Volume 60, Issue 3

The paper investigates language use in rapso, a Trinidad-based music genre which evolved in the 1970s on the basis of local calypso and call-andresponse traditions and incorporated, among others, influences from US hip hop and Jamaican reggae and dancehall. Analysing the use of local and international English forms in three representative songs by performers Brother Resistance (1980s), Kindred (1990s) and 3canal (present), I show how Trinidad Creole English develops from a straightforward symbol of cultural self-assertion and local authenticity against the British colonial tradition to one element in a more complex sociolinguistic mix, which sees several varieties of standard and nonstandard English competing in an increasingly globalized contemporary mediasphere. The phenomena described here thus lend themselves well to analysis in the framework of the sociolinguistics of mobile resources which Blommaert has proposed in his 2010 book Sociolinguistics of Globalization

The present paper deals with multilingual practices as they have emerged in Nigeria’s vibrant hip hop community. Apart from English, the most important strand in the multilingual fabric of Nigerian hip hop lyrics is Nigerian Pidgin. In addition, several more indigenous languages are used regularly. The focus of the present study, however, is on the use of two foreign varieties, namely African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Jamaican Creole or Patois (JC). Borrowing from AAVE and JC is a useful strategy for Nigerian artists to authenticate their performances by international standards. In principle, multilingual practices, including use of dialects and languages which are not natively spoken in a community, fits in well with the hip hop aesthetic. However, as will be shown, some AAVE and JC elements are borrowed without a full understanding of their linguistic and cultural context or transformed in an effort to adapt them to a new local context, which also runs the risk of undermining authenticity. Borrowing from AAVE and JC proves most problematical on the level of grammar

Authenticity and ownership have been problematic for both linguists and users of Creole in Britain. In this paper we review the changing issues connected with authenticity and ethnicity, based on empirical research spanning the period 1981-2011. Second-generation speakers of Creole in London in the 1980s were conscious that they could not pass for natives when in the Caribbean, but could nevertheless claim to be authentic ‘Black British’ by virtue of commanding both the local British vernacular and a local version of Jamaican Creole (Sebba 1993). By the end of the century, claims of authenticity linked to ethnic identity had been undermined by the emergence of a non-ethnically specific youth variety incorporating Creole grammatical and phonological features, as parodied by the fictitious character Ali G (Sebba 2003, 2007), sometimes called ‘Jafaican’ by the media. We argue that as ‘Creole’ manifests itself less and less as a linguistic system and more and more as an additional linguistic resource in a complex semiotic system, ‘authenticity’ is achieved through practices rather than inherited ethnicity or native-like use of a specific variety

This paper examines processes of authentication in Paget Farm, one of the communities in creole-speaking Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines). The study is based on sociolinguistic interviews with two generations of Bequia speakers, adolescents and their grandparents, recorded in the course of semiethnographic fieldwork. Several variants of past temporal reference were analysed: bare verbs (I go yesterday) vs. inflected verbs (I went yesterday), and preverbal been (I been go yesterday) - a stigmatised, “old-fashioned”, basilectal form (Patrick 1999). This paper not only shows that authenticity, rather than being a constant quality of a speech community, is linguistically and socially constructed, but also considers speakers’ motivations behind this process. Crucial to authentication are the social meanings of linguistic variables, local ideologies, as well as the larger socio-economic context. Moreover, I demonstrate that creole speaking communities, where the relationship between the global and the local is particularly strong, provide an especially fruitful area for research on authenticity

This paper considers to what extent authentic language varieties can be identified in the Anglophone Caribbean, and most specifically in Trinidad & Tobago at the present time, and makes a case for our recognizing that we need to acknowledge mixed varieties and mixed language usage as authentic where we find it to be normative. The paper sets the Caribbean quest for authenticity of language in the broader frame of the search for a Caribbean aesthetic and examines briefly the evolving process aimed at authenticating creole languages through codification and literary representation. In so doing, it notes that our intellectual pursuits do not necessarily mesh with the concerns of community speakers and that ultimately a line has to be drawn between our own perceptions of authenticity and those of the everyday speaker. The comment in the title of the paper that tells us that the ‘real’ language is, in fact, a ‘mix-up’, was produced by an informant who was being quizzed on this very matter and who spoke in the context of a small rural village in Tobago, untrammelled by the forces of late-modern contact in a setting which might have allowed for the continued existence of a single coherent historically derived variety if any such context might be found