Language attitudes and linguistic awareness in Jamaican English

This paper presents results from a pilot study testing the acceptability of a number of lexical and morphosyntactic features which have been identified in previous corpus-based analyses as more frequent in educated Jamaican English usage than in other standard varieties of English. The results from the questionnaire survey show that there are considerable differences between individual items on the questionnaire, with regard to their acceptability in writing as well as their regional background. Such differences merit further investigation and must be taken into account in the codification of a standard Jamaican English.