Final Post: Jamaican Dialect Review

For my final post, I thought I'd do a review of all of the topics I've worked on. Instead of rehashing the archetype again, I did a whole video explaining what I learned. And I did it in dialect, which will be painful to listen to. Enjoy!

Facial Expressions

For this post, I was running low on ideas, so I decided to expand the idea of vocal posture to facial expressions. As I was watching the video again, I noticed that his facial expressions were affecting his voice, particularly in vowel production. This is especially apparent when he gives a kind of half smile, and all his vowels are raised in the process. I wanted to play with these aspects to see how my mimicry of them would approximate his production. This may not lead to a great insight about the dialect in general, but it should be an interesting exercise nonetheless.

[Looking to side] Invite the leaders into a meeting, at Islas High School. We outline the rollout functions of the [look to interviewer] police and sent out the sot. We didn’t [shake head and bring mouth together, like smirk] deny anything, we just put everything on the table. We decided to work with them to bring about changes. [head back briefly] So what we realized, for the last [start half-smile to interviewer] two years, we don’t have a murder in Payne Avenue. Right? [stop smiling] And, um, when you look at Majesty Garden also, the year that the Ratbat gang was so dominant, the amount of killing and [raise eyebrows] shootings. We foot patrols in the area, we put [raise eyebrows and nod for emphasis] mobile patrols and a [light head shaking for emphasis] supervisor ensure that the police are there on a 24 basis. [more emphatic side to side head movements] So we have approximately 71 gangs in 2014, now we have at least 51. So the tremendous success is to dismantle these gangs, and we’re not going to stop there, we’re gonna [big head movement] continue, we’re gonna have [nod for emphasis on each list item] matches, we’re gonna have meetings, we’re gonna have things wit the youts, like domino tournaments, football tournaments, and for the young ladies, trying to come up with some netball tournaments. And of course we put tremendous strain on the police to come up with these resources, but the fact that we are [nodding for emphasis] doing it we’re just gonna work for the betterment.

Next time I'll do a wrap up post talking about what I've learned.

Rhythm

What I noticed listening to the rhythm of this clip probably ties into the most widely recognized aspects of the Jamaican dialect. Once you start noting the stressed words, you hear a kind of galloping, dactylic rhythm that is common in many English dialects, but is more pronounced in Jamaican. The rhythm also ties in with intonation in a way that I hadn’t really put together when looking at intonation or prominence. The stressed syllables noted below have a sort of dip-and-rise intonation (3-2-4, perhaps), which is especially noticeable when listing. Listed items in many dialects of English get a rising intonation until the last item, but there’s something different to my ear about this particular intonation.

The phrases below are examples where the prominent syllables have this dipping intonation, and anchor their sections of the galloping rhythm:

• of killing and shootings
• foot patrols, mobile patrols, and a supervisor
• seventy one gangs in 2014, now we have fifty one
• not gonna stop, we’re gonna continue

Many of these can be read as contrastive stresses, but they jumped out at me most when I was listening for the rhythm of his speech.

After completing the recording I felt (and saw) myself bobbing my head along with the readings. The rhythm of this dialect has a very salient stereotype in our culture that I had to work hard to fight against, and focus on my archetype.

Next time, I'll look at some more holistic views of the dialect and get ready to wrap up this project!

Something a little different

This post will be a little different from the others as I’m working with a different text. I’ve been reading A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James. It takes place in 1960s Jamaica and is structured into short, monologic chapters narrated by a huge cast of characters, ranging from local gangsters to American journalists. Because I’ve been working on this project, I’ve been reading some dialect-heavy sections of the book to myself out loud. I decided to record one of these sessions to get a sense of how well my speech is coming along.

Listening again, I’ve noticed a few things that I need to keep in mind:

• Unstressed syllables need to be lower. The second syllable of “people”, “looking”,  should be lower vowels, not the high mid vowel of NAE.
• Reducing function words that are different from NAE in the grammar of the dialect, e.g. “Me didn’t have no chance”
• The increased tension of /i/, /o/, and /u/ takes a lot of concentration to maintain.

For my next post I’ll be focusing on pulling all of these skills together on the archetype.

 

Prominence, Sentence Stress, and Intonation

This post focuses on prominence and sentence stress, with a little bit of a look at intonation. For this I put the clip into Praat so that I could visualize it, and I’ve posted this visualization here. I noticed a few things as I listened, following along in Praat:

• Due to the audio quality, some of the pitch movement is hard to see, but Praat confirmed that he doesn’t do a lot of pitch movement except on stressed words.
• Stressed words tended to fall early in sentences, while the end of sentences tended to be faster and less stressed. Recognizing this pattern helped me to feel the rhythm of his speech more clearly as well. Some examples are “deny anything”, “what we realized”, and “71 gangs”. These phrases come early in their sentences, while the rest of the sentence gets much less stress.

I practiced these as I made the following recording, though as I listened back to it, I think some of the other aspects of the accent were not as clear.

Next time I’ll work more specifically on intonation, as well as tying all of the features together.

Here's the Praat data that I was working from.