Caribbean Culture: Language and Music

Class Updates

• Papers have been graded but there are issues with the system, should be resolved by Thursday.

• One more paper is due, with two questions instead of one.

Focus of the Class

• Culture, specifically dealing with language and music as analogs to understand Caribbean cultures.

• Modern Caribbean from the 1990s onwards.

Initial Discussion

• Words associated with Caribbean languages and cultures:

  • Tradition

  • Instruments

  • Beats

  • Religion

  • Creole/Creolization

  • Folk

  • Community Affirmations

  • Communal

  • Market culture/Commerce

  • National culture/National identity

Creole and Creolization

• Creole: A language that is a mixture of different languages, often in unequal power dynamics, that becomes a new native language.

• Creolization: A social and cultural process where different cultures mix to create a new culture that becomes native.

• English is a classic Creole language, with French and Germanic languages mixing after the Norman invasion.

  • William Shakespeare and the King James Bible mark the moment English came into its own.

Tucson Example

• Tucson was born in the French colony of Saint Domingue.

• His parents were African survivors from Dahomey (Fon culture) and West Central Africa (Congo languages).

• He grew up multilingual, speaking Fon, Congo languages, French, and Creole.

• As the leader of the Haitian Revolution, his first language was Creole, making him able to communicate with a wide range of people.

Creole (Person)

• Typically means someone born in The Americas, compared to someone from Europe or Africa.

• In Louisiana, it refers to black New Orleans people of French colonial background.

Dominant Creole Languages

• English

Languages Spoken in The Caribbean

• European Colonial Languages: Spanish, English, French, Dutch.

• Creole Languages: Haitian Creole, Jamaican Patois, Papiamento, Aripuana.

• Other Languages: Hindi, Chinese, Arabic.

Creation of Creole Languages

• Dominant Relationship: European language of power mixed with African languages.

• Inter-African Creolization: Mixing of different African languages.

• Africans teaching other Africans the European language.

• Large plantations often had a significant proportion of people from the same part of Africa with similar linguistic backgrounds.

Pidgin

• Linguists use the term pidgin to describe a reduced language used for instruction in colonial situations.

• Some linguists believe that Creole languages come from pidgin languages, but this is a point of contention.

Spanish Speaking Caribbean

• Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic are considered to speak Spanish, not a Creole.

• Multilingual examples: Trinidad (English, French Creole, Spanish, Urdu, Yoruba), Suriname (Dutch, Sranan Tongo, Saramaccan, Javanese, Hindi).

• Bilingual examples: Saint Lucia, Dominica, Grenada (English, French Creole), Netherlands Antilles (Dutch, Papiamento).

• Diglossia examples: Haiti (French, French Creole).

• Continuum examples: Much of the English-speaking Caribbean.

• Monolingual examples: Barbados, Antigua, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.

Standard vs. Nonstandard Language

• Standard: Official language of government, communications, schools, and business.

• Nonstandard: Informal language spoken at home or in the streets.
  Dominican standard Spanish is different from Spanish in Spain.

Continuum

• Two poles with movement in between.

• Example: Jamaican (standard English) vs. broad/country Jamaican (nonstandard).

• Patois is close to an English version of Haitian Creole.

• Languages are made up of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and sound/pronunciation.

• Most words in Jamaican Patois come from English, but the grammar and sound system are West African.

National Identity

• Previously, middle-class Jamaicans identified with perfect English, but now Patois is taken to represent Jamaican people.
  Media and Television
  Everywhere in The Caribbean, life has been transformed by modern media beginning with radio during the colonial times. Over time, media has changed, which has affected national culture. Louise Bennett, a famous poet, storyteller, and actor in Jamaica was one of the first people in Jamaica to make this linguistic culture of the people respectable to be respected.

Music

• Similar to language, musical traditions in The Caribbean are a blend of European and African traditions.
  Religious Significance
  Music has strong religious overtones in The Caribbean, going back to slave times and the creation of Afro-Caribbean religions. Different drumming traditions originate from Africa, such as the drumming in Haiti from West African fon cultures drums in Santa Maria, in Cuba, right, the drumming is that of the Yoruba style Right. Music in that sense, going back to African traditions, right, being introduced into, into The Caribbean is an important part of manipulative practice.

Music significance

The Caribbean is well-known for creating music, and is a major basis of all popular music being produced today. Reggaeton, reggae, dancehall, salsa, cumbia, and calypso, are just some of the musical forms of the Caribbean.