As anyone who has seen me perform knows, I frequently go off in some good-natured commentary on various things cultural, and one of them is the effectiveness of our dialect, so that a reaction from Bernard Fernandes, a diaspora Guyanese, lauding a point about dialect I recently made, leads me to shout, as I have before, for the value of our dialect and to consequently object when it is attacked. It’s a subject I often get dragged into because of the dialect nature of many of my songs, but I must confess that I don’t need to be dragged – I’m more than ready to leap in – so at a time when the University of Guyana is making efforts to legitimise our Guyanese lingo I’m one of the persons publicly saying “Go brave Dr Griffith”.
The modern technology, now coming at us in waves, is all in the interest of better communication; that is the mantra and a worthwhile one at that. By extension, however, we have to be on guard to defend “de way we does talk” as often the most effective way we have for Guyanese to communicate with Guyanese, particularly if we believe, as we should, in brevity.