Vowels and diphthongs

Nearly a dozen analyses of JamC vowel and diphthong systems exist, positing inventories from 8–17, and variously motivated by historical transparency (Cassidy 1961), symmetry (Devonish and Harry, this volume) or phonetic accuracy (Beckford Wassink 1999). This last, the most detailed empirical analysis, describes JamC as a V-shaped, peripheral, symmetrical system with five front and five back vowels and two at the low apex, and demonstrates that contrasts often attributed to length alone, an important distinctive feature of JamC, are supported by systematic quality distinctions as well. BrC however relies primarily on vowel quality, and vowel length generally patterns with LonVE. Variants which might be contrastively associated with Standard Jamaican English (StJamE) are rare in BrC, where vernacular structures (both British and Jamaican) predominate, and are more often encountered in the speech of Caribbean-born migrants than later generations.

(2) Jamaican Creole vowel inventory (based on Beckford Wassink 1999)

The inventory in (2) is fairly typical, except that it explicitly recognizes quality distinctions as well as length in every sub-system. Analyses with fewer members inevitably dephonemicise some regular and salient distinctions; those with more typically admit debatable separate subclasses, such as rhotic vowels (Veatch 1991). Beckford Wassink concludes that  is not phonetically distinguishable for most speakers from /a/, as suggested in Patrick (1995), thus giving only five short vowels and six long ones or diphthongs.

Table 1 summarizes the principal vowel variants; the general effect is a London like system with a variably Jamaican-like sound. It is difficult, in the present state of knowledge, to make quantitative statements about preference, and it cannot be asserted (without premature idealization) that all variants even belong to the same system, given such factors as variable rhoticity, vowel quality dispersion and overlap, alternation of centring glides with monophthongs with upglides in the same word-class, etc. Nevertheless, all variants may be encountered in the speech of Caribbean-origin Britons who claim to be using ‘Patwa’ or ‘Creole’.

There are often differences, however, between speakers who were born and spent at least early childhood years in the Caribbean, and those born in Britain like Sally, the twenty-something speaker of the word-list sample on the accompanying CD-ROM. Though both Sally’s parents are from Kingston, she identifies herself during the recording saying, “Yeah but I’m Cockney!” Her mother and Paulette, a British-born but Jamaica-raised woman a generation older, tease her saying “You fly the flag”, and “You Londoner... Cockney”. Sally’s assimilated speech may represent the future of London Jamaican pronunciation, though the chart captures a range of variants (hers are generally rightmost, Paulette’s to the left).