The White Creole Speaker
In class, we talked about recreolisation and in particular, we looked at London Jamaican. As indicated, the phenomenon of recreolisation cannot be understood independently from an awareness of the social context surrounding the recreolisation.
What type of motivations can you imagine, would account for the ‘White Creole Speaker’?
Advertisement
-
Recent Comments
Patrick Eichhorn on A Dialect Continuum Eltje Lahno on Pidgins and Creoles: Issues fo… Eltje Lahno on Pidgins and Creoles: Issues fo… Eltje Lahno on Creoles Julia on Creoles
February 1, 2008 at 10:31 am
One reason for recreolisation may be the expression of one’s personality, for example the german artist gentleman makes reggae music and so he maybe wants to underline this “reggaestyle” by an Jamaican accent, (because most people associate reggae with jamaica, with dreadlocks, bob marley etc.)
Another reason might be the distiction from other groups, eg. the Bavarian from the “rest” of Germany. Or young people who want to distinguish themselves from older ones.
February 1, 2008 at 11:22 am
As we already mentioned in class yesterday, the phenomenon of recreolisation can be seen as a means of finding and expressing one’s ethnic identity – at least in the case of those “recreolised” speakers who already have the ethnic background in question (that is, creole-speaking parents or grandparents). Thus, speaking the creole can help to find social orientation, especially in the case of youth subcultures. This would mean that speaking a creole is part of the style of subcultures, as examined by Dick Hebdige in the field of cultural studies. A “white creole speaker” could then be somenone who originally has a non-creole-speaking background but who nonetheless identifies him- or herself with a particular subculture. Speaking the creole could then account for some kind of “street credibility”. This could be the case in the 1960s/1970s British skinhead subculture – a “white” working-class youth subculture which was highly influenced by the culture (especially, as mentioned in the first comment above, by music) of Jamaican immigrants.