Jamaican Creole Goes Web
Sociolinguistic styling and authenticity in a digital 'Yaad'
Author
Large-scale migration after WWII and the prominence of Jamaican Creole in the media have promoted its use all around the globe. Deterritorialisation has entailed the contact-induced transformation of Jamaican Creole in diaspora communities and its adoption by ‘crossers’. Taking sociolinguistic globalisation yet a step further, this monograph investigates the use of Jamaican Creole in a web discussion forum by combining quantitative and qualitative methodology in a sociolinguistic ‘third wave’ approach. In the absence of standardised orthography, one of the central aims of this study is to document the sociolinguistic styling and grassroots (anti-) standardisation of spelling norms for Jamaican Creole in the web forum as a virtual community of practice. An analysis of individual repertoire portraits demonstrates that conventionalised spelling variants co-occur with basilectal Jamaican Creole morphosyntax in ‘Cyber-Jamaican’ as the digital ethnolinguistic repertoire of the discussion forum. The enregisterment of this ethnolinguistic repertoire is closely tied to staged performance, which establishes the link between ‘Cyber-Jamaican’ and the negotiation of sociolinguistic identity and authenticity via stance-taking.
[Creole Language Library, 49] 2015. viii, 294 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements | pp. vii–viii
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1. The Globalisation Of Jamaican Creole | pp. 1–13
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2. Creole On The Web: The 'Corpus Of Cyber-Jamaican' | pp. 15–19
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3. The Sociolinguistics Of Cmc | pp. 21–31
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4. Spelling: Grassroots Conventionalisation And Styling | pp. 33–125
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5. 'Cyber-Jamaican': A Digital Ethnolinguistic Repertoire | pp. 127–182
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6. The Sociolinguistic Authenticity Of 'Cyber-Jamaican' | pp. 183–247
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7. Conclusion | pp. 249–261
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Appendix | pp. 273–291
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Index | pp. 293–294
“This is a very comprehensive and well-argued study […]. I recommend it to anyone interested in the sociolinguistics of creole languages, as it makes a signifi- cant contribution to closing the much-lamented gap between current research in sociolinguistics and sociolinguistic research on creoles.”
Bettina Migge, University Colle Dublin, in Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 33:2, 2018
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Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CFB: Sociolinguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General