Oxford Inclusion And the Validation of Our Language

You might have heard about the Caribbean words recently included in the latest update to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

As a note to readers from the United States in particular, in the English-speaking Caribbean this is the definitive dictionary for us, as former and current English colonies.

The additions have been interesting. As a Trinidadian I was happy to see the spelling of the Caribbean verb wine, not spelled like whine because it refers to the twisting of the waist, as in winding something up. I have long used Sonia Dumas’ definition as my reference. Dumas is a choreographer, filmmaker academic who says in her Ted Talk “The Hip As A Weapon” that a wine is ““either a rotation, a gyration or an osculation of the pelvic region, usually done in rhythmic style to music in a festive or recreational environment”.

The collection spans the region. I have been known to steups one to many times. The result of suppressed frustration that is part and parcel of the news making process.

There is lime, wahgwan, oonah and dutty. The two in the middle I never use. But lime and dutty find regular space in my conversations when appropriate. I tend to say allyuh over oonah because that’s how that word evolved in Trinidad as opposed to Barbados, which is where I’d expect to hear that pronunciation.

But what does this inclusion mean? Is brata now a word that I can use in standard text without being sanctioned?

Well. Language evolves. Words that start off in one language can be used regularly in another. Like schadenfreude, which is borrowed from German and has no single word translation in English.

I asked this question in the Society for Caribbean Linguists page on Facebook. As Dr. Jo-Anne Ferreira, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at UWI, St. Augustine explains, this is not new and has happened since the First Peoples encountered European invaders to these lands and they had to communicate with each other.

She also called on Dr. Jason Siegal and Dr. Joseph Farquharson to join the conversation. The former, who heads the Richard and Jeannette Allsopp Centre for Caribbean Lexicography at UWI, Cave Hill explains that “there is no document that sets what is or is not standard for English. Inclusion in the OED means that there is enough textual evidence for the word to be included in the OED with a degree of confidence. The OED contains many dialectal, vernacular, slang and even foreign words. The Caribbean words that were included this time around were not slang before their inclusion anyhow, so the inclusion in the OED could not have changed that status.

It is important to note the difference between slang and vernacular here. Vernacular is the language or dialect spoken by ordinary people in a country or region. Slang is informal language that might be trendy, and/or limited in use due to location and context.

What this means is that inclusion in the OED recognises this are common words that could be defined and included as they form part of our regular language.

Dr. Farquharson is a senior lecturer within the Jamaican Language Unit at UWI, Mona spoke to the subtext within my question about the OED validating these as “real words”.

“OED will record what is of interest to their editorial team. They are not bound by the ideologies or systems of classification of Caribbean people. Hence, since the very first edition which was completed in 1928, they have included some Caribbean words that no Caribbean person would classify as standard English and many would not even classify as English. It is ultimately a question about where English stops and English-related Creoles begin, and also about where standard English stops and nonstandard(ised) varieties of English begin. These are ideological and political decisions.

That said, the inclusion of Caribbean words in the OED does not normally change their status in their home nations, probably because there is no wide access to the OED in many Caribbean countries. But…if the status of the words do change when they come into contact with the OED, my question would be why do we have to wait for people thousands of miles away to accept our words before we do?”

I find the entirety of his comment interesting. First is him pointing out that the words, while selected under the guidance of a Caribbean linguist (meaning someone whose specialty is Caribbean languages), the ultimate decision is made by the OED editorial team. At minimum their perspective is foreign, which is fair because OED is a dictionary based in the United Kingdom.

As the professor rightly says, these are “ideological and political decisions”.

He goes on to discuss the Caribbean’s need for foreign validation that permeates almost all that we do here, by asking rightfully, I think, why do we need this validation?

That said, both Siegal and Farquharson are working to compile a Dictionary of Caribbean English to close existing gaps in our language. It differs from the landmark Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage which was first published in 1996. As Siegal explains in an article in Barbados Today the upcoming dictionary will help validate the language to a people for whom their unique expression needs to be treated as valuable, because too often it is not.

We have used words like bad and broken to describe how we speak for years, which many of us still need to unlearn.

This conversation represents a full circle moment for me, I had interviewed Dr. Farquharson about his work on One Love the Marley biopic. And many years before I interviewed Dr. Winer on her groundbreaking Dictionary of Trinidad English, which I own and remains a prize possession. She was also the consultant linguist for the OED for this project.

It is just a nice experience to see the work that has been done on the way we talk and see some taking pride on the expressiveness of our unique language