This study explores the connection between Jamaican language prosody and reggae rhythm as a fundamental building block of Jamaican national identity. The background is the current movement to award national hero status to creative figures Louise Bennett Coverly and Bob Marley, whose work in the national language and music represents the Jamaican "nation" as distinct from the official "state". Using acoustic analysis of two-syllable Jamaican words and Bob Marley's "One Drop," the research identifies a shared structural feature called prosodic delay. In the Jamaican language, high pitch is frequently delayed to the second syllable, a pattern often described as "topsy-turvy" by speakers of Standard English. Similarly, the "one drop" reggae rhythm de-emphasizes the first beat of a measure, shifting prominence to later beats through a complex system of simultaneous quick and slow counting. The authors argue that this musical rhythm represents the transfer of the linguistic pattern of prosodic delay into music, creating a distinct acoustic signature for the reggae genre. Historically, this shared rhythm has served as a powerful tool for symbolic resistance against cultural and linguistic assimilation into Anglo-North American norms. By embracing these "deviant" prosodic features, both in speech and in music, the Jamaican nation asserts its cultural distinctiveness from the neo-colonial Jamaican state and the former colonial power. Ultimately, this linguistic and musical nexus allows the Jamaican people to define their identity through the defiant declaration: "They are not us". (c) 2026 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

While major languages often enjoy substantial attention and resources, the linguistic diversity across the globe encompasses a multitude of smaller, indigenous, and regional languages that lack the same level of computational support. One such region is the Caribbean. While commonly labeled as "English speaking", the ex-British Caribbean region consists of a myriad of Creole languages thriving alongside English. In this paper, we present GuyLingo: a comprehensive corpus designed for advancing NLP research in the domain of Creolese (Guyanese English-lexicon Creole), the most widely spoken language in the culturally rich nation of Guyana. We first outline our framework for gathering and digitizing this diverse corpus, inclusive of colloquial expressions, idioms, and regional variations in a low-resource language. We then demonstrate the challenges of training and evaluating NLP models for machine translation for Creolese. Lastly, we discuss the unique opportunities presented by recent NLP advancements for accelerating the formal adoption of Creole languages as official languages in the Caribbean.

The conflict between environmental justice and economic development is an issue central to the developing world. Using an interview analysis of community residents, this study seeks to identify whether the formally proposed trans-shipment hub sited for the Goat Islands in Jamaica is an environmental injustice. The site, situated in the Portland Bight Protected Area, is one of Jamaica's largest fish sanctuaries and provides hundreds in the community with their livelihoods. The hub, which was promoted as an economic development project by the Jamaican government, would have allowed Jamaica to enter into the global trans-shipment chain, subsequently reaping millions of dollars in profit. Resultant themes include issues related to environmental degradation, displacement of community members, hope for employment opportunities and investments into communities and desire for consultation. While many community residents had concerns regarding the potential location of the logistics hub, there were mixed reactions as to whether this type of development should never be allowed to take place. The study reveals the conundrum that is faced by states when it comes to promoting economic development initiatives. On the one hand, there is a desire for these forms of investment to spur economic advancement, yet on the other hand, the environmental injustices cannot be ignored. Further, the paper reveals the importance of consultation and recognition when development projects are proposed.

Jamaicans are aware that the level of influence they have in the world way outstrips the size of the country or the size of its population. There is a phrase that sums up Jamaicans’ understanding of the place of themselves and their country in the world. In the mass media and in private conversation, the explanatory phrase, ‘Wi likl bot wi talawa’ always comes up. It may translate into something like ‘We are small but we are strong’. The word ‘talawa’ does not translate well into English. The entry for this word in the Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cassidy and Le Page 1980, p. 436) says, ‘Sturdy, strong, not to be underestimated; tough, stubborn’. Amongst Jamaicans who travel, there is an oft-repeated statement that there is no place in the world, however remote, where you would not be able to find a Jamaican.

This book is a sociolinguistic analysis of the intersectionality of race, language and national identity in Jamaica, exploring the dynamics and implications of a majority black nation where a dominant ideology continues to look at white countries as models.

Hurricane Irma caused significant destruction to the Caribbean during the 2017 Atlantic Hurricane season. In its aftermath, many of these Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are left with the dilemma of seeking ways to rebuild in some cases entire nation states. Using the case study of Antigua and Barbuda, where Barbuda was the first Caribbean island to receive a direct hit from Hurricane Irma, the paper begins to explore the ways in which the global system of exploitation of SIDS exacerbates internal historical conflicts which is a manifestation of climate injustices. Specifically, the Barbudans’ relative privilege in having inherited communal land rights have become, for the government, the barrier standing in the way of the only alternative funding sources for reconstruction, foreign tourism investment. Using the theoretical underpinnings of climate justice, we argue that the causers of climate change, who are generally the inheritors of the historic colonization, exploitation and impoverishment of these states, will effectively benefit from the intensity of Hurricane Irma, given that they will eventually get access to Barbudan land if the communal land rights are revoked.

The paper questions the role of the transformative artist within Caribbean popular culture with reference to the costumed "Mas" bands in Trinidad Carnival, using Fanon's argument on the role of the artist as the theoretical base. Using the documentary "The Minshall Trilogy: A Modern Fable as Street Theatre" as its source of visual and contextual data on these bands, the paper examines how the artist, Peter Minshall, takes the traditional folk worldview of an agrarian 19th century Trinidad and converts it into a late 20th century discourse on industrial development, materialism, moral vales and development.

Industrialization projects have been promoted as one of the main drivers of economic regional integration for the Caribbean region. However, surrounding residents to industrial projects are often concerned about the impact on their community, health and the physical environment. Their opinions often become part of a public discourse involving a range of stakeholders, including the community, state and international actors. Using a politics of scale and intersectionality framework, grounded in environmental justice, this article examines how scale and marginality play a role in explaining why regional industrial projects are often difficult to implement, using the case of a proposed Alutrint smelter in Trinidad. Content analysis and thematic coding was applied to 296 national newspaper articles that documented the public discourse on the Alutrint smelter. Quotes on the arguments made by various stakeholders were categorized into international, regional, national and local scales. The results indicate that themes of rights, economic effects, and concerns for health and safety were central to the discourse. However, there was a breakdown in communication across the scales resulting on local community choosing freedom over development.

Creole languages are formed in conditions where speakers from distinct languages are brought together without a shared first language, typically under the domination of speakers from one of the languages and particularly in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism. One such Creole in Suriname, Sranan, developed around the mid-seventeenth century, primarily out of contact between varieties of English from England, spoken by the dominant group, and multiple West African languages. The vast majority of the basic words in Sranan come from the language of the dominant group, English. Here, we compare linguistic features of modern-day Sranan with those of English as spoken in 313 localities across England. By way of testing proposed hypotheses for the origin of English words in Sranan, we find that 80% of the studied features of Sranan can be explained by similarity to regional dialect features at two distinct input locations within England, a cluster of locations near the port of Bristol and another cluster near Essex in eastern England. Our new hypothesis is supported by the geographical distribution of specific regional dialect features, such as post-vocalic rhoticity and word-initial ‘h’, and by phylogenetic analysis of these features, which shows evidence favouring input from at least two English dialects in the formation of Sranan. In addition to explicating the dialect features most prominent in the linguistic evolution of Sranan, our historical analyses also provide supporting evidence for two distinct hypotheses about the likely geographical origins of the English speakers whose language was an input to Sranan. The emergence as a likely input to Sranan of the speech forms of a cluster near Bristol is consistent with historical records, indicating that most of the indentured servants going to the Americas between 1654 and 1666 were from Bristol and nearby counties, and that of the cluster near Essex is consistent with documents showing that many of the governors and important planters came from the southeast of England (including London) (Smith 1987 The Genesis of the Creole Languages of Surinam; Smith 2009 In The handbook of pidgin and creole studies, pp. 98–129).This article is part of the theme issue ‘Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution’.

Creole languages are formed in conditions where speakers from distinct languages are brought together without a shared first language, typically under the domination of speakers from one of the languages and particularly in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism. One such Creole in Suriname, Sranan, developed around the mid-seventeenth century, primarily out of contact between varieties of English from England, spoken by the dominant group, and multiple West African languages. The vast majority of the basic words in Sranan come from the language of the dominant group, English. Here, we compare linguistic features of modern-day Sranan with those of English as spoken in 313 localities across England. By way of testing proposed hypotheses for the origin of English words in Sranan, we find that 80% of the studied features of Sranan can be explained by similarity to regional dialect features at two distinct input locations within England, a cluster of locations near the port of Bristol and another cluster near Essex in eastern England. Our new hypothesis is supported by the geographical distribution of specific regional dialect features, such as post-vocalic rhoticity and word-initial 'h', and by phylogenetic analysis of these features, which shows evidence favouring input from at least two English dialects in the formation of Sranan. In addition to explicating the dialect features most prominent in the linguistic evolution of Sranan, our historical analyses also provide supporting evidence for two distinct hypotheses about the likely geographical origins of the English speakers whose language was an input to Sranan. The emergence as a likely input to Sranan of the speech forms of a cluster near Bristol is consistent with historical records, indicating that most of the indentured servants going to the Americas between 1654 and 1666 were from Bristol and nearby counties, and that of the cluster near Essex is consistent with documents showing that many of the governors and important planters came from the southeast of England (including London) (Smith 1987 The Genesis of the Creole Languages of Surinam; Smith 2009 In The handbook of pidgin and creole studies, pp. 98-129). This article is part of the theme issue 'Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution'.

Purpose To describe validation of the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS; McLeod, Harrison, & McCormack, 2012a) and ICS–Jamaican Creole (ICS-JC; McLeod, Harrison, & McCormack, 2012b) in a sample of typically developing 3- to 6-year-old Jamaicans. Method One-hundred and forty-five preschooler–parent dyads participated in the study. Parents completed the 7-item ICS (n = 145) and ICS-JC (n = 98) to rate children's speech intelligibility (5-point scale) across communication partners (parents, immediate family, extended family, friends, acquaintances, strangers). Preschoolers completed the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP; Dodd, Hua, Crosbie, Holm, & Ozanne, 2006) in English and Jamaican Creole to establish speech-sound competency. For this sample, we examined validity and reliability (interrater, test–rest, internal consistency) evidence using measures of speech-sound production: (a) percentage of consonants correct, (b) percentage of vowels correct, and (c) percentage of phonemes correct. Results ICS and ICS-JC ratings showed preschoolers were always (5) to usually (4) understood across communication partners (ICS, M = 4.43; ICS-JC, M = 4.50). Both tools demonstrated excellent internal consistency (α = .91), high interrater, and test–retest reliability. Significant correlations between the two tools and between each measure and language-specific percentage of consonants correct, percentage of vowels correct, and percentage of phonemes correct provided criterion-validity evidence. A positive correlation between the ICS and age further strengthened validity evidence for that measure. Conclusions Both tools show promising evidence of reliability and validity in describing functional speech intelligibility for this group of typically developing Jamaican preschoolers.

Cet article s'intéresse à l'évolution de pratiques linguistiques rivales dans les musiques populaires jamaïcaines, des années 1950 à nos jours. Deux langues coexistent et rivalisent en effet en Jamaïque : l'anglais, héritage linguistique de l'époque coloniale, et langue officielle de l'État jamaïcain postcolonial, dispute sa place dans les paroles des chansons avec la langue jamaïcaine (le créole jamaïcain, ou Patois). Ce dernier est la langue maternelle de la vaste majorité de la population, et constitue de facto la langue nationale. Cet article analyse la façon dont cet affrontement se déroule, et le type de langue qui en vient à être associé avec les différents genres musicaux jamaïcains. Son analyse culmine avec l'examen du rôle que la langue jamaïcaine a fini par jouer, par l'intermédiaire de la musique, dans le défi le plus important que l'État jamaïcain a dû affronter depuis l'indépendance : la confrontation militaire qui se déroula à Kingston Ouest/Tivoli Gardens en mai 2010 pour l'arrestation et l'extradition de Christopher « Dudus » Coke.