Dear Editor,
I enjoy reading Dave Martins’ column “So it Go” in your Sunday edition every week. My attention was particularly caught by the topic of his column on Sunday, 14th October. I whole-heartedly agree with what I think to be the main thrust of his article (to underscore “the value of the Guyanese dialect”) but I would like to make one addition and to briefly suggest a different perspective.
The one addition is that we have been teaching about, analysing, researching and writing about our language – Guyanese Creole, Creolese or Guyanese – for a number of years at the University of Guyana. Since the 1950s, Guyanese Richard Allsopp had been writing and publishing scholarly observations and analyses of Guyanese Creole. Right here at UG, a long line of scholars such as George Cave, John Rickford, Ian Robertson, Walter Edwards, Dhanis Jaganauth, Cicely John – all Guyanese – and others including Edna Perry, Christopher Lawrence and Dereck Bickerton, have researched and taught countless students about Guyanese Creole and Creole languages generally. The tradition continues today, where we have not only specific courses in Guyanese Creole, but where this language itself is made central to classes from the first to the final year in Language, Sociolinguistics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Language Acquisition and Learning, Language Teaching, and Oral Traditions.
The different perspective I wish to offer centres on the word “dialect” which Mr Martins uses to describe our language. This word has a specific technical meaning (which, while being relevant, I will not pursue here), but it also has some very powerful social, cultural and political connotations. This is where my concern lies. The word “dialect” bestows a particular character to our language. It makes it seem to be something less than a language, or something that is secondary, or a variation of a language rather than a language in its own right.
Even when we use the term in championing the particular appropriateness and relevance of Guyanese Creole, it still seems that the language is being seen as a side-line of communication rather than a living, dynamic language.
Further, the word “dialect” and the way we see it being used makes it seem that Creole is reserved for ol’ talk, gyaffin, busing, story-telling, humour and so on. It makes it seem that Guyanese Creole is about the past, small days, lang time, “colourful expressions” and nostalgia. Indeed, many diasporic Guyanese revert to this use of language when on social media as a means of recapturing “de ol’ days”.
Incidentally, there is a long-standing similar situation with reference to our indigenous languages, which are referred to (even by indigenous people) as “Amerindian dialects” rather than “languages” as they should be.
I am aware that many persons would not wish to confer the full status of a “language” on Guyanese Creole, but as a recent exchange in your columns has shown, their reasons are antiquated, prejudiced, and self-contradictory.
We conduct all the necessary business of life through Guyanese Creole. It is our full-time language, and its name should reflect this.
Yours faithfully,
Alim Hosein
