Chapter 4

Metathesiophobia, nutty professors and Patois

Sending a message to another person across space and time is one of the oldest and most fundamental purposes of writing. The letter, which fulfils this distancing function of writing, emerged as one of the earliest written text formats. This chapter will focus on a particular type of argumentative letter and media text, i.e. the “Letter to the Editor”, written by readers – usually in response to an article or another reader’s letter – and published in the opinion section of newspapers. Letters to the editor form an important part of public interaction and, as a genre, are intertextual and dialogic (Bakhtin 1986) in nature.

Opinions about language use and language politics often find a public outlet in letters to the editor (Tardy 2009, Sturiale 2016). The corpus of data analysed in this chapter consists of just over 100 letters to the editor in the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner from the years 1999 to early 2002 and from the years 2010 to early 2020. The letters are part of a long-standing and ongoing language debate on the use of Jamaican Patois/ Creole in various contexts of Jamaican life. In the analysis of these letters, a particular focus will be placed on the language ideologies expressed in them as well as the positioning of the writers by means of speech acts of complaints and pleas. An outlook will be provided on reactions in a social media platform to a petition (“pitishan”) to make Jamaican Creole an official language in Jamaica alongside English.