1 THE MAOFWORDS REVISITED: JAMAICA CREOLE AD AMERICA EGLISH I TRIIDADIA VERBAL PLAY 1 Glenda Alicia Leung glendaalicia@gmail.com University of Freiburg Introduction Orality in the African Diaspora Within the African diaspora, orality has remained a salient cultural artefact which survived the transatlantic crossing. In African$American and Anglophone Caribbean communities, the ability to engage in speech play and verbal contests is highly prized. Indeed this observation has been well$documented in the literature, most notably in Roger Abrahams’ book The ManofWords in the West Indies in which he describes the performance traits of the archetypical manofwords. According to Abrahams, men$of$words are “eloquent speaker[s]…capable of garnering a great deal of power, respect, and in many cases admiration through [their] artful speaking.” 2 Often there are comparable parallels between speech patterns found in African$American and West Indian cultures. 3,4,5 Indeed there is a shared ethos and reverence for men$of$words capable of verbal alacrity and versatility. This case study draws on Abrahams’ archetypical man$of$words to explore the linguistic behaviour of Trinidadian disc jockeys (DJs) who, apart from speaking their native languages, use Jamaican Creole English (JCE) and American English 6 (AE) when on air. The main 1 The companion website to this paper can be found at http://trini$djspeech.wikispaces.com. 2 Roger D. Abrahams, The ManofWords in the West Indies: Performance amd the Emergence of Creole Culture (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1983), 21. 3 Thomas Kochman, ed., Rappin' and Stylin' Out: Communication in Urban Black America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). 4 Lisa J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 134$163. 5 Maureen Warner$Lewis, “The Oral Tradition in the African Diaspora,” Vol. 1, in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, eds. F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 117$136. 6 I have conservatively identified the variety used in Trinidadian DJ speech as AE since there is insufficient linguistic evidence in the data to disambiguate generic AE from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in many passages. However, given the radio station’s niche market of black diasporic music and DJ practices such as rapping on hip hop tracks, it is highly likely that AAVE is the linguistic target.