Lose Your Language, Lose Your Identity

The impact of colonialism on indigenous language is not a topic discussed in the lecture halls of even the most prestigious of universities in the world. It is a taboo to most established educational institutions because it calls into question the artifice and guile of colonising powers, and their wanton eradication of native languages in order to dominate and control the thinking of those whom they oppress.

Many indigenous groups faced genocide just for speaking their own language; all in the name of “Manifest Destiny” -- an illusory concept that erroneously precludes privilege and genetic superiority as in the case of the Third Reich (German Nazism). In this blog, I will look at the Jamaican vernacular in particular as this is my native tongue. As an insider, I am privy to the subtitles of the phonology, the morphemes and other aspects of the building blocks of language and how these shaped communication between colonised beings, whose consciousness and identity has been lobotomised and twisted in order to fit into a White view of reality.

Jamaicans gather to express their African heritage

Language as Power

According to French philosopher Edourd Glissant, “The language of a people is their world.” Therefore removing that language is essentially removing the world view and cultural expressions that those individuals have come to know as their reality-- a lifestyle and way of being that could be centuries or millennia old. The language they speak, of course, influences their cosmology therefore the way in which they perceive the world.

When we apply this theory to the former enslaved Africans exiled on the island of Jamaica, we can clearly see how this theory plays out in the mindset and values of the people. The colonised tongue is estranged from its origins, few Akan ,Fon, Ga, or Ewe lexicon remain. The lexicon informed the speech patterns and above all the parables and adages used by the Yoruba people from Nigeria for example. The ethnogenesis which transpired as a result of white colonialism created a new people with a new forms of self expression. Indeed the first act of the enslavers was to confound the languages in a Tower of Babel style manipulation, where those who spoke similar languages were kept apart from each other in order to keep them from communicating and devising plans to plot their freedom from their European masters. The current pegin English or patois spoken by the new natives of this famous island is a Texmex so to speak--a hodgepodge of European and African languages yoke together in a schizophrenic dance.

Upon further analysis of Glissant’s theory we see how speaking like Europeans can create a divide between Africans in the Diaspora and those living on the continent, even though Africans on the continent may speak English or French etc. The dilemma exist in the diction used by the West Indian African or American blacks vs the diction used by those on the continent, who are seen as more primitive and poverty stricken. The language of the European automatically created division between the two groups of Africans. Jamaican patois, Black American twang etc. all incorporate some negative collocations, and colloquialisms that discriminate against the native Africans on the continent. Lexeme are used by the new breed of Africans castaway in North America to separate themselves from those on the continent and visa versa. Terms such as “slave baby” used by some Nigerians to show status and to differentiate themselves from the descendants of enslaved Africans born in the Americas is becoming a popular ,

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