Honeyed words review of Crystal Rain (and thoughts on creole)

August 10th 2007 at 8:09 am

Honeyed Words reviews Crystal Rain and really likes it, but struggled with the Caribbean language:

One of the things that really tripped me up in the beginning was Buckell’s inconsistent use of grammar. He has set his story in a planet colonized by people of Earth, and many of the people are descendents of the modern Caribbean cultures.

There are two major factions, the Aztecas (based on the Aztec culture) and the Nanagadans (everyone else). The Nanagadans are further divided into several villages, often grouped together by common ancestry. The capital city meanwhile, is a cosmopolitan melting-pot of all the cultures. Sounds fine, right? It is, and the world building that Buckell develops over the course of the novel really pans out.

The barrier to entry for me though was the language. After taking a linguistics course this Spring, language has been heavily on my mind. There are a few terms that Buckell consistently threw around that grated on me. The first was “accent.” An accent is a way of pronouncing the words. I say “tahmaytoe” and you say “tomahtoe.” It’s the difference you hear when people are “pahking” the “caw” and saluting the “flague.”

A dialect is a different version of the language, one that’s understandable by native speakers, but uses a slightly different grammatical structure. When Buckell said accent, most times he meant dialect. He didn’t change the way the words sounded so much as he changed the way they were put together. This misnomer of terms wouldn’t have bothered me much, except it was accompanied by Buckell voicing characters with an unsettling mix of standard and non-standard grammar.

“Non standard grammar” is such a wonderfully loaded phrase for me.

While I don’t respond to reviews, I did try to address the concerns about language lest people think that a) I invented this all, and b) that I know nothing about linguistics (if there was a linguistics major I would have taken it, languages fascinate me).

So I responded thusly:

Um, well, it’s not a created dialect, it’s Caribbean creole from St. Thomas that I mainly used, with a few Trinidadian and Grenadian quirks. I didn’t invent it, I grew up speaking it to such an extent that family friends didn’t understand what I was saying if they caught me out with friends who were speaking it.

You call it non standard but it’s actually africanate in background with English words overlaid, not uncommon in the creation of creoles.

There’s more here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Creole

St. Thomas is not as strict as the Jamaican creole or Grenadian that I grew up with, which is why I chose if for my books.

Now as for dialect, many people in the Caribbean call it dialect, patois, or creole. Accents vary wildly, most people can understand Jamaicans in Kingston, my friends from the country in Jamaica, up in the hills, I could barely keep up with and I grew up with it. My attempt was to communicate both that accents, dialects and forms of speaking varied depending on who spoke, who spoke to whom, and for varying reasons, which is how I would use it if I were back in the islands today.

That defense of my mother tongue choices done, I’m so glad you liked the book! LOL.

So there we have the idea of accent, dialect, patois/creole all mashing up together, which is of course completely and wonderfully Caribbean.

I’ve seen one person online say that my characters sound like Jar Jar Binks. That’s unfortunate, but I’ll say the reason Jar Jar is annoying isn’t because because he uses clearly creole/patois grammar structures, but because he speaks in a high pitched voice and is annoying and useless and incompetent.

Nonetheless, using creole is something I want to continue doing because it represents the language I heard growing up.

Although I guess it’s just one of my mother tongues, I’m really good at code-switching to sound like whoever I’m around, hence my perfect, nice, mid-West flat accent now. My what people would call ’standard’ dialect was an upper middle class English accent with a trace of New Zealand until I reached the US Virgin Islands.

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