To cite the examples, consider wet (to water flowers), globe (electric bulb), buk (from ‘book’, meaning ‘anything written’), savi buk (from ‘know book’, meaning educated), environment (neighborhood) and bluff (to give an air of importance). A number of lexical items retain the old meaning but are no longer prevailing in Native English. One example is Dress (move at the end of a row for the sake of creating room for extra people) is the reserved meaning recorded by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary ‘to form in proper alignment’. 3) Replacement:
Last but not lease, the final type of English colonial activity – replacement – will be identified in the forthcoming part. As mentioned, replacement is characterized by the phenomenon that a pre-colonial population is replaced by new labor from elsewhere, especially the slaves from West Africa (Leith 1996:181-2). In fact, there were so many pidgins and creoles thanks to the colonial activity. To make the picture clearer, the history of slave trade should be described firstly. Slave trade was originated in the mid sixteenth century when a man called Sir John Hawkins sold the captured slaves to Caribbean.
After that, English started to send Africa slaves to south part of America, including Jamaica, in order to provide workforce or labors. The varieties therefore emerged as the consequence of connection amidst British and West African people attributed to colonization of America and Atlantic slave trade. In generality, majority of the English-based Creole were formed by the vocabulary of English-speaking sailors and settlers, together with many loanwords, loan transitions, grammatical patterns and so forth.
According to Ligon, shipments of slaves were ‘fetch’d from several parts of Africa, who speak severall languages, and by that means, one of them understands not another’ (Ligon, 1647, p. 46). This statement implies the tactic that ‘policy of the slave trader was to bring people of different language backgrounds together in the ships, to make it difficult to plot rebellion’ (Crystal, 1988, p. 235). If Crystal is correct, pidgin would be the only available communication among the slaves. As the time goes by, pidgin will develop as Creole and become a thoroughly functioning language.
In fact, Jamaican Creole enjoys the highest status among various Creoles in the sense that it has the longest-standing literature and the media and artistic use. The Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967, 1980) was written to help standardize the spelling. It was in turn encouraged a fuller use of Creole by Jamaican writers (McArthur, T 2002). Here the citations of the vocabulary of Jamaican Creole will be listed. First, it has many words from other languages like pikni (small child) from Portuguese and ho senny ho (how’s business? ) from Chinese.
Moreover, there is reduplication in Jamaican Creole like poto-poto (very slimy or muddy) and fenky-fenky (very puny cowardly, fussy). Furthermore, in 18th century there was the presence of nautical terms in Jamaican speech. To cite the examples, berth (office), store (warehouse) and jacket (waistcoat). Conclusion: To conclude, there are many varieties of English around the world but they are commonly regarded as ‘English’ since that is how their speakers firstly identify them, due to historical reasons (McAuthur, T 2002). In fact, the most significant factor contributing to these varieties is colonization.
Three types of colonization, as mentioned above, generate different linguistic consequence and, at the end of the day, the ‘New Englishes’. Following this, scholar like David Graddol tries to estimate the future of English. Yet, the most crucial point is, English undoubtedly experiences the highest status in the world right now.
References: Edgar W. Schneider (2007) ‘Postcolonial English: varieties around the world’, The emergence of American English, New York: Cambridge University Press, 278-289. McArthur, T. (2002) The Oxford Guide to World English, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Leith, D and Jackson, L (2007) Chapter 2 – The origins of English in Changing English, London: Routledge, The Open University. Leith, D, Graddol, D and Jackson, L (2007) Chapter 3 – Modernity and English as a national language in Changing English, London: Routledge, The Open University. Leith, D, (2007) Chapter 4 – English – colonial to postcolonial in Changing English, London: Routledge, The Open University. Jenkins, J (2009) World Englishes – A resource book for students, London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
