Vincentian Creole

Introduction Story

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1:08Hello. Nearly six years ago, I was in a rehab hospital in London to learn how to walk. In the bed next to me was a man who seemed not to be able to speak or eat. Nurses and doctors would come to his bedside and talk to him and plead with him to eat. They explained that he wouldn't get better if he didn't eat. On one occasion, I could hear a nurse trying to feed him with a spoon, and though I couldn't see him behind his screen, it sounded like he was refusing. I could hear that the staff were getting worried.

1:39There were whispered conversations, and their tone with the man started to sound a bit edgy. Then I heard them tell the man that a nurse was going to come in who could speak to him in his own language. Grenadian, from the Caribbean island of Grenada. Sure enough, the nurse came in, and I could hear her speaking to him in a way that's nothing like the way I'm speaking now, and to my ears resembled Jamaican, but was by no means the same. But at that moment, the important thing was that the man ate what the nurse gave him.

2:10I've no idea what he was suffering from, but clearly hearing his own language opened some kind of door in his mind that allowed him to accept being fed. I can't think of a better example of how hearing the language, dialects and accents of our home is such a fundamental matter to us.

Caribbean Language

2:30Well, today we're going to explore this thought and others in relation to another Caribbean language. With me is Teddy Mack. He's a linguist working on Creoles and what are called contact languages. More on that in a moment. Welcome to the programme, Teddy. It's a pleasure to be here. Now, rather than me saying where you're from and what languages you speak, I'm going to leave that to you. I'm from a town called Leiu on the island of St Vincent in the Caribbean. Right, and your languages that you can speak? So my mother tongue, I would say, is Vincentian Creole alongside English, kind of both at the same time.

3:05And I also speak Spanish and Italian fluently, French conversationally, and I'm learning Greek. That sounds like quite a package, yes. And just remind us exactly where St Vincent is in the Caribbean. St Vincent is in what's called the Lesser Antilles. It's south of St Lucia, west of Barbados and north of Grenada. It's where they filmed Pirates of the Caribbean.

Vinci Language

3:28Ah, so can you tell us a bit about the language on St Vincent? The official language of St Vincent is English, but most people speak Vincension Creole, or what we might call dialect, or Vinci, or Vinci dialect, Vinci twang. Right, I like that. And can you give us some examples of that? Can you talk to me in Vinci twang? Yeah, so if maybe I want to say to a group of people, where are you going? I might say in Vinci, ah, we pa, ah, ya, go.

4:00Now that is a mix of things. You have ah from French, like to, we pa is which part, and it means where, ah, yo is you plural, and ah, go, are going. Ah, we pa, ah, ya, go. Or you might say, pa, ya, go. Very good. And have you got some, say, some expressions to do with the weather, maybe? Yes, that's right. People always talk about the weather, don't they? So when it's raining and the sun is shining, they say, I devil and his wife are fighting, which means the devil and his wife are fighting.

4:31And that's when it's sunny and rainy at the same time. Yes. And are there sayings to do with animals, say, or with birds? Yeah. So Vintentians love to speak in parables or sayings. So, fow we don't hear shoo go hear boop, which means all people say the fowl that doesn't listen when someone says shoo will hear boop. It means broadly, heed advice or you may feel the consequences. What's the brat there?

5:10Sprat. Oh, Sprat. Sorry. Like a small fish. So there you are, you're speaking, Vintcy. How old were you when you came to the UK? So I came here when I was six. So that's how you were speaking in that way, which you've just shown us. And what was that like? I mean, you suddenly arrive in a school in England. What do people make of it? Well, it was quite surreal because I came here thinking I already spoke English. I didn't really have a sense of Vintcy as being a different language. And then I arrive and I have to learn all of these new words and new ways of speaking.

5:44And in fact, when we were in the airport, someone asked my mum, oh, did you come here today? And her response was, no, me come here for live.

5:54Yeah, did you come here to die? Yes. Oh, very good. Lovely. And your family, did they all come from St. Vincent? So my mum is Vincentian. I was born there. My stepdad is Jamaican. So sort of half of my family is Jamaican. And what do people say to you then? I mean, so I'm seeing you now as a six-year-old. You're arriving in a primary school. Who's telling you things about your language that surprises you? It was mostly other children. They'd say things like, oh, you speak weird or you speak funny or just people didn't understand necessarily what I said.

6:29And I had to learn lots of strange new words like daft and poorly. And was that OK for you or did you find that very unnerving? I think I've always had a bit of an ear for languages and accents and things. So what I did was consciously made an effort to try to copy the way that I heard people around me speaking. And then I kind of got the sense that there was, you know, a lot of stigma around. I grew up in Coventry. So it's not the most prestigious accent.

7:01So then I started copying the way I heard people speak on TV, which then led to sort of friends and jokingly saying that I spoke posh. And I'm just quite interested. Did you have a sense that you were wiping out your St Vincent way of speaking? Did you have a sense I'm saying goodbye to it? Did you ever have that feeling? Yeah, I remember distinctly that at one point the voice that I spoke with out loud didn't match the voice in my head. And I found that very strange.

7:31It felt kind of like I was becoming British. Well, I suppose in a way you were. But did you carry on speaking like that at home with your mum? No, not really, because the problem is that Vinci Creole has a lot of stigma attached to it. So my mum was always very my mum always pressed home the idea that you should speak properly. And the way that you speak would inform the way that you wrote and would inform how people saw you.

8:03So at home, I would try to speak properly as she wanted, which did then mean that I was speaking British English at home as well and not using, you know, Vincentian English or Vincentian Creole so much. So you have retained it. You can speak it. There you are just speaking. I think somewhat. Although, ironically, it doesn't feel as comfortable for me to speak what I think of as my mother tongue as it does to speak, say, Spanish or Portuguese or Italian.

8:34Right.

Creole Definition

8:35While we're talking about Creole, let's do some definitions. Creole. How would you define that? I would say a Creole is a relatively young language that has formed out of intense contact environment where speakers from different speech communities are brought together. And typically they get lots of their vocabulary from one language, usually a higher prestige language, whilst the grammar is, tends to be simplified.

9:06And I don't mean that in the sense that they aren't capable of communicating the same kinds of complex ideas. But in terms of numbers of forms, there will be fewer. And the grammars tend to be simplified and have influence from other languages, what are called substrate languages. So in the case of St. Vincent, we've got English. What else have we got in the mix with this Creole? Yeah. So we have English, which is what we call the lexifier language.

9:38It gives most of the words. And then we have other substrate languages like West African languages, Fula and Ibo and Yoruba are the main theories. So these are languages now spoken in Nigeria and Ghana? Mm-hmm. As well as some influence from other European languages like French and Portuguese. I see. And we also talked about contact languages. You mean the language, just simply the languages that are in contact with each other?

10:10Yeah. And the speech varieties that can come out of those. So, for example, here in London, you have multicultural London English, which has lots of influence from the languages that it has come in contact with. So you might say that MLE is a contact language. Yes. Now, let's go back over some of those phrases. What interests you grammatically or lexically about the words used? One interesting thing is the way that we form negatives. N'as-y donc d'es-o. And the no comes right at the start, whereas in English you have to say don't or do not sit there.

10:45We do kind of a thing like in French, well, kind of, you have ne pas, where there's a negative at the start and then another negative at the end. It's part of a thing called Jespersen cycle. Okay, just repeat it once more for us, nice and slowly, so we can take it in, so you can show us again. N'as-y donc d'es-o. So there you were saying don't sit down there, is that what you were saying? Yes. Yes, I see. So the don't is there in the little particle na. Yeah, so it's a little bit like French with the ne pas, isn't it, a little bit.

11:16Yeah. And English previously had pre-verbal negation. It then got reinforced with this do thing. So you had to have do not. Well, I guess it's a survival, isn't it? I mean, isn't one of the features of the new world, as it was called, America, Caribbean, and South America as well, Latin America, that some of the old forms have survived as a result of colonisation, of who did the colonising from the 16th, 17th centuries onwards.

11:46So some of those old forms survive, I guess. Yeah, exactly. One of my favourite things is some of the old-fashioned words that have survived in Vinci that aren't used in English anymore. So, for example, humbug, which for us means to bother someone. You might tell a small child, oh, stop humbug me now. It means, like, oh, stop bothering me. And then you read A Christmas Carol and you see, bah, humbug. Yes, well, it's a slightly different meaning there. It just means sort of hypocrisy, I think, in A Christmas Carol. Yeah, but I think it's a process of semantic shift where, you know, we've picked up that word and it's taken on a new meaning.

12:22Or you tend to hear vex more often in Caribbean than in, I guess, standard English these days. Yes, give me an example of how that works, because I do hear that with some children at school of Caribbean origin, yes. I remember when I got here in the UK, I would say things like, that vexed me, to mean that made me angry. And in 2004, that was really strange. But now I hear things like that way more often. Yes, the Caribbean has spread, as you said, in multicultural London English.

12:54I think you've drawn attention to the word that I say is the, that you would say with the D sound. Tell us about how flexible this is, the de and dem. Yes, so, well, for the, Vincerell has E or D to mean the. So, like, when I say mashup, eating mashup, it's mashup. The thing is mashed up. But then we have also de, which can mean there, it can mean they, it can mean to be, it can mean the day, like today.

13:31And so you could say something like, you see them pick me de, hold them de de, you know? Which means, do you see those children there? They've been there the whole day. So this is a very flexible, I mean, for somebody outside, not in on it, quite confusing, obviously, from the outside. But for you, you're just there with it. Yeah, my partner likes to joke that 90% of the language is just de, de, de, de, de. Yes, she's possibly, yes, very good.

Vinci in Schooling

14:03And can you give us a sense of how this, how the Vincerell that you're speaking now sits in relation to schooling in St. Vincent? What's the attitude in school to it? So the official language of St. Vincent and the Grenadines is English, which means that in schools they're taught in standard English. But children grow up speaking Vincerell at home and in the playground and in the streets. And they aren't always told what the difference is.

14:36There's this kind of what's called a situation of diglossia. So there's the prestige language, which is standard English, and then the low language, which is Vinci Creole. And at least when I was at school, we were taught not to use Creole because it was broken English, which then creates like a sense of shame around speaking the way that you're most accustomed to speaking. And it also creates added difficulty in schools, I think, and some of my research has shown that studies have shown that children entering primary school and then entering into secondary school aren't prepared for the level of education that they are receiving.

15:21They are struggling to achieve high grades in English and the other core subjects. And part of this reason, I suspect, is that they're being educated in a language that isn't entirely their own. Lots of studies have shown that mother tongue education at first leads to higher results later on. So is it your view that the children would benefit from being shown that this is a separate language and here it is, you speak it, and now we're going to learn this other language called standard English.

15:57But you'd always have a sense there are these two languages of equal status, but you feel that this constant saying it's broken English or it's bad speak or whatever, that that actually holds them back. Is that your view? Yeah, I think absolutely that's my view. I think that if we came at it from a perspective of this is the language that you're used to speaking, here is this other language, standard English, these are the differences, then they'd be better equipped to know when to speak, when to use each of their tools in their linguistic repertoire.

16:30And what do you think lies behind that idea of calling it broken English? I used to live next door to a guy who came from Dominica and he told me that he spoke broken French. So it's across the Caribbean, this idea that it's broken. No language is broken, is it? So where's that idea come from? I think it's a major holdover from the colonial period where, you know, the powers that were running these countries in the Caribbean saw the speech of at first slaves and then lower class people as being kind of a poor imitation of their own speech.

17:08But I think that this really does a disservice to those speakers who had agency and might not have necessarily wanted their speech to be readily understood by those in power. So they were doing retentions and innovations that in actual fact enabled them to conceal what they were saying, particularly from overseers or masters in that situation. Yeah. Is that the idea? Yeah, 100%. And some, in some cases, some of the features are typical of adult second language learners.

17:43So, you know, if you learn a language as an adult, you might make grammatical mistakes that are evident of your first language, that you're trying to use these constructions in a new language. And that could explain why we have some of these other grammatical features of West African languages mapped onto English words. Have you found interesting retentions in Vinci from African languages? Yeah, there are lots of these kind of two noun collocations for things.

18:14So where you put two words that describe things next to each other to make a new thing. So instead of tears, you might say Iwata, which would be exactly how you say it in, and I can't remember which specific West African languages, but in some West African languages, you might say Iwata. So then we have words that have been borrowed over directly, like jombie is the word for a ghost. It's related to the word zombie, I think. And nyampie is the crusty sleep that you get in the corner of your eye in the morning.

18:48Yes. It's good to have a word for that. Across the Caribbean, there seems to be this desire linguistically for a word for second person plural you, you to a group of people. In Jamaica, this is uno. In Barbados, it's wanna. In Simonson, we have ayo. And that comes from the English all of you. Yes. Oh, that's interesting. So you can double up, I think, in Irish and in Scotland as well, you've got use, use lot.

19:21Yes. And what about, say, a word to eat? Some really basic words. Are there any retentions there? I know in some Caribbean dialects, there's the word nyam, or yam, which is taken from, I think, either Fan or Wolof, I think. Yeah, and we have nyam as well. Yes. I remember children in one of the schools I was working in saying, nyam up, nyam up my dinner. So it was in London speak, but nyam it up, or just yum it up, because it then collocates a bit with yum, meaning it tastes nice.

19:53So it's quite a nice overlap there. So you've got nyam in Vinci. We've got nyam as well. Do you sometimes find yourself saying, I'm going to nyam up my dinner or something like that? Do you kind of bleed across from your Vinci into when you're speaking standard English, as you are to me now? I think more so these days. As a child, growing up here, I was kind of ashamed of it for a while, but nowadays I try and use it more often when I speak to my granny, or even sometimes at home when, say, we're watching something on TV and there's someone says something in Jamaican Patois or something, and then my commentary on it will be in Vinci.

20:33Yes, and what do granny and mum say about that? Do they say, don't talk broken English, or do they laugh? Do they find it funny? They find it funny. They find it kind of almost as if I were a foreign person speaking Vinci, because I speak with something of a more British accent sometimes. I mispronounce things. And so it seems, because nobody learns our language, right? There's not the resources for it. So to hear somebody speaking it with a slightly off accent, it's a strange experience.

21:04Well, I can tell you something now. My son's partner has origins in St. Vincent and her cousin, Helena Williams. When I told her I was doing this programme, I asked whether there were any phrases that she can remember or knows from St. Vincent. I'm going to pass them over to you there. There's a lovely little saying. I'm not going to say it. You can. I've underlined it there. And you can tell me about it there. So it says here, Chicken Merry Hark Dene, which means that if a chicken is happy, there is a hawk nearby.

21:39Oh, wait a minute. Just say that again for me. Do it a bit slowly, a bit artificially for me. Chicken Merry Hark Dene. So when the chicken is happy, is that right? Yeah. Hark Dene, there's a hawk nearby. I guess it basically means that bad things can happen even when you're happy. So be careful. Oh, right. So even when you're happy, sort of watch out. Yeah. I guess the imagery is that if you're too happy as a chicken, a hawk will eat you.

22:09Vincentian sayings basically boil down to something about an animal and a proverb to live by. Yes. Well, that's very basic in terms of the way of life, isn't it? That's the material life coming through into the language, isn't it? You're rearing chickens. Chickens can be got by an eagle or a hawk. So it's very much the observed world, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Yeah. There's one that I remember that's, if crab no ark, it wouldn't get fat.

22:38Somebody's not getting fat. What's the first bit? If crab no ark, it wouldn't get fat. It means if the crab didn't walk anywhere, he wouldn't get fat. I think it's sort of his equivalent to nothing ventured, nothing gained. Ah, yes. Yeah. If you don't go out and do stuff, you won't get any food. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, very good. Yes. That's a nice comeback. I must tell my sort of relatives that. And one or two names for food there on the list, I think. Here we go. Just, you can tell us a bit about food, because I love words for food.

23:08Oh, this is bringing back good memories. The first on the list is sauce, which is a pig foot soup. It's one of my favourites, but I don't get to have it very often. And then blackfish. This is a pilot whale. In same instance, there is a special dispensation for whaling using traditional methods, and it's really common in towns like Baralee and Onbekwe, one of the islands. Um, we have chuchi, which is a kind of fish cake made of, like, chuchi fish. They're, um, they're really small fish that you find at the mouths of rivers as they empty

23:43into the sea, and then you make a kind of fried fritter with them. It's like, it's really, really good. And then she says Johnny Cakes, but I would call these Bakes, and I made some this weekend. Um, it's a kind of very buttery dough that you fry, and it's like a, Jamaicans would call it fried dumpling. Excellent. Very good. And have you got any more sayings you can give us that, um, maybe occur to you sometimes, or you might say to your partner or to your, your granny, when you're watching cricket, as

24:16you say? There's a, one I really remember is, follow fashion dog, must catch manji. Um, so follow fashion dog, the, the, the dog that follows fashions, it's a copycat, must catch manji, will become manji. If you follow what everybody else is doing, it might not necessarily end up good for you. Just do the grammar in that one. It's quite interesting. Say that again for me. Follow fashion dog, must catch manji. Very good. Lovely. Um, so for you, when you were in St. Vincent, were you able to switch from standard to Vinci,

24:54called code switching? Um, were you able to do that when you were young? Could you go between the two? Yeah. My mum was very proud that I would almost translate between the kids in my village and the missionaries that would come from places like Canada and the US, because they weren't always understood. So I would spring up and say what they said was, um, you were the interpreter. Yeah. Oh, interesting. So there you were code switching very, very young. Um, quite often we, we miss this as a, as an ability that young children have.

25:28Um, and in a way, have you gone on doing that through your life? Do you think? I think so. I think it's really helpful to be able to use such a range of my linguistic tools, especially, you know, speaking as I do now to you might not be the way that I speak to my friends in Coventry or that I speak to my family back in St. Vincent. Do you talk on the phone to anybody in St. Vincent? I just, I would love the idea that, you know, you pick up the phone and just, boom, you code

25:59switch and you're in there with, uh, with Vinci. Oh, my mum does this all the time, especially if it's an unknown number, she'll answer like with her English voice of hello. And then it's somebody from St. Vincent and she might go, girl, how long may I hear from you? How you do?

26:13Perfect. Yes. So she can do it. She does it. And have you, have you said that to her? Have you pointed it out to her that, hey mum, you know, you. Yeah. All the time. You've got two voices there. And what does she say? Oh, she says, just leave me alone now. So have you been back to St. Vincent? Just once. Now, what was that like? What was your experience? Did people think you were coming on a bit posh or what was their attitude to you? Yeah, definitely. They, uh, they thought it was very funny hearing my English accent and getting me to say things like 10.30, um, instead of 10.40.

26:46Um, and then, you know, again, giggling when I would try to speak in Creole. But it was also an interesting experience for me because I went back when I was maybe 13 years old, uh, and kind of re-engaging with the community. And I was surprised that I remembered a lot of things, you know, how to get around my village and places in the capital and stuff like that. So it was really nice. And I'd love to go back again. Will you? Hopefully. Um, my plan is to honeymoon there. Oh, right.

27:16And, um, just that experience of being there, did, did you feel uneasy? I can imagine it might've been just a little bit uneasy. I mean, really about your own identity. Who am I? Who, who, who is Teddy Mac? Yeah, I've, I've often felt sort of not Vincentian enough for Vincentians and not British enough for Britons and kind of in this liminal space in between. But then in a way we all are, aren't we?

27:47Yeah. We're always moving, aren't we? I mean, you just did a big move for what your family did. Yeah. I think, um, I've resolved to kind of be proud of where I've come from and be proud of where I've ended up and meshing the two together is where my identity kind of lies.

28:07102 miles ago, the oil light came on. 100 miles ago, you'd noticed. Now, it's time to head to take five. This oil change, fall in love with your car all over again. In just 10 minutes, your dream technician will check your tire pressure, top off fluids, change your oil, and verify with Carfax exactly what your car really needs. All while keeping you in the driver's seat. Take five, the stay in your car 10 minute oil change. Save up to 30% on your next oil change to take five. $15 value, valid to participating locations, terms and conditions apply.

Conclusion and Ad

28:37Right, so as we've been talking today, our language journeys can tell us so much. Word of Mouth is teamed up with the Open University and their linguists, they interviewed me about my own language journey. If you'd like to hear that, go to the BBC Radio 4 Word of Mouth page and follow the links to the Open University. Well, Teddy Mac, thanks very much for coming on the programme. Thank you. And before you go, can you sign us off with a Vinci farewell? Thank you. What good.

29:08Thank you.

29:12102 miles ago, the oil light came on. 100 miles ago, you noticed. Now, it's time to head to take five. This oil change, fall in love with your car all over again. In just 10 minutes, your dream technician will check your tire pressure, top off fluids, change your oil, and verify with Carfax exactly what your car really needs. All while keeping you in the driver's seat. Take five to stay in your car 10-minute oil change. Save up to 30% on your next oil change to take five. $15 value, valid to participating locations, terms and conditions apply.