The Perception of Mixed Utterances by Jamaican Bilinguals
| dc.contributor.advisor | Angermeyer, Philipp | |
| dc.contributor.author | Gooden, Amanda C. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-10-26T17:36:39Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-10-26T17:36:39Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2023-08 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Language in Jamaica is marked by high variation (Patrick, 2004 as cited in Kennedy, 2017) among speakers across all linguistic contexts (Christie, 2003). This is caused by two broad factors: firstly, by the varying linguistic repertoires among speakers, with some speakers being dominant Jamaican Creole (JC) speakers, some dominant Standard Jamaican English speakers (SJE), and some balanced bilinguals (Kennedy, 2017) and secondly, by the blurred boundary between English, the language brought to the island by British colonizers in 1655, and Jamaican Creole, the de facto National language of the country and language of the majority (Farquharson, 2013), whose genesis is attributed to language contact between speakers of English and various African languages during the period of colonization in the country. Because of the relationship between these languages in their structure and usage, they are proposed to exist on a continuum, with forms closer to Jamaican Creole being basilectal forms at one end and forms closer to Mainstream English being acrolectal forms on the other end (DeCamp, 1971). These however, are idealized forms, as most speech lies between poles, and speech found here are called mesolectal forms. These forms are likely the result of language mixing that has been present since the creation of JC (Patrick, 2013) and continued contact between JC and its lexifier, SJE. The purpose of this research project is to determine how Jamaican speakers process linguistic forms that do not neatly belong to either language by observing where they judge linguistic utterances to belong on a visual depiction of the proposed language continuum. The placement of these utterances by participants of this study will be tested against two social variables: the geographical location of speakers and their language attitudes. The first variable will be tested by including speech perception by Jamaicans living in the island and those living in the diaspora, namely various cities in Canada and the United States of America. The second variable will be tested by asking participants about their attitudes towards language use in Jamaican contexts, specifically JC that has held an inferior social status to SJE in Jamaica, because of its perception as a broken variety of English (Kouwenberg et al., 2011), associated with poverty and a lack of education (Christie, 2003). | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10315/41484 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.subject | Utterances | |
| dc.subject | Jamaican Bilinguals | |
| dc.title | The Perception of Mixed Utterances by Jamaican Bilinguals | |
| dc.type | Research Paper |