Jamaican Creole Morphology And Syntax Analysis

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 pronounce the word. Jamaicans too always drop the front /h/ sound in almost every word. In the video, Ali said, “er” instead of “her” and “ot dog” instead of “hot dog” which is similar to the Jamaicans’ h-dropping pronunciation. Also, the famous t-glottaling in a word that contains double t in the middle as in “better”. In the video, Ali G said “you ain’t getting none of this”. However, according to Felberbauer (2016), he stated that none h-dropping nor t-glottaling truly belong to Jamaican Creole
For instance, “me” could function as noun “I” or it can also show possession, “my”. In the video, Ali G said, “How come me Julie can force me to tell ‘er that me love ‘er?”. Clearly, there are three uses of ‘me’ in the quoted sentence; the first “me” refers to “my”, the second “me” is used similarly how we use and the last “me” refers to the noun “I”. The sentence if were constructed in English would be, “How come my Julie can force me to tell her that I love her?” Another example is the use of word “them” which could also mean “they” in Jamaican Creole. Ali G said, “But ain't there the danger if them get equal right in the work place then them will start asking for them at