Dread Talk: The Rastafarians' Linguistic Response to Societal Oppression

• Main Author: Manget-Johnson, Carol Anne
• Format: Others
• Published: Digital Archive @ GSU 2008
• Subjects: Haile Selassie I; Colonialism; Political Resistance; Bob Marley; Standard Jamaican English; Oppression; Caribbean Creole; Language Variation; Iyaric; Dread Talk; Rastafarian; Reggae; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/44; http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=english_theses

Opposed to the repressive socio-economic political climate that resulted in the impoverishment of masses of Jamaicans, the Jamaican Rastafarians developed a language to resist societal oppression. This study examines that language--Dread Talk--as resistive language. Having determined that the other variations spoken in their community--Standard Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole--were inadequate to express their dispossessed circumstances, the Rastafarians forged an identity through their language that represents a resistant philosophy, music and religion. This resistance not only articulates their socio-political state, but also commands global attention. This study scrutinizes the lexical, phonological, and syntactical structures of the poetic music discourse of Dread Talk, the conscious deliberate fashioning of a language that purposefully expresses resistance to the political and social ideology of their native land, Jamaica.