Linguistic ideologies and the historical development of language use patterns in Jamaican music Joseph T. Farquharson a, b, * a Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld University, Germany b Department of Language, Linguistics & Philosophy, The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Kingston 7, Jamaica article info Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: Jamaica Historical description Genre Creole abstract This paper presents Jamaica as a case study of the intersections between language practice, language ideologies, and music, using a historically grounded descriptive approach spanning a period of more than three and a half centuries. It describes secular and religious Jamaican music(s) and ideologies connected to them through different periods of the country’s history characterised by different social and socio-political configurations (e.g., slavery, colonial rule, Independence). These systems and the emergent socialities to which they gave rise influenced the creation of new musical genres and determined to varying extents how linguistic codes were distributed by genre, and in the lyrics themselves. Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction English is the de facto official language of the Caribbean island of Jamaica, but most commentators would agree that the country’s lingua franca is an English-lexified Creole, which inhabitants commonly refer to as (Jamaican) Patois/Patwa. Despite its long-term currency across all sectors of Jamaican society, the origin of the Jamaican language in the oppressive system of slavery has served as a basis for its denigration, not only by the elites, but also by working-class Jamaicans for whom Jamaican may be their main or only code. Throughout its history of more than three centuries, the language has frequently been evaluated as inadequate and inefficient (Leach, 1959:6), ‘just plain laziness’, and as being ‘so limited in vocabulary that it can only be described as primitive jabbering’ (Cargill, 2000). While similar sentiments have occurred regularly in books and newspaper articles for more than a century now, a language attitude survey conducted approximately a decade ago by the Jamaican Language Unit (2005) has revealed that they are apparently coming to represent a fringe view. Close to 80% of respondents reported that they saw Jamaican as a language, and roughly the same percentage declared themselves bilingual in English and Jamaican. Several factors contributed to the change in prestige (cf. Jamaican Language Unit, 2005) which the Jamaican language has undergone over the past six decades. These factors include shifts in power relations and identity politics, mobility, migration, and access to and use of new technologies (Devonish, 2007 :158–241; Farquharson, 2015; Hinrichs, 2011; Mair, 2003, 2013). I include Jamaican popular music under the new technologies, not as a new technology itself, but as having appropriated the new and emerging technologies from the early twentieth century onwards, for purposes of amplification (Henriques, 2011), reproduction, and dissemination (via radio, television, internet, etc.). * Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld University, Germany. E-mail address: jtfarquharson@gmail.com. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language & Communication journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.08.002 0271-5309/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Language & Communication xxx (2016) 1–12 Please cite this article in press as: Farquharson, J.T., Linguistic ideologies and the historical development of language use patterns in Jamaican music, Language & Communication (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.08.002