This book explores the social and structural changes in Jamaican Creole (JC) in a web discussion forum used by Jamaican diaspora communities. Focusing on orthographic and morphosyntactic variables, Andrea Moll delivers a rigorous and engaging analysis using a blend of quantitative and qualitative methods.
Comprising seven chapters, the book begins by explaining how globalization has led to the formation of diasporas. Moll explains that these developments trigger linguistic transformations, which are evident in JC, before providing an overview of the history of the JC diaspora and the spread of JC via popular culture. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of the dataset, the Corpus of Cyber Jamaican (CCJ), consisting of seventeen million ‘tokens’, collected between 2000 and 2008. It presents a convincing rationale for the study, including the presence of stylistic differences between the CCJ and more traditional oral and written varieties of JC. With a focus on ‘third wave’ sociolinguistic approaches, chapter 3 describes the various methods that were used to analyse the data. Moll draws parallels with the CCJ using the concept of communities of practice. She then discusses identity and the ways that linguistic resources can be used to construct the virtual self, through processes of enregisterment and indexicality. The end of the chapter concentrates on authenticity as a communication achievement and the significance of performance in communicative practices.
Moving on to the analysis, chapter 4 first describes the history of competing orthographic models. It then explains how the emergence of conventionalized spelling forms in the CCJ can be understood using Mark Sebba's model of ‘orthography as a social practice’ (Spelling and society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Moll continues by comparing orthography in the CCJ with previous findings in the field, focusing on semantics and the influence of etymology on spelling conventionalization. This section also offers a comprehensive analysis of specific orthographic conventions, such as eye dialect, and investigates topic- and user-based orthographic choices to understand the development of regular spelling forms. The chapter closes by examining how members use nonstandard orthography in identity management and the influence of role models on their orthographic strategies. Based on the results from chapter 4, chapter 5 highlights the ways that members engage in sociolinguistic styling and combine linguistic resources to construct their identity.
Chapter 6 offers an interesting insight into linguistic authenticity in the forum. It presents the results of a questionnaire that asked Jamaicans external to the CCJ to evaluate forum members’ ‘Jamaicaness’ based on their posts. Moll then underlines the importance of dialect performance in understanding the enregisterment of Cyber Jamaican and describes how JC features are strategically used to negotiate identity and sociolinguistic authenticity. The concluding chapter provides a concise summary with suggestions for further research.
Taken together, this study sheds light on how globally dispersed people use JC from a stylistic perspective. In doing so, it makes a valuable contribution to two emerging domains: web-corpus linguistics and the sociolinguistics of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC).
