you hear and speak at work or in the office," said Netollia Fairweather, a librarian at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica. "Patois is what you speak at home or on your days off."

But some say the attempt to use the Internet to give patois more structure may be undone by another chatroom era phenomenon: abbreviated writing. Rather than helping the dialect to develop the rules of grammar that it needs to become a formal language, the Internet may lead patois to develop the same kind of shorthand forms that e-mail English has.

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