Morris Cargill and his Bukra Talk

Below is a subsection of the late Morris Cargill's July 15, 1999 Gleaner Column entry entitled "Bad News."  He entitled this section of his column "Slave talk." I am unaware of the percentage of Jamaicans who would embrace Cargil's correlation between a Jamaican's inability to master English and indiscipline.  Not a few, however, would agree with the late "intellectual" that Jamaican Creole is substandard English. May the Lord be pleased to use our translation project to eradicate these misconceptions of Jamaican Creole (and its speakers). 


"I prefer to describe what we call our patois as either slave talk or yahoolish, for that is what it really is. 

When I was going around the other West Indian islands during the Federation I was greatly impressed by two important things. When Grantley Adams made his speeches in the Federal House he often spoke with a thick Barbadian accent. But beneath that accent his speeches were well structured, and were in excellent English. I soon found that to be true of all the Barbadians I met. Never mind the accent. Whatever they said was firmly based upon well structured English.

The Trinidadians had a different but softer accent, yet they too spoke excellent English. When one phoned a private home both the maid and the mistress spoke the same excellent English with the same charming lilting accent.

The situation in Barbados and Trinidad differs greatly from the situation in Jamaica for our patois is nothing more than hopelessly broken English, unstructured and incapable of dealing with abstract concepts, without tense or number.

Although a few Jackasses, some of whom are at the University, keep on claiming that Patois is some kind of language, it is nothing more than an undisciplined and unstructured kind of chattering. An undisciplined and disorderly way of speaking makes for an undisciplined and disorderly mind. Of course the converse is also true. A disorderly and undisciplined mind also brings about a disorderly and undisciplined way of talking.

One doesn't know which comes first but I don't think it matters. Every writer complains about the lack of discipline in Jamaica but it doesn't seem to occur to many that that indiscipline is expressed by, and probably results from, the undisciplined way so many talk. We should watch our language and stop calling slave talk some sort of cultural heritage. It is nothing of the sort. It is simply mental sloppiness. Barbados and Trinidad both have a useful lesson to teach us. It may well be the reason why both those countries are so very much more successful than we are."


Post by Bertram Gayle - Project Co-ordinator