The Jamaican Language Unit (Di Jamiekan Langwij Yuunit)

Dr Karla Washington, Professor Hubert Devonish,
and Sharynne holding the Jamaican New Testament and How to Write Jamaican

Today Dr Karla Washington (University of Cincinnati) and I visited Di Jamiekan Langwij Yuunit (The Jamaican Language Unit). The Unit was established in 2002 by the Jamaican government to recognize and support the use of the Jamaican language.

Professor Hubert Devonish is the head of the Unit, and is a distinguished linguist and scholar in the area of Caribbean languages. His most recent project has been to provide advice for the translation of the New Testament (Bible) into Jamaican. He also has written "Writing Jamaican the Jamaican Way/Ou fi Rait Jamiekan". The book uses the Cassidy-JLU writing system that is based on a phonetic realisation of spoken Jamiekan. The Jamiekan alphabet contains the following letters and letter combinations: a, aa, ai, b, ch, d, e, f, g, hn, I, ie, ii, j, k, l, m, n, ng, o, ou, p, r, s, sh, t, u, uo, uu, v, w, y, z, zh.

Professor Devonish provided us with valuable advice about the various phonetic and phonemic transcriptions of words pronounced by Jamaican adults. We will use these as the range of possible adult targets for our research with the Jamaican children next week.