Speaking Guyanese

Calling Guyana an English-speaking country is a bit like calling Jean-Claude Van Damme an actor.  Sure, J.C.V.D. has had a lion's share of feature films to his name and royalty checks to back them up, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find a number of them pretty Van Damme entertaning, but as for him being an actor...

So with that point snidely made, I will acknowledge that Guyana is officially an anglophone country, and pretty much everyone I have run into so far can understand most of what I say, and speaks…well, that's the tricky part.  It's English.  It's also Creolese.  It's also got a bit of Hindi, depending on where they live.  And no matter what language it actually is, who I'm speaking to will make all the difference as to whether I understand any of it or not.

My pre-arrival impressions of Guyanese accents were based on one person I knew, and another I'd heard of.  The former was Mali's Peace Corps Medical Officer, who has a peculiar but delightful mix of influences in her accent.  It has the bright, musical quality of a British accent, with some delicate calypso exoticism, and is as clearly-toned as a tuning fork.  The latter example, I've only heard of through a married couple of family friends from back home, who were speaking of a Guyanese housekeeper they once employed.  When the wife mentioned that she had a hard time understanding her sometimes because of her unique way with English, her husband replied with smiling skepticism, "That was English?"

So far, my experience listening to people here has run the gamut from our dear doctor's charming lilt to an impregnable warble which plays by its own rules – or the few it has.  The difference is in whether or not they are speaking Standard English, the kind which is taught in schools, used in official business, and spoken on the TV and radio.  Standard English mostly sounds like a mild-to-heavy accent on a slightly goofy version of what you're reading right now.  There are some Guyanese who have spent time in U.S. or have at least watched a lot of our TV shows, and have American English pretty much nailed down.

To flavor the language, there are those who use the words which technically exist, but have been collecting cobwebs in the dusty corners of "my" language's attic.  I've never heard the word "shucks!" used so many times in anything written after the 1950's than I have hanging out with locals here.  And the other day, I was asked by a bus passenger crammed in next to me if his bag was "humbugging" me, which is not only incorrect, but bewilderingly so.  (This is on par with a dear friend of mine who speaks English fairly well as a second language, and who recently praised me as "an exorbitant writer," which she insisted made sense as a complement when literally translated back into her native German.)

It's when I hear Creolese thrown into the English, as is often done here, that I get stuck and wish I was back in Mali, where I can at least understand Bambara and some of its dialects better than I can the children and drunken fishermen I've encountered here – though my dad reminded me that incomprehensibility is a common trait amongst drunken fishermen the world over.

The problem with Creolese is two-fold.  First is the warped pronunciation of their vowels, which actually shares some occasional traits with the Irish accent (Cork in particular, it sounds to me), plus whatever other ethnic influence is local to the area, be it Indian, Caribbean, or British.  "Dog" sounds like "daeg," "Thursday" morphs into "Taarsdey," "hat" is worn as a "hyat," and I can't even figure out how to spell the other sounds they use.  The other hinderance is the language itself, which has English rules tossed into a blender, along with some Hindi vocabulary in the areas with East Indian immigrant populations, and comes out sounding like the lost verses of "Day-O."

Unlike Haiti, which has standardized their version of Creole and made it their official language alongside French, Guyana still maintains English as it's only formal language, and unfortunately, not everyone knows the difference.  In preparation for my library and literacy outreach program I'll be working on while I'm here, I've been observing and interviewing a lot of teachers from Nursery school through high school, and one of the common themes that comes up is that not all the students learn to distinguish between the Creolese they speak and the English they're supposed to be restricted to in school.  In some cases, even the teachers blur or cross the line, in conversation and in lessons.

As a result, here is some of what I saw in middle-school age Remedial English writing exams.  From a more literate student in the class, there was, in immaculate handwriting, "I will like to inviting you to go fishing with us. My Father buy a new fishing boat we will go at the backdam to fishing.  A nice cook wite fish and went we finshend cook we will eat and rast a little and went we finshend we will go back fishing."  This actually sounds, to my untrained mind, like something I might hear a child say verbatim if they were to narrate this imaginary letter to me, so it's no surprise that this is how a student with poor understanding of the difference between proper and colloquial language would write.

I fear I'll have little opportunity to make headway into he local dialects here.  I'm only here for six months, and most of the people I hang out with actually do speak English fairly well, though there probably a good reason I don't spend much time with the folks I can't understand.  As for adopting my own language to fit theirs, well…no.  In Mali, I was more than happy to go around speaking Bambara, because I had no real choice if I wanted to communicate.  Just imagining myself trying to adapt my language to fit in here makes me giggle at the thought.  It's one thing to watch a Hasidic New Yorker doing a musical imitation of Burning Spear, but for me to incorporate that into everyday speech is just too much of an anatopism for my own dignity to handle.  Sorry folks, but I'm proud of my own Phluphia mumble, and I intend to keep it!