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“Creole is not a badly spoken type of English; it is a language of its own,” he said, adding that the language came of its own culture, and has its own life and grammar.
He said Guyanese Creole was spawned in the period of slavery and indentureship, when our forefathers, who spoke different languages, attempted communication among themselves and with the whites.
“It didn’t arise from someone taking English and French and corrupting it. It was a case where people were trying to communicate, and took from their own linguistic ability. Creole is a contact language,” he added, dismissing the negative image of Creole that is painted in society.
“It is a remarkable product of human ability and creativity in language. Once people understand this, it will help to change their perception on Guyanese Creole,” he opined.
He said Creole language occurs in almost every nation, and arises primarily from a need to communicate, and therefore Creole should be seen as language creation; but the negativity of Creole was engrained into our minds by the whites, with the language being described as inferior and bastardized being another way of enslaving us.
“Most people still believe that the whites are superior to coloured people, and that is because we were fed those sentiments. The whites thought to themselves, when they first heard our language, that it sounded like English but it’s not the English they speak, and they labelled it as a broken form of English,” he said
He added that Creole was one of the intellectual academic arguments during the period of slavery. Those arguments revolved around the size of the human skull. Since the skull of a white person was larger than the skull of any coloured person, the whites assumed themselves superior. Their theory that coloured people were intellectually deficient was drafted from those arguments.
“It was a racist theory. (They argued that) for Creole to be language, it must have order and grammar, and it has both! But the self-defeating attitude was engrained in us, and instead of us looking at our language and asking ‘how did our foreparents communicate with the whites? How did they manage to communicate under such harsh treatment?’ we label their language as inferior,” Hosein said.
More efficient
“On the contrary,” he said, “from a linguistic point of view, Creole is more efficient than English.” He reasoned that, linguistically, the English language has more inconsistency than Guyanese Creole; and that, under critical examination, English grammar proves to be redundant.
“English says ‘two white houses,’ and Guyanese Creole says ‘two white house.’ In the English language, the plural is marked twice, (and) that is the redundancy. Looked at from that point of view, we can say English grammar is heavily redundant,” Hosein said.
However, he said the Creole only marks it once: ‘Two white house,’ and therefore its grammar is more efficient.
“People perceive the English grammar as being perfect, and you find people saying you must speak proper English,” he said, “but the grammar of English is the grammar of English, and the grammar of Creole is the grammar of Creole. We can’t say English is imperfect, because no language is superior or inferior. They evolved from history and culture and people, and they change and borrow elements from other languages. That is what language is,” he declared.
“So what is the purity and perfection English? And why compare the two? Why don’t we compare English with Spanish?” he reasoned.
He explained that much of our vocabulary (in Creole) was taken from English, but the grammar came from the people’s own linguistic ability; and many people in Guyana think that Creole is a version of English because it sounds like English and is laced with English words, but much of the English vocabulary is used differently in Guyana.
“For example, we have the words back and dam and we join them and say backdam. The English person wouldn’t know what is a backdam or a bottomhouse.” He said there is internal prejudice against Guyanese Creole and those who speak it. “We were fed (the belief) that Creole is bad. People are always saying ‘speak proper English’ or ‘we don’t speak Creole, but them people does.’ We are always trying to establish hierarchies and point to someone below us. That’s why we tend to say, ‘Oh, Berbice people talk Creole’, or ‘country people or coolie people’; but the truth is we all speak Creole, even the people who think they are speaking English.
“They are not speaking English, because the pronunciations are different, the meanings are different, and the lexicons are different, even though the grammar might look like English,” he said.
“So, even if you round up your mouth and you pronounce your ‘th’, the language is soaked with the culture,” he added. He mentioned that students at the University of Guyana who study Linguistics are amazed that Creole is an actual language, and that they can study it historically and do theories on it. “There is no need to compare English and Guyanese Creole,” he reasoned.
He said that our language should be embraced by society, but he also recognizes the need for English. “English is becoming globalised. It’s an international language, and so for us to participate in this international community, it is good for us to know English. We recognize all the benefits of the language,” he said, holding on to his argument that Guyanese Creole should not be seen as a bastardized and inferior form of English.
