Caribbean Languages Are Not “Broken English”

In the bonus episode, of Carry On Friends we’re doing an episode swap with Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture. Strictly Facts is a Breadfruit Media co-produced podcast hosted by Dr. Alexandria Miller. This episode features Dr. Joseph T. Farquharson, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at The University of the West Indies and Coordinator of the Jamaica Language Unit. His work focuses on Jamaican language development, language planning, and linguistic identity.

Caribbean languages are often treated like informal speech instead of full languages, and that misunderstanding has consequences for identity, education, and opportunity. We unpack how labels like “patois”, “dialect”, “broken English”, and “Creole” carry hidden history from slavery and colonisation, shaping who gets seen as “proper” and who gets dismissed. A key takeaway is that language is not only communication, it is a marker of belonging. When Caribbean people hear their accent on global stages, from mainstream TV moments to pop and dancehall-infused hits, pride shows up fast, but so do stereotypes and confusion that flatten the region into “everybody speaks Jamaican Patois”. Getting specific about Jamaican, Trinidadian, Bajan, Guyanese and more is part of respecting the Caribbean as a diverse linguistic map.

A major myth gets challenged: the idea that enslaved Africans heard Standard English, tried to learn it, failed, and produced “broken” speech. The better starting point is the English dialects actually spoken in plantation societies, where many features that survive today are linked to non-standard British varieties, archaisms, and sound patterns rather than “bad English”. That shift matters because it reframes Caribbean Creole languages as results of contact, power, and community building, not incompetence. We also explore why naming evolves over time, from patois with its old stigma, to Creole as a scholarly term, to a growing movement that simply calls the language “Jamaican” or “Haitian”. Language naming is language politics, and choosing the national adjective can be a form of emancipation.

We also go deeper than vocabulary by looking at grammar, because structure is where Caribbean linguistics becomes undeniable. Features like serial verb constructions, distinct copula patterns, and focus markers show systems that align with West African language patterns across the Atlantic world, including in West African pidgins and Creoles. These details are not trivia: they are evidence of ancestry living inside everyday speech. Understanding substrate and superstrate influences helps explain how African languages and European languages interact under unequal conditions, while universalist perspectives add another layer about how new languages stabilise. For anyone searching Caribbean roots, this is a powerful reminder that heritage is not only in food or music, it is in syntax, sound, and how meaning gets built.

Finally, we connect language to migration, music, and policy. Diaspora life often turns language into an in-group signal when people meet racism and difference, and Caribbean music becomes a language teacher for children whose parents avoided speaking it at home. That global demand raises a practical question: how do you standardise a language without erasing its regional variation? We discuss language planning through the Jamaican Language Unit and the Cassidy JLU writing system, designed for consistent sound-to-symbol spelling. Standardization is mainly for home communities, but it also enables literacy tools, publishing, translation, and wider learning materials. The long-term vision is official bilingualism, stronger linguistic security, and the freedom to use Caribbean languages for anything from storytelling to science, building social confidence that can translate into real economic value.