Summary
[...] most Jamaicans don't, at least not as their first language. In 1997, an uproar bounced from coast to coast after the school district in Oakland, Calif., announced plans to conduct bilingual education in ebonies, plans which were soon abandoned. [...] public opinion, driven by anti-Latino bias, has tilted against bilingual education in general.
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THEY SPEAK ENGLISH IN JAMAICA, RIGHT? ACTUALLY, most Jamaicans don't, at least not as their first language. That would be Jamaican patois, or "patwa," as they say in the Caribbean nation.
Nearly 80 percent of Jamaicans speak both English, the official language, and patois, a hybrid with a similar vocabulary but a structure borrowed from African tongues. In the well-schooled opinion of linguists at the University of the West Indies, patois is a different language from English. They have been building a case to persuade the Black-majority country to own up to its bilingual heritage.The Jamaican linguists have produced a guide to writing patois, published this summer and packaged with a music video on compact disc, and have conducted a four-year experiment using bilingual techni...See the full content of this document
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