Reflection
Inspired by a lifelong love of words, his exceptional capacity for work and an indomitable will, Richard Allsopp created the monumental Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage – a priceless asset to the nation and region.
Professor Richard Allsopp probably regarded himself as the Caribbean’s Noah Webster. An illustrious American lexicographer, Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language in 1806, thirty years after the USA’s independence and is credited with institutionalising the use ‘American’ spellings − such as center rather than centre, honor rather than honour, and program rather than programme, etc − which, today, are regarded as standard American usage. Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828 when he was 70 years old.
By comparison, Walter S. Avis created A Dictionary of Canadianisms and the related Dictionaries of Canadian English to be published in 1967, the centenary of Canada’s dominion status. Similarly, William Stanley Ramson planned the publication of the Australian National Dictionary for 1988 to mark the bicentenary of the English settlement of Australia in 1788.
Richard Allsopp perceived that those three largest English-speaking countries in the world – America, Canada and Australia – tied the celebration of their nationhood intellectually “to the provision of a national dictionary as the true mark of national identity” and, also as a symbol of national unity. This was his vision when he published his Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage in 1996, thirty-four years after the first English-speaking Caribbean countries – Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago – became independent nations in 1962 and twenty-three after the Caribbean Community came into existence. He was 73 years old when his Dictionary appeared.
Words
For Allsopp, therefore, the Caribbean Dictionary was an essential aspect of nationhood and regional ‘statehood.’ He took a stand against what he referred to as the “shamefacedness” of people who felt guilty about having been accused of speaking “broken” English and hoped that his Dictionary would “enlighten us about ourselves, revealing truths that would replace our colonial self-effacement with self-confidence.” He saw Creolese and the sister Creole dialects of the Caribbean as distinctive new languages which were created out of the unique experiences of the combination of native African language concepts with those of the languages of Europe and influenced by Amerindian, East Indian and other languages.
Most important, he asked himself several of the most serious questions about language: What is the right/wrong ‘national’ way to speak? May local or regional usage be formally written? By what criteria is acceptability to be judged? On what ground can any local or folk ‘thing-name’ be rejected as wrong? What spelling shall be determined (and by whom) for items nations never bothered to spell until now that they need to write them? What terms are unparliamentary, libellous, offensive?
In answering questions like these, Allsopp recognised the fact that a serious language communication problem had to be resolved. Students from the English-speaking Caribbean educational system who were required to write examinations for the London and the Oxford and Cambridge boards found themselves at a disadvantage owing to vastly dissimilar interpretations, even of the same words, in different cultures. He also thought that it would be pointless to refer to dictionaries of British or North American English to explain regional idioms. Guyanese and other Caribbean people, also, will easily recognise how difficult it would be to attempt to replace everyday expressions – such as cut-eye, hard-ears, eye-pass and suck-teeth – with Standard English equivalents which are as succinct or comprehensible.
Commonly understood words – baigan, koker, paal, stelling, warishi – simply do not appear in an English dictionary. Yet, Caribbean dialects are intrinsic in Caribbean speech and literature. Over the past six decades, no significant writer – from Guyana’s Edgar Mittleholzer to Jamaica’s Vic Reid, Trinidad’s Samuel Selvon; Barbados’s Kamau Braithwaite and St Lucia’s Derek Walcott, all of whom won international acclaim – has written without using native Creoles. The dialects are part of Caribbean reality which studies of lexicography cannot ignore.
Allsopp, most probably, was the first scholar to identify how, in Caribbean English, pitch, stress and tone are used uniquely to distinguish meaning. He was able to find that many errors in students’ writing derived from the stress and tonal characteristics of their speech. In the field of Creole linguistics, he emphasised the formative influence of the underlying grammar and idiom of African languages – establishing historical evidence of what thereafter came to be known as the Afrogenesis of Atlantic Creoles. Indeed, it was in a paper that he presented at the Conference of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics in 1976 that the use of the term Afrogenesis was first recorded. He was also one of the first to argue strongly for recognition of Caribbean standards in English, particularly with regard to the lexicon.
Work
Evidence of Allsopp’s pioneering work in Caribbean linguistics was apparent sixty years ago when he published a two-part article called “The Language We Speak” in the Guyanese literary journal Kyk-Over-Al (This article was reprinted in two parts in the Guyana Review in April and May). This preliminary work was amplified in his University of London MA dissertation “Pronominal forms in the dialect of English used in Georgetown (British Guiana) and its environs by persons engaged in non-clerical occupations” in 1958, and his Ph D dissertation, “The Verbal Piece in Guyana Creole” in 1961. These two magisterial works can be considered the foundations on which the monumental Dictionary was eventually erected.
His trend of thought evolved through his conference papers during the 1970s and 1980s. He authored scores of scholarly papers in professional journals and chapters in books. Some of these were “The English Language in British Guiana;” “The problem of acceptability in Caribbean creolised English;” “The case for Afrogenesis;” “Africanisms in the idiom of Caribbean English;” and, “Caribbean English and our schools.” His other books include Guyana Talk; Dictionary of Caribbean Regional English, Language and National Unity and, A Book of Afric Caribbean Proverbs.
Richard Allsopp has become widely respected and will be long remembered as the region’s pioneering and most prominent lexicographer. He was a member of the small group of scholars who had come together fifty years ago at the first international conference on Creole languages held at Mona, Jamaica. His vision of the importance of language was always clear but his interest became more intense in the era of independence and regional integration. His efforts always seemed to be part of a grand scheme which was fulfilled in the Dictionary.
His unique creation was the Caribbean Lexicography Project through which he laboured for a quarter of a century, familiarising himself with Dutch, Hindi, Spanish, Twi and Portuguese so as to establish the Dictionary on an empirical evidential foundation.
The Dictionary is the product of much hard work by Allsopp and the project team. The achievement could be measured by the enormous volume of data accumulated by thirty-eight data-collection workshops in twenty-two territories and countries; transcriptions of hours of tape-recorded, spontaneous speech and field-notes; responses to questionnaires, checklists of hundreds of idioms of Caribbean English and an open list of thirty-two categories of Caribbean life-style including children’s games, childbirth practices, folk medicines, funerals, weddings and superstitions; excerpts from hundreds of written sources including calypsoes and folksongs, handbooks, journals, magistrate’s courts records, novels; specially commissioned vocabularies of bauxite, cocoa, rice, sugar and timber industries and loan-words from other cultures and creoles.
Will
Richard Allsopp applied his considerable intellect for several years to compiling the Dictionary. His academic career and the various positions he held – Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and Senior Research Fellow, Vice-Dean (Campus Dean) and Public Orator – at Cave Hill testify to the tenacity of his commitment, the clarity of his vision and his indomitable will.
He started as French Language Tutor in UWI’s Extra-Mural Department in Georgetown in 1948, and toiled beyond official retirement as Honorary Research Fellow and Director-Coordinator of the Caribbean Lexicography Project which he had helped to establish on the Cave Hill campus. He had taken up the position of Lecturer in English at the newly-established College of Arts and Science in Barbados which became UWI’s Cave Hill campus, in 1963. There, he was responsible for the introduction of linguistics and continued to design and teach linguistics courses, including a graduate course in Caribbean Lexicography, until 1995. He was also head of English and chairman of the Language and Linguistics Unit, Chairman of Survey Courses and Social Sciences, Designer and Moderator of Use of English and other courses in English, and vice-dean of the College.
As his work came to be better known, he was called increasingly to serve in international consultancies: on the World Bank Education Project; as the English Language Consultant on the New Liturgy of the Church in the Province of the West Indies; and on boards of the New Oxford English Dictionary, the World Book Dictionary and the Collins Dictionary. He was, in fact, the only West Indian to be appointed to the board of the New Oxford English Dictionary.
Richard Allsopp received, rather belatedly, several awards in recognition of his service to education. The University of the West Indies appointed him to an Honorary Doctorate of Letters and the Republic of Guyana awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature (a Special Award). The Society for Caribbean Linguistics, of which he had been a founding member, publicly acknowledged his outstanding contribution by appointing him an Honorary Life Member in 1994. He received the national award Companion of Honour of Barbados in 2004.
Allsopp gave Caribbean lexicography a special personality and put it on the world stage. His Dictionary marked the culmination of years of painstaking research. It will remain one of the most significant landmarks in Caribbean Linguistics and an invaluable resource for many generations for future generations. He made the point that “The weight of evidence supplied in this work should provide sufficient ground to build Caribbean pride to replace the earlier colonial shamefacedness and inhibitions bedeviling the region.”
In the final analysis, the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage became, possibly, “the most important book ever to come out of the Anglophone Caribbean.”