Jamaican Creole Morphology

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Based on Ali G’s video about human rights on YouTube and the article by Peter L. Patrick entitled Jamaican Creole Morphology and Syntax, in terms of pronunciation, Jamaican Patois speaker as mentioned in the article normally substitute the /th/ sound to /d/ or /t/ sound. Hence, the word “them” will be pronounced as “dem”. Phonologically, /ðɛm/ is pronounced as /dɛm/. However, in the video, we noticed that the word “think” is pronounced the way the native speaker of English would pronounce. His pronunciation of ‘think” as “tink” is not consistent in the video. At first, he used “tink” then later it changed to “think”. He did not substitute the /th/ sound with /d/ sound. He pronounced “think” instead of “tink” in the way the Jamaicans usually…show more content…
For instance, “reduced” will be pronounced as “reduce” with no stress in the /ed/ sound at the end. In the video, Ali G again shows inconsistency in pronouncing the word “shocked”. He sometimes dropped the /ed/ sound and sometimes he does not. Meanwhile, hypercorrection of H also takes place in Jamaican Creole where the speaker will attach /h/ sound in front of the word like “egg”, “off”, “end” and many more (Nyvlt, 2012). This feature does occur in Ali G’s speech but not consistent. He said “Does you think that women should be hexpected to do the cleaning…” He added /h/ sound in front of “expected” but did not do the same to “equal…show more content…
In the video, Ali G said “I is shocked” which should be “I am shocked”. On the other hand, he also often use contraction such as “I’s got a joke”. This feature exists in Jamaican Creole and is used by its speakers. Jamaicans often place the verb ‘is’ before noun, be it singular or plural noun. Also, similar case happened to word “does” where Ali G is heard to place this word to form a question and to . We quoted what is said by Ali G with addition the word does, “Does you think it is possible that…”, “I ain’t saying I does this”, “They does it before they leave for

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