Call for national hub to safeguard Bajan language

​An appeal has been made to create a national linguistic and heritage centre to preserve, document, and celebrate Barbados’ unique dialect and verbal traditions.

As Parliament moved a resolution to establish a permanent home for the National Art Gallery, St Andrew MP Dr Romel Springer insisted that formal, state-led efforts must extend to preserving the nation’s oral culture, noting that language forms the bedrock of identity. 

​”In as much as a debate on acquiring a building [for the National Art Gallery] is about art, it is also a debate on our cultural heritage,” Dr Springer told the House of Assembly. “Language is an expression of our linguistic heritage and culture. It carries the history of Barbadians. You can learn or say a lot about a person based mainly on the language that they speak and their expressions.”

He stressed that alongside visual arts and physical craft, the country must establish a dedicated home for linguistic expression and traditional storytelling: “As an adjunct to this National Art Gallery, we should have a national linguistic and heritage centre so that when you express yourself in arts and crafts, there should be a home also for the expression of language.”

​Reflecting on his career as a university linguistics lecturer who taught Caribbean vocabulary and glossary creation, Dr Springer recounted the historical roots of the Bajan dialect. He pushed back against historical misconceptions that regional phrasing was simply copied between islands, explaining that many expressions trace their origins directly back to West Africa.

​”All of our language, when you do the research, stems from our removal from Africa and being brought here to the Caribbean.”

He pointed to words like wunna — used to refer to the second person plural — noting that identical terms with the same meaning exist in West African languages, as well as in Jamaica and Guyana.

 “When we check our linguistic history, we realise that we all share that same linguistic culture. The ones that we felt most comfortable using, we continued to use despite the hardship it caused us.”

​Dr Springer warned that without urgent intervention, modern influence from foreign media risks eroding the distinct speech patterns of younger generations. He expressed concern that terms, proverbs, and expressions born out of subcultures — such as the public service vehicle (PSV) transport culture — are rapidly vanishing without ever being properly catalogued.

​”There are so many Bajan expressions that have disappeared from the linguistic landscape of Barbados because nobody has taken the trouble to chronicle, document, or capture them.

“They are only captured in the memories of persons who will eventually lose their memory or pass on. You may not notice it, but one day you will wake up, and the children in this country will be talking like the children on YouTube and Peppa Pig. It will disappear from the landscape.”

​He emphasised that the Bajan accent and phrasing remain the ultimate identifier of Barbadian identity worldwide. Recalling the cultural shift within the music and broadcasting scene during the 1990s, he noted how artists moved away from mimicking Jamaican accents once they embraced the beauty and validity of their native speech.

​”See that Bajan accent? That is what distinguishes us from the Antiguans, from the Trinidadians, from the Jamaicans,” he told the chamber. “In the core of every Bajan, they love to hear the Bajan accent. It is something uniquely ours that only those who grew up here can express properly.”

​Calling on the government to engage trained language scholars and university academics, Dr Springer suggested that establishing a national repository is vital to keeping the island’s intangible history alive for future generations.

​”Let us put in place mechanisms that will ensure our language, our accent, and our Bajan culture do not disappear, because we will come to regret it. Establishing a national linguistic heritage centre to accompany the National Art Gallery would be a move in the right direction in our overall attempt to preserve that which makes us who we are.”

(RR)