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Faydene Gillings-Grant
Born: 15 December 1960
Lives: Solihull, West Midlands
Time lived in area: 5 to 10 years
Occupation: Librarian
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Faydene says she speaks more slowly at work because she's very aware of having to ensure people can understand her Jamaican accent.
Language of interview: English
Duration: 00:32 (mins/secs)
The participants were asked to describe how they spoke in their own words.
How do you describe your accent: "My English language accent has been influenced by the American and English pronunciation. My voice still has traces of a sing-song (or lilt). I don't think my Jamaica accent is very strong."
Have there been other influences on the way you speak: "I was born in Jamaican in 1960. I grew up in St James and Manchester (parishes in Jamaica). I got married to a Kingstonian and lived in Kingston (capital of Jamaica) until migrating to the UK."
Do you have skills in languages other than English?: Yes
Other languages: Spanish
I find that I have to speak slow, slower um when I'm when I'm talking because I, I sense that my accent is slurring uh particular words and therefore when I'm talking to people in my library world and and and whatever then I have to s-speak slower. And I talk to my husband about this at times because he's a naturally just a very fluent and fast speaker and he - so he doesn't think about people not understanding where I'm, whereas I'm sort of conscious, I'm thinking "Are people understanding what I'm saying?" so I slow down for that reason.
Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes
Many first and second generation children of immigrant communities are acutely aware of their bilingual or, in the case of the British West Indian community, bidialectal status. Faydene stresses how important it is, particularly in educational terms or in order to enhance career prospects, for speakers to be able to adopt more mainstream speech patterns when appropriate. Many British Jamaican speakers demonstrate an incredible ability to code-switch - that is they can alternate between radically different dialects as circumstance dictates, often within the same utterance. In most cases this process is subconscious and a perfectly natural reaction as we all tend to adapt our speech to a certain degree in order to fit in with the people around us. In other cases, switching between a patois and a more mainstream dialect depends on the context, as Faydene suggests here - she feels it's appropriate to use at home or among friends, where it's a strong marker of shared identity or group solidarity.
There are a number of features of Faydene's accent that are typical of Jamaican speech. Firstly, Jamaican speech is rhotic - that is she pronounces the sound after a vowel, at one time a feature of speech throughout the UK, and thus presumably an aspect of the type of English transported to the Caribbean at the time of colonial settlement. Listen carefully to the way Faydene pronounces the words works, interpret and market. The way she pronounces the vowel sounds in words in the following two sets is also typical of Jamaican speech: communicated, patient, away, ailment, explain, always, situation, able and educational and totally, goes, mode, promoting, home and both. Perhaps even more importantly the whole rhythm of Caribbean speech is distinctive, due to different intonation patterns and above all different stress placement within a statement. Listen carefully to the way the highlighted syllables in the following are pronounced by Faydene with a much stronger vowel than is usual in most British English accents: agree, husband, several, patient, totally, ailment, Jamaican, influence, librarian, across, situation, along, educational and important. This is a very subtle feature, but contributes to the notion that Caribbean English has a very musical quality or a characteristic 'lilt'.
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