This is the kind of thing that enrages me; Natricia Duncan and Anthony Lugg report in the Guardian:
When the Jamaican MP Nekeisha Burchell stood up to give her maiden speech, she was keenly aware of how much her country’s parliament mirrored the Westminster version thousands of miles away in London. […] Burchell, the opposition spokesperson for culture, creative industries and information, approached the microphone and began to speak. “Madam speaka, mi git up dis afta noon fi mek mi fuss sectoral speech, pan me portfolio …”
The speaker, Juliet Holness, immediately cut her off. “Hold on, hold on, hold on! Standing orders, and I think you are fully aware,” said Holness, who is the wife of Jamaica’s prime minister. The regulation to which Holness referred was the rule that only English – and certainly not Jamaican – is allowed in parliament. “If I have to stop you again during your presentation, you will not get any additional time,” Holness told Burchell as parliament erupted into protest, with someone chiding “broken English”.
Burchell had ignited an explosive debate across the country and beyond about the enduring legacy of British colonialism and whether robes, prayers for the British monarch and the “king’s English” are still right for Jamaica, more than 60 years after it gained independence.
Burchell continued her speech in standard English. “Madam speaker, perhaps I should abandon that attempt to use our local language because I have been reminded of the linguistic conventions of this honourable house,” she said. “Because maybe there is no more fitting way to begin a presentation on culture than to speak briefly in the language understood by the overwhelming majority of Jamaican people – even if that language still struggles for full acceptance in some of our most formal national spaces, including this very parliament.”
Speaking to the Guardian this week, Burchell said: “The moment really exposed unresolved tensions around language, legitimacy and postcolonial identity.” She said it was not her intention to disrespect parliament or cause disorder. “For me, the question is not whether parliament should have rules. Of course it should. The intention was to disrupt the comfort zone we have found ourselves in.
“We have gotten comfortable with keeping things like the prayer we say before parliament starts every single week … We’re saying these words that we don’t understand. We’re still wearing these wigs and these robes in a hot climate like Jamaica, because we are still keeping these models.”
Burchell said her intervention was not meant to be “anti-British” or “anti-English” but was more about Jamaica’s cultural confidence. “Jamaica’s language has become one of the most globally recognisable cultural expressions to come out of the Caribbean. Through reggae, dancehall, athletics, popular culture, people across the world recognise the rhythm, energy, boldness, humour [and] the emotional texture of our language. And I think that’s part of why this conversation resonated internationally,” she said. […]
Prof Carolyn Cooper, a literary scholar, was one of several Jamaican academics to support Burchell’s intervention. On Friday, Cooper interviewed Burchell entirely in Jamaican on the University of the West Indies (UWI) YouTube platform. “I describe our language as Jamaican. Not Jamaican Patois, not Jamaican Creole, not dialect, none of those. Jamaican! Just like French, Spanish, English, German and any other language,” Cooper said.
“I think the problem is that we don’t recognise Jamaican as a language, because if we did, Jamaica would be officially bilingual,” she said, adding there was a widespread perception that Jamaican was not a language in itself. […]
According to Dr Joseph Farquharson, a coordinator of the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) at UWI, Jamaican “has all of the features, all of the characteristics or properties of a language”. The language has a complex history, coming not only “out of European imperial expansion and colonialism” but also from other languages and dialects, he said.
“Jamaican is like several other languages referred to as creole languages. Those languages emerged in the context of Atlantic plantation slavery out of the interaction between Europeans and Africans, mostly west Africans,” Farquharson said.
On the campaign trail, Jamaican politicians normally use Jamaican, and the 2005 language attitude survey of Jamaica suggested most Jamaicans recognised “Patwa” as a language and thought it should be made an official language alongside English, he noted. “Nobody has suggested getting rid of English. What is being suggested is that we make a space for the language that most Jamaicans use and understand.” […]
Sonjah Stanley Niaah, the director for UWI’s Centre for Reparation Research, described the parliamentary rule of speaking English only as a “direct legacy of enslavement”. She said: “It is surprising that, in a parliament with intentions to petition the king of England for a response in relation to whether enslavement of Africans was a crime against humanity, in a country which has a ministry of culture charting the reparation agenda, that such a negative response to the use of Jamaican was upheld.”
It’s bad enough when colonial powers officially suppress the languages of the peoples they colonized; it boggles my mind that the government of a country that threw off British rule would continue to insist on “proper” English at the expense of the language of its own people. But power, anywhere and everywhere, insists on conformity. (If you want the opposing view, that “rules should govern,” click through and read the official responses, which I have elided because they make my teeth itch.)
After momentarily sharing your outrage I was enthused that Burchell may have initiated a healthy
discourse that will, in time, lead to bilingualism. I may be rightly accused of curmudgeonly optimism: the cracked glass is half full.
In a chat with one of my sons recently we explored the inherent conservatism of all organized entities. Their prime motive is self-preservation, hence avoidance of change.
Of course that can be a failing tactic.
Nigerian official attitudes to Nigerian Pidgin* (objectively the best candidate for a national language) are similarly pretty negative. Colonialist attitudes are hard to shake off (especially when local elites have an actual stake in perpetuating them.)
* Commonest name for it, unless you count the even-worserer “Broken.” Of course, it’s not a pidgin.
After momentarily sharing your outrage I was enthused that Burchell may have initiated a healthy discourse that will, in time, lead to bilingualism.
I certainly hope you’re right, and I will try to adopt curmudgeonly optimism as a guiding principle.
It’s probably a good sign that the government’s response, dental puriticity aside, was not “We oppose any such change,” much less “This is not open to discussion.”
My impression is that there’s a continuum from standard Jamaican English to Patwah, so the Jamaican Parliament might in time want to allow speeches anywhere along that continuum.
I wonder whether Jamaican MPs are currently allowed to say in Parliament, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” but not “Pit inna de sky, it fall inna yuh y’eye.” (From https://nlj.gov.jm/jamaican-proverbs-2/. There appears to be only a phonetic connection with digging a pit for another.)
How do you say “unresolved tensions around language, legitimacy and postcolonial identity” in Jamaican? Why is she breaking character to speak to the Guardian? Make them get an interpreter if they can’t understand a Jamaican politician speaking Jamaican!
I suppose Burchell’s stunt, apart from neatly drawing attention to the issues, also had the effect of eliciting an official declaration that Patwa is not “bad English” – it’s not English at all.
It would be interesting, given that there is indeed a continuum from basilectal creole to English, to experiment with titrating the mixture to find out where the Speaker’s cutoff point was. Perhaps this could turn into a frogboiling exercise, and end up introducing Patwa into parliament by stealth.
I have previously expressed the view that it would improve political discourse considerably in the UK if all parliamentary* proceedings had to be conducted in French (as was the case in the good old days.)
* Senedd, too. It would head off all those moans about Welsh.
The historical example everyone with localist/nationalist views of this sort should want to emulate is the very successful replacement of standard Dutch with Afrikaans as one of the co-official languages of government in South Africa. I fear that due to widespread perceptions that the early political promoters of Afrikaans as a suitable language for high-register and formal contexts were otherwise Very Bad People, this inspiring example may be understudied and underappreciated. Afrikaans was apparently formally recognized by statute as just as good as standard Dutch for government purposes in 1925 after a decades-long process, which I assume probably involved some incidents where parliamentarians speaking too obviously in Afrikaans were told to sit down and shut up. (One wonders whether some of the Anglophone politicians had a good enough ear even to judge these things or instead needed to rely on curmudgeons with a better command of standard Dutch to do the sit-down-and-shut-up enforcement.)
I’ve read something to the effect that a lot of the impetus for the official recognition of Afrikaans came from the fact that most Afrikaners couldn’t actually handle standard Dutch very well any more, so there was an aspect of bowing to the inevitable.
It’s difficult to see the Jamaican elite coming to feel as separated from British linguistic norms as Afrikaners presumably were from Netherlandish by that time. But then, that’s part of Burchell’s actual point, I think.
Afrikaans is also by no means as remote from Dutch as basilectal Jamaican creole is from English. Afrikaans has sometimes been called a creole, but that’s pushing it rather a lot, I reckon.
It’s also a political issue, and not just in the obvious South African politics ways: some creolists are very committed to the notion that there is no essential difference between the relationship of Haitian Creole to French and the relationship of Afrikaans to Dutch, on the grounds that this would make Haitian Creole a sort of second-rate subthing instead of a proper language. (I just read a rant by one such zealot on this very point, insisting that linguists should not use the linguistic term “creole” at all, Because Racism. I thought his heart was in the right place … perhaps not so much his brain. Though, to be fair, he was specifically denying that the-languages-usually-known-as-creoles had, as a matter of historical fact, been through a phase of abnormal transmission, so he was not incoherent, merely wrong.)
If you ask google whether anyone speaks in actual Scots in the Scottish Parliament, you are told the answer is “yes, sometimes,” but then the example that dominates the first page of hits is a “guest” address by this language-activist fellow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Kay_(writer) who is not actually an elected member. Does the SNP not actually have someone in public office who can pull it off as well?
Is the “problem” in Jamaica actually elite deference to *British* linguistic norms, or is it the practical inability to escape continuous exposure to American linguistic norms?* If the former, however, maybe they could warm up a bit by using spellings like center and favor instead of centre and favour as a small incremental step toward going Full-Patois (with accompanying eye-dialect spellings)?
*Just take those complaints about colonialism and edit them to be complaints about neo-colonialism, or something like that?
Just take those complaints about colonialism and edit them to be complaints about neo-colonialism, or something like that?
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding – something worse.
https://englishverse.com/poems/jim
Afrikaans was the spoken language and Dutch the written language. It was akin to the Swiss German situation. There were some newspapers and popular literature in Afrikaans but everything official was in Dutch.
The main reason to adopt Afrikaans as the only written language was education. Most Afrikaners were still illiterate in the 1920s and trying to teach children to read and write in Dutch instead of Afrikaans led to many not finishing school and thus higher education and the professions were being dominated by English speakers.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world (yet in a milieu strikingly similar to the Caribbean in various ways due to parallel histories), the usual working language these days of the parliament of the Seychelles is reportedly the Seselwa creole, although you’re also allowed to use either standard English or standard French if you want to. Some from Mauritius are interested in how that’s working in practice and whether to follow suit. https://statehouse.gov.sc/news/6852/mauritius-explores-creole-in-parliament-as-speaker-meets-president-herminie
the usual working language these days of the parliament of the Seychelles is reportedly the Seselwa creole, although you’re also allowed to use either standard English or standard French if you want to.
My God, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world!
Very relevant in New Zealand right now: this clip will give a flavour of the dog-whistling going on. (Feel free to groan at the level of linguistic ignorance.)
NZ First is a minor party (the sort usually described as ‘populist’) which is currently propping up the right-leaning coalition. The leader (the guy speaking, who’s been the only ever leader, it’s more of a personality [**] cult) is actually Māori, and first got a toehold in Parliament appealing to Māori disaffection. His current supporters are more of the blue-rinse/country is going to the dogs with all these foreigners and bleeding-heart liberals supporting minorities (whisper it: good-for-nothing Māori and Pacific Islanders, one of his acolytes was caught the other day complaining about the country being smothered with butter chicken — apparently unaware that’s an English dish).
Needless to say, English is not under threat in NZ. It is the de facto language of business in Parliament. Official publications and government offices are in theory bilingual, in practice that extends only to Te Reo signage. NZ First has already insisted the signage be swopped around to make the English more prominent.
[**] If you can call that a personality.
The Seychellois example makes me think one ought to investigate the current political situation in those other bits of the Commonwealth Caribbean where (as in the Seychelles) the local creole is French-lexifier rather than English-lexifier. Because those creoles kind of conceptually stand in a different relationship to standard English because unlike in Jamaica/Barbados/etc. they can’t be deprecated as “broken” English and perhaps no one has all that strong a political/cultural motivation to complain that they’re “broken” French.* So that might enable a different sort of diglossia with a different vibe and different political consequences?
*I think standard French does maintain some theoretical prestige in the Seychelles and Mauritius (with some subset of offspring of the local elite still taught to function in it?) that it may not in e.g. St. Lucia.
Not that much, in that the internal diversity of Swiss German is vastly greater than that of Afrikaans and that its sound systems are much farther outside the range of Standard German. If you can write in Standard Dutch, all you need is ê (plus one or two other graphemes I’ve forgotten), and you can write down Afrikaans as you hear it*, the only question left being how many apostrophes you pour over the text. That does not work for any Swiss dialect, and if you’ve solved the problem for one, that leaves it unsolved for many others.
* Not quite how it’s done in reality, I know – y instead of ij, f-v distinction maintained even though z and IIRC ch are not used; but that’s all or nearly so. Also, almost no apostrophes.
the internal diversity of Swiss German is vastly greater than that of Afrikaans
According to Bruce Donaldson’s Afrikaans grammar, “South Africans do not normally recognise the existence of dialects as such in Afrikaans, but rather slight regional or ethnic variations in speech.”
He does go on to mention the “often highly distinctive speech of many, but not necessarily all, so-called coloureds” and says that “as such variations are not regarded as belonging to standard Afrikaans, they are not discussed here.”
He also says that the higher registers of Afrikaans remain entwined with standard Dutch, and prescriptive judgments about “correct” Afrikaans still often reflect Dutch norms (even when the actual spoken language ignores them.)
@JWB:
There are also English-lexifier creoles spoken in communities where the prestige language is not English: Pichi, spoken in Equatorial Guinea, which is very well described by Kofi Yakpo, is one.
Cameroon Pidgin is found in the Francophone bits of that country, too. There’s a good novel, Temps de chien, by Patrice Nganang, set in Yaoundé, where the characters intermittently drop into the English-lexifier creole, somewhat disconcertingly. I wonder how it strikes metropolitan French readers …
I used to have a colleague from the Seychelles. She was (and presumably still is) trilingual, and spoke pretty much impeccable English, with a fairly faint and difficult-to-place accent. She told me that she was significantly more confident in speaking Seychellois than French, though, on account of not having had much formal French education, and being long out of practice actually speaking French.
While there is debate about postcolonial identity and cultural recognition, there is no strong, broad push to change the parliamentary rule. This attitude reflects pragmatic local agency rather than colonial legacy, especially as code switching in other situations is common and not controversial.
This attitude reflects pragmatic local agency rather than colonial legacy, especially as code switching in other situations is common and not controversial.
Could you expand on that? What is so pragmatic about not allowing people to use their own language in their own legislature?
It’s pragmatic because legislatures are workplaces for law-making, and standardizing the debating chamber is like requiring formal register in court (or requiring Latin in the Hungarian Diet until the 19th century). I fully understand that this can feel alienating, and I imagine that if I were Jamaican, I might even be on Burchell’s side. But life is full of pain and compromise.
I know almost nothing about Jamaica, but to the degree that standard English is the preserve of the privileged, specifically, restriction of parliamentary proceedings to standard English would have inescapable political effects, if not actual purposes: it would be naive to suppose that such a restriction was purely “pragmatic.”
Whether that is quite Burchell’s point is another matter: she evidently herself belongs to the linguistically-privileged stratum, and anticolonialism can be more a vehicle for cementing local elites than for giving voices to the marginalised. But I know no ill of her and have no opinion about her motives.
This kind of thing has happened (culturally rather than politically*) with Welsh in the past: nobody speaks, as a mother tongue, the Literary Welsh that in living memory was held up as the only “uncorrupted” form of the language: acquiring it required an education not accessible to most actual Welsh speakers. This suited the (Welsh-speaking) elite just fine. Cynically, you might say that the only thing that has undermined this dominance is the threat to the survival of the entire language, which made such posing a luxury we can no longer afford.
* Politically? I wish …
it’s certainly “pragmatic”, with the goal of keeping the operation of the state as opaque as possible to most jamaicans – just as law french operated in england, or parliamentary latin in the double monarchy.
@JWB: i think the closest thing to what you describe takes us back to the dutch: the ABC islands’ primary language is papiamento/u, which has a lexicon that’s largely portuguese and spanish, possibly mediated by judezmo or/and judeo-portuguese, with the language of colonial/neocolonial administration being dutch. another contender could be garifuna, whose indo-european component has more from english and french than the local colonial/neocolonial spanish.
@rozele: To which of J. W. Brewer’s posts are you alluding when you say “@JWB: i think the closest thing to what you describe …”?
“a country that threw off British rule”
Not Jamaica, then which was granted independence in an orderly and amicable fashion, like most of the Empire.
I admire Burchell’s stunt, which appears to have been quite effective, but stunt it was, no? One gets the distinct impression that she had fully scripted her response to the Speaker in advance. I wonder how well her speech would have gone if the Speaker had not made the entirely predictable objection – would Burchell then have had to translate her entire prepared English speech into Jamaican, off the cuff?
it’s certainly “pragmatic”, with the goal of keeping the operation of the state as opaque as possible to most jamaicans – just as law french operated in england, or parliamentary latin in the double monarchy.
Yes, exactly. The mailed fist is always pragmatic.
I admire Burchell’s stunt, which appears to have been quite effective, but stunt it was, no?
Everything in politics is a “stunt,” one way or another.
So let’s make some more for no particular reason!
@Ook: It’s pragmatic because legislatures are workplaces for law-making, and standardizing the debating chamber is like requiring formal register in court (or requiring Latin in the Hungarian Diet until the 19th century).
I haven’t heard that American courts require formalish register for lawyers, judges, etc.—obviously not for witnesses or jurors. Maybe for clerks? I don’t believe Johnnie Cochrane was censured for repeating “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.”
You haven’t explained the pragmatic value of requiring standard English in the Jamaican Parliament. Are there MPs who wouldn’t understand Patwah clearly? Burchell’s use of “sectoral speech” suggests that Patwah, like AAVE, has the vocabulary of standard English freely available.
@Nat Schockley: I wonder how well her speech would have gone if the Speaker had not made the entirely predictable objection – would Burchell then have had to translate her entire prepared English speech into Jamaican, off the cuff?
That brings up an interesting question: Would translating have been hard? I’ve heard people bilingual in English and Spanish running into trouble translating off the cuff—for instance, by translating idioms literally. But they weren’t translating their own utterances, whereas Burchell knew what she wanted to say, and Patwah is much closer to standard English than Spanish is. The small amount she got through can be standardized pretty much word for word, in most cases just by changing the pronunciation. (I had to look up “pan”, which is “upon, on”.) I suspect that whether she had notes or a complete script, she might well have been able to give her whole speech in Patwah.
U.S. courts do typically require that everyone either speak in English or speak via a translator so that the official transcript of the proceedings will be in English, even if it varied by register. In Puerto Rico this rule does not apply to the local court system but does apply to the federal court that’s located there. Which poses a problem because typically everyone in a federal courtroom in P.R. (including the lawyers, the judge, and the stenographers) is perfectly fluent in Spanish so lengthy lapses into Spanish are not uncommon because no one in the room is super-motivated to immediately enforce the rule. Which creates practical problems later on when, but only when, someone dissatisfied with the outcome appeals and the transcript ends up at a higher level of the federal court system in front of a panel of appellate judges who do not necessarily have any ability to read a transcript in Spanish.
I must say that in the romanticized situation where everyone is in fact perfectly bilingual or bidialectical or what have you, I don’t really see the objection to social conventions saying that in such-and-such context it is expected that everyone use a specified one of the two language varieties they all know and not the other. I think David E. has given multiple examples of situations in West Africa where a given language is presumptively/exclusively the one used in a particular domain and another in another domain.
Of course, in the real world, there are often asymmetries. Everyone in the Knesset whose L1 is Arabic can speak/understand tolerable Hebrew but not vice versa. Everyone in the Legislative Yuan whose L1 is Taiwanese can speak/understand tolerable Mandarin but not vice versa. Same with Catalan v. Castilian in Spain, and many other such situations. So you use the not-universally-understood language if you’re trying to make a point (with political overtones) and some other legislators will then be predictably mad about it (with their own political overtones). Which isn’t to take sides on whose points/overtones are good v. bad, just to observe that in such a situation pretty much any rule for what is and isn’t permitted when speaking the legislature will predictably make someone unhappy. Who should bear the cost of putting up with someone else’s preferences (when either apparent alternative involves someone bearing some costs) and what intermediate compromises might be available are, in fact, the sorts of problems that democratic legislatures supposedly have some institutional competence in sorting out.
rozele and others might be interested in this recent article offering (unsolicited?) advice to politicians in Curacao about how to effectively speak in Dutch in Parliament if they are not L1 Dutch speakers and don’t feel like they have native-level fluency. The advice is of course offered in English, and in a register that kinda rubs me the wrong way although many of the substantive points seem like perfectly good advice. Including the interesting point that in that specific context code-switching between Dutch and Papiamentu* can be rhetorically effective (and I infer socially/politically tolerated) if you’re thoughtful about how you do it. https://www.curacaochronicle.com/post/unknown/the-art-of-speaking-in-public-as-a-president-of-parliament-in-a-language-that-is-not-his-native-language
Other sources say it’s fine to speak Papiamento* in Curacao’s legislature, but this piece presupposes that there are still good real-world motivations for at least some politicians to use Dutch at least some of the time. To M’s question re which post of mine rozele was referring to, my inference is that it was the one re situations where the local creole cannot be characterized as a substandard dialect of the local prestige language. Whatever Papiamento* is, it’s not substandard Dutch, and no one is particularly motivated to characterize it as substandard Portuguese in a context where standard Portuguese has no particular cultural prestige or political clout.
*There may be some factional/regional/shibboleth things going on with whether you use the -u spelling or the -o one?
Sociolinguistic observation: In Panama in the US Army, 1970, I used to dial my radio to the station on Bonaire. There’d be a Gospel hour in Papiamentu, followed by a news analysis program in Dutch. (The Papiamentu wasn’t hard to follow once you penetrated the Portuguese enunciation. As for the Dutch, knowing English and German I found it a frustrating but interesting exercise to try to grasp it from two directions at once, like trying to clasp my hands around a tree.)
“ I must say that in the romanticized situation where everyone is in fact perfectly bilingual or bidialectical or what have you, I don’t really see the objection to social conventions saying that in such-and-such context it is expected that everyone use a specified one of the two language varieties they all know and not the other. ”
1. It is, as you astutely note, a ‘…romanticized situation”.
2. This may or most likely does not reflect the Jamaican reality.
3. Mandating one of two generally known languages, dialects, what-have-yous to the exclusion of a more broadly used and understood variety serves to preserve the ease and comfort of those clutching power and privilege at the expense of the less well endowed. Not a goddam new thing under the bright Caribbean sun. This was the source of my initial angst.
So, therefore, in theory we can find agreement while in reality we share only a sharp divide. I’m afraid that with the current regime we are running a bit short of Ceteris paribus.
@J.W.B.: Why is she breaking character to speak to the Guardian? Make them get an interpreter if they can’t understand a Jamaican politician speaking Jamaican!
In case you were serious, I think people who speak English despite being from non-English-speaking countries often speak English to English-speaking journalists. For one thing, it avoids translation errors. Of course Jamaica isn’t a non-English-speaking country, though according to Wikipedia, “a significant portion of the population” isn’t fluent in English.
In case you were serious
I’m not sure JWB would be caught dead being serious in such a discussion; he’s all about bringing the lawyerly objections and quibbles to bear.
@M @JWB: yes, exactly! “that might enable a different sort of diglossia with a different vibe and different political consequences?”
I would think that people speak English rather than their L1 to journalists in such circumstances out of some combination of: 1) observing a politeness norm; 2) trying to maximize effective communication to the intended audience; and/or 3) accepting that as a practical matter the journalist holds more power in the situation such that the interviewee should want to accommodate rather than demand to be accommodated if the interviewee hopes to benefit from press coverage. The question would then be which of these three do not have the same weight when the same person is addressing his or her colleagues in the legislature. Indeed, one can imagine a sufficiently “colorful” foreign political figure demanding the Guardian or whoever interview him/her via an interpreter even if everyone knows the interviewee is perfectly fluent in English because for symbolic reasons the interviewee does not wish to concede any symbolic high ground to the foreign press. And the foreign press will then accommodate that if they want the interview badly enough. (The key in such situations is for the interviewee not to break character and start correcting/overruling the interpreter as to the best English phrasing of particular points made.)
hat as an anarchist should deprecate anyone voluntarily giving speeches in parliament to start with, I should think. It only encourages them.
…and the transcript can’t be translated later? Really?
J.W. Brewer: Indeed, one can imagine a sufficiently “colorful” foreign political figure demanding the Guardian or whoever interview him/her via an interpreter even if everyone knows the interviewee is perfectly fluent in English because for symbolic reasons the interviewee does not wish to concede any symbolic high ground to the foreign press.
As I recall, Robert Mugabe sometimes did this.
@David M.: Well, if the parties would stipulate to an English translation without the court having to resolve conflicts over it, sure. But you may or may not be shocked to hear that in the context of a lawsuit the various sides may express differing views as to which English version of potentially ambiguous Spanish testimony is better, and the appellate judges don’t want to have to referee such disputes. When the translation is happening live in the courtroom, such objections can be raised and addressed as they are happening, and/or the witness can be asked to clarify in Spanish exactly what they meant by a Spanish word that might bear an inconveniently wide range of potential meanings in English. This also requires the lawyers to think on their feet and not wait to quibble about the best translation of a particular passage only after it has in hindsight become unusually important. For documents introduced as evidence, typically one side will put forward an English translation carried out by a theoretically competent translator and then the other side will either decide to live with that or put in a rival translation of its own – but again this will have already happened at the trial-court level. Or you can just have a bilingual witness testify in English about what some relevant excerpt from a Spanish document means, but that may preclude you from arguing later on about some other part of the same document you didn’t get “translated” that way but that you now think is also important.
@J.W.B.: I would think that people speak English rather than their L1 to journalists in such circumstances out of some combination of: 1) observing a politeness norm; 2) trying to maximize effective communication to the intended audience; and/or 3) accepting that as a practical matter the journalist holds more power in the situation such that the interviewee should want to accommodate rather than demand to be accommodated if the interviewee hopes to benefit from press coverage.
4) Whether the interviewee is interested in the kind of power game you describe for a “‘colorful’ foreign political figure; 5) Maybe most importantly, how the choice of language looks to the intended audience, which may be quite a bit wider than the readership of a newspaper.
The question would then be which of these three do not have the same weight when the same person is addressing his or her colleagues in the legislature.
And we’re keeping in mind that the audience is different, and again may be quite a bit wider than those fellow legislators. And we have 6) The rule, not merely a norm of politeness, in the legislature, which the speaker might want to follow to be able to make their whole speech, or break to dramatize their objection to the rule. Also 7, 8… for whatever I haven’t thought of.
In this case, when Burchell spoke standard English to the Guardian reporter, she wasn’t breaking character, as you suggested in an earlier comment. Her “character” was someone who can speak English fluently when it’s advisable (and thus whose reason to advocate speaking Patwah isn’t trouble with English), not someone who insists on speaking Patwah at all times.
@J.W.B. again: the witness can be asked to clarify in Spanish exactly what they meant by a Spanish word that might bear an inconveniently wide range of potential meanings in English.
I’ll bet a nickel that at least once in the history of bilingual trial courts in Puerto Rico, some witness has clarified an English word by using Spanish (“rincón”, not “esquina”) and some witness has clarified a Spanish word by using English (“wait”, no “hope”) .
hat as an anarchist should deprecate anyone voluntarily giving speeches in parliament to start with, I should think. It only encourages them.
True, true!
Something that has often struck me since I started living in France nearly 40 years ago may, or may not, be relevant to the status of French in Mauritius. When I was living in England few people, other than stamp collectors, showed much awareness of the existence of Mauritius or would thought of going there for holidays. In France, however, l’Île Maurice has long been a favourite holiday destination for people who could afford it. I imagine that the local people often hear French spoken by visitors. I suspect that much the same could be said of the Seychelles.
BTW, for the benefit of anyone hoping to promote awareness of Portuguese-lexifier creoles among the US public, the expanded field for the World Cup means that the national soccer teams of both Cape Verde and Curacao will be playing here this summer (although not necessarily advancing past pool play). So there’s an easy “news hook” ready for exploitation. Separately, the internet advises me that standard Portuguese is the working language of the Caboverdean legislature (Assembleia Nacional) but I’m not sure whether a legislator who tried to speak the creole on the floor would get in trouble or not.
Per wikipedia, France was in 2023 the #2 source of tourists to the Seychelles, behind Germany and ahead of Russia, with the UK a fairly distant #4 (and the US a more distant #9). OTOH, per other stats the UK is the #1 European destination for Seychellois traveling abroad, presumably Because Commonwealth.
ETA: I’ve been to the Seychelles (once, 30 years ago this month), but never Mauritius. I see that the quickest current way to get from NY to Mauritius involves changing planes in Nairobi, although other options involving changes in either Dubai or Paris don’t add all that much time all things considered.
I’m completely on the Burchell pro-Jamaican Language side here, but did it rub anyone else a little bit the wrong way that there was an undercurrent of insisting that the reason Jamaican should be respected is because it was a Language, not a Dialect? Seems to imply to me that if you consider Patwa a dialect rather than a language, it would be perfectly acceptable to not allow its use in Parliament. It’s propping up the idea that there is a consistent definition of what a language is and if a “dialect” doesn’t meet that standard it’s fine to assign it a lower register.
Indeed, one can imagine a sufficiently “colorful” foreign political figure demanding the Guardian or whoever interview him/her via an interpreter even if everyone knows the interviewee is perfectly fluent in English because for symbolic reasons the interviewee does not wish to concede any symbolic high ground to the foreign press. And the foreign press will then accommodate that if they want the interview badly enough.
Not really the same situation at all, but to my recollection Ichiro Suzuki gave every interview throughout his entire career (until his Hall of Fame induction speech) through a translator, even though he was by all accounts perfectly fluent in English. I believe the reason given was so he didn’t make a mistake in his non-native language, but my theory is it gave him more time to process the question and think of some Baseball Pablum, so as to avoid saying anything insightful whatsoever.
@JH: I don’t know about his motivation for conducting virtually all English interviews via a translator, but Ichiro was known among other baseball players for the high quality of his idiomatic English. His extemporaneous, profanity-laden pep talks in the American League locker room became a renowned (among relative insiders) annual feature of the All-Star Games.
I’m completely on the Burchell pro-Jamaican Language side here, but did it rub anyone else a little bit the wrong way that there was an undercurrent of insisting that the reason Jamaican should be respected is because it was a Language, not a Dialect?
Sure, but that’s a different issue and a harder fight. Trying to get people to respect all forms of speech is very hard; it’s easier to get them to agree that people in Jamaica should be able to use Jamaican in official circumstances. Baby steps!
Burchell’s use of “sectoral speech” suggests that Patwah, like AAVE, has the vocabulary of standard English freely available
As with this Fela Kuti song, which is surely in Nigerian Pidgin, but nevertheless contains the words “communication”, “ideology” and “progress. ” (Some other non-basilect features, too.)
https://genius.com/Fela-kuti-and-afrika-70-opposite-people-lyrics
The bigram “sectoral speech” means nothing at all coherent to me in standard English and most of the first page of hits when I google it are references to Ms. Burchell. Although to be fair this link to a text associated with another Jamaican politician suggests that it may mean something in the jargon used by Jamaican politicians. https://moj.gov.jm/sites/default/files/publication/documnet/MOJ%20SECTORAL%20SPEECH%202025%20MAY%2030%20FINAL.pdf