Black British English
What lexical, grammatical and phonological features of Creole are used/not used? How
might the text version look represented in standard English, in the phonemic orthography
used in the Dictionary of Jamaican English and/or more marked styles of Black British
English?
You could approach this by annotating the text, or an excerpt from the text, in its word
processed form, or on paper, transferring the features to a table under the three headings
specified. We decided to colour-code it, as shown in the excerpt below.
11, 10 ,9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
Its I Smiley Culture with the Mic in me hand
Me come to teach you the right and not the wrong
In a de cockney translation
Cockney's not a language it is only a slang
And was originated ya so inna England
The first place it was used was over East London
It was respect for different style pronounciation
But it wasn't really used by any and any man
Me say strictly con-man also the villain
But through me full up of lyrics and education
Right here now you go get a little translation.
You may note some features eluding immediate categorization, depending on your familiarity
with the varieties of language in use. There are two of us collaborating on this activity: one,
whose speech is closer to RP identified "over East London" as a Black British English form; the
other, whose speech has its roots in a traditional working class London vernacular, regarded it
as a general feature of London English rather than a feature of this Creole. It will take further
linguistic detective work to identify who is right, and the truth probably may well lie in degrees of
mutual influence. Another question relates to "the right not the wrong": is this a Black British
English phrase, or a manner of expression used to maintain the rhythmic patterning of the song,
or is it used for other reasons?
You will have noticed some of the same patterns of pronoun use (me), plurals (man) and
pronunciation (dem) discussed in Mark Sebba’s commentaries, but you will also find this is not
as frequent or as consistent as in Sonny’s Letta. This may be a consequence of the different
contexts for Cockney Translation and Sonny’s Letta, including differences in the implied
audiences, with correspondingly different pressures on choices made about the representation
of Black British English. As Dan Clayton says in the blogpost accompanying the lyric, Cockney
Translation blends Cockney and Jamaican ‘slang’ "into a witty commentary on shared culture in
London… which show just how normal the blending of cultures and languages is in youth
culture". It was a lighthearted song with wide appeal and the record topped the charts. Sonny’s
Letta has a different level of authentic representation which focuses a more explicit appeal to
solidarity, and resistance to an authority (including the standard language) misusing its power.
If you wanted to establish the level of orthographic variation with numbered precision you could
count the ratio of standard to non-standard spellings in the written versions of Cockney
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Translation and Sonny’s Letta. Again, some of the items may not be easily counted as there
may be no standard English equivalence, hinting at the limitations of such a model of translation.
Another limitation lies in the fact that the written version of Cockney Translation is a websourced fan's version of the lyric rather than being an authoritative published version. It may not
be accurate, and it gives only limited representation of pronunciation.
You could look at how the song works differently in the approximate rendering into formal
standard English below and consider how much of the original sense is retained and how the
text is altered in the effects produced. This version renders some of the explicit referential
meaning but is far from being a simple translation of the written text’s impact, or that of the
performed song.
11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
It’s me, Smiley Culture, with the microphone in my hand. I have come to teach you the
right way of translating Cockney. Cockney's not a language, it is only a slang, and it
originated here in England. The first place it was used was in East London. It showed
respect for a different style of pronunciation but it wasn't really used by anyone except
conmen and villains. But, because I am educated and experienced in writing lyrics you
are going to get a little translation.
Experiments with rewriting this verse in more marked styles of Black British English, or in the
orthography of the Dictionary of Jamaican English, will show up the level of standard English
used. It will not function as Sonny’s Letta does. You may want to consider why.
What difference does the orthography make to the impact of the text version and what
aspects of the performance does linguistics not account for?
Apart from using phonemic symbols to show pronunciation, as in Sebba’s activities, linguistic
approaches to describing the phonology of speech use specialised conventions to take account
of “suprasegmentals”: pace, volume, pitch and related details which are not indicated in
standard English writing. Some recent approaches to textual study have taken this further,
placing the linguistic meaning-making in a text within a broader communicative repertoire of
“semiotic resources” including body language, gesture, gaze, clothing, and auditory and visual
meaning-making. For the purposes of this activity you may merely want to note the
comparatively meagre account of the song in performance rendered by the lyrics by comparison
with watching and listening to the performance.
It has been argued that non-standard orthographies may lead to more vivid kinds of reading and
hint at meanings beyond those in use in familiar standard English forms. Some of this may be in
the simulation of spoken effects: rendering the mode of speech by the mode of writing. Other
examples are harder to explain, as in the case of eye dialect, where the re-spelling of a word
does not alter its pronunciation but may still give off different effects to those of the standard
English equivalent form. In Sebba’s recent book, Spelling and Society, he makes the point, for
example, that the spelling “tuff”, a respelling sometimes found in advertising and popular culture,
does not signal a different sound to <tough> but it may not have a simple equivalent meaningmaking consequence. In Sonny’s Letta, <letta> functions in this way, signalling (at least) a
deliberate distancing from authority from the start.
References
Sebba, M. (2007), Spelling and Society, Cambridge University Press
2