ABSTRACT
More than a decade after the first reports of ‘London Jamaican’ from Rosen and Burgess and D'Costa, we may look back at the questions which could not be answered at that time, and see what progress has been made. Research already described in this book, taken together with the work of others like Sutcliffe, Edwards, Hewitt and Tate, enables us to say at least the following:
D'Costa's assertion that JC is ’an identifying group dialect common to all West Indians‘ is correct — provided we limit it to those born in Britain, i.e. nearly all adolescents and young adults. It is also necessary to use the term ‘JC’ cautiously. Though black adolescents are modelling their ‘black talk’ on JC rather than some other Caribbean variety, the norms for indigenous British Creole are different from those of Jamaica.
The JC spoken by young blacks in Britain does appear to vary geographically, due at least to some extent to influence from the local variety of British English. The Bradford Rasta-farians studied by Tate (1984) seem to be unique among the groups studied, inasmuch as their JC seems to carry no hint of Bradford English syntax or pronunciation. Other speakers may have readily identifiable local features but the differences are not ever likely to be great enough to make the varieties mutually unintelligible.
The pull of JC for British-born black youth seems to outweigh the attraction of any of the other Caribbean Creole varieties spoken by the first generation. While fluency in this Creole may correlate somewhat with coming from a Jamaican background, Jamaican descent is clearly not a necessary condition for acquiring a command of JC, as shown by Tate's Dominicans. Some white Creole speakers in London seem to have competence in Creole on a par with black speakers who have average fluency in Creole: this is borne out by Hewitt's research (1982, 1986).
With the possible exception of certain groups where Creole is in constant use in the home, e.g. among Rastafarians, all British born Caribbeans now have a variety of British English as their first language. The degree of competence which individuals reach in Creole depends very largely on their patterns of socialisation in childhood and adolescence. This may be related to the number of black children of the same age group in the individual's neighbourhood or class at school, and more generally, to the density of Caribbean settlement in the area. Edwards (1986) showed that in the West Midlands competence in Creole, and patterns of language use for Caribbean speakers, are strongly related to social network in this way. Hewitt makes a similar observation regarding London:
it appears that demographic factors are influential. In the areas of densest black settlement the lateral supports for Creole use are inevitably greater … In area A [an area of relatively low Caribbean settlement] there were many black youngsters who knew and used very little Creole […] in Area B [an area with a higher density of Caribbeans] the use of Creole was substantially greater amongst adolescents, and was also supported more strongly by continuities with the adult population (Hewitt 1986: 105)
