On the Speaking of English

It's about time, I think, that we recognize as a nation that the language we speak is not English.

Not so long ago, a columnist in The Punch took a letter issued from the Ministry of Education to task for its poor use of English grammar.  Of course, anything emanating from the government ministry charged with teaching the next generations must be perfect.  But simply criticizing the grammar in the letter missed the real point.

The real point is this.  English is a foreign language to us Bahamians.

I'm not aiming to be flip or insulting here; I'm deadly serious.  The language we speak in this country is not English, but something quite different.  Professors of linguistics call it a creole — Bahamian Creole, to be exact.  They recognize that while it disguises itself as English by using English vocabulary as a vehicle, its structure and its rules are fundamentally different.

I believe that we recognize that we have a different flavour to our language.  We celebrate it in the few bits of vocabulary that we have retained from our pasts:  words like jook (which is, as all true Bahamians know, quite different from stab), or yinna (which we sometimes express as y'all or you-all, and which distinguishes the singular you from the plural).  But what we don't recognize is the fact that we speak a different language altogether.

We don't recognize it for a number of reasons.  One of them is the fact that we were so well colonized that the language we speak, which is completely legitimate, was (and still is) categorized as bad or broken English.  Another of them is our national prejudice against our Haitian neighbours that leads us to associate creole with all the negative connotations we associate with Haiti.

In linguistics, the word creole has a far more universal meaning.  A creole is, quite simply, a mother tongue that originates from the contact between two or more languages.  In the Bahamas, the language we speak, Bahamian Creole, is the language that was created in the slave societies that founded our modern one.

During slavery, many tactics were used to maintain order.  One of them was to avoid at all costs placing slaves of the same background together.  As a result, many Africans were separated from people who were familiar to them, which meant that they were unable to communicate with one another except with the language of the masters.   At first a basic language of communication was created to cover all those areas of overlap — a work language, one full of commands and concrete words, but one whose use was limited.  Linguistics professors call this language a pidgin, and we still find pidgins today in the languages Bahamians use to speak to the Haitians they hire.

Later, those languages expanded to include all areas of life, including abstract and philosophical ones, and they became the creoles we speak today.  We use English words, but we retain the African grammar that our ancestors brought with them when they came.

What is interesting about African languages is that they almost all have certain things in common that make them fundamentally different from European ones.  The three most prominent are the creation of plurals, the creation of possessives, and the conjugation of verbs.

In European languages, each of these tasks is achieved by modifying the word in question.  You've got one DOG, but two DOGS; the bone that belongs to Mark is MARK'S BONE; and Mark GIVES that bone to the dog.  If he did it yesterday, he GAVE it to the dog.

In African languages, however, nouns and verbs remain the same.  When Africans want to indicate possession, tense or number, they use other words to help, or they indicate it by context.  How this translates into Bahamian Creole is like this.  You've got one DOG, and Mark has two DOG.  We know he has more than one because we said it already; he has two.  (Duh).  In our language, and in the African ones from which it derives, two dog is perfectly correct.

The bone Mark owns is MARK BONE.  We don't need to change the noun to show whose it is; the context tells us.  Sometimes, if we want to emphasize it, or if we want to get rid of "bone", we say MARK OWN.  Simple.

And if we want to tell people what Mark did with the bone, we say MARK GIVE the bone to the dog.  That remains the same, whether it's happening now or happened last week; if we want to indicate when Mark gave the bone to the dog, we say when it happened. 

But in English, we have to change the nouns and the verbs to do the same work.  English, you see, may be the official language of our nation, but it is a foreign language to us. 

Hence the all-too-common awfulness of some of our published writings; hence the absurdities of overcorrection that we hear on the radio and the television.  What we are witnessing are people trying to speak English correctly, but applying African rules.  The result is a mangling of both our languages.

Until we recognize that English is a foreign language to us, as it is for the Greek and Chinese and Haitian immigrants who settle our shores, and teach it as such (perhaps teaching also the formalities of Bahamian Creole at the same time), we will continue to be almost universally challenged by three very basic rules of that grammar:  noun plurals, noun possessives, and the conjugation of verbs.