Vowel variation

There is variation between /au/ and /ua/ in the following items in JamC.

This variation, however, seems restricted to these and perhaps one or two other lexical items. For some speakers, in particular educated bilinguals, the choice of the variant employing /au/ in these items is intended to signal an extreme or intensive meaning, i.e. /aul/ ‘extremely old’, /kaul/ ‘extremely cold’. This may be a result of the fact that the /au/ version is an unusual reflex for JamE /oo/. This deviation from the expected is interpreted to signal, at least for the bilinguals, a deeper and more extreme meaning than the regular JamC /ua/ reflex would signal. In the case of the attributives meaning ‘old’ and ‘cold’, the /au/ alternant is only possible when the item is used as a predicator. When performing an adjective type function within a noun phrase, the /au/ alternant is not possible in JamC. This is demonstrated in the following example.

The awareness of the possibilities of alternation between /ua/ ~ /au/ is high within the speech community, perhaps because of its lexical role. This is exploited for poetic effect by Bennett (1966: 126), in which she writes the JamC item for ‘roll’, which is normally /rual/, as ‘rowl’, intending a pronunciation /raul/, since it is used to rhyme in the poem with /faul/ ‘fowl’. In addition, there was the Dance Hall piece by Mr Vegas, ‘Heads High’, in which all the entire rhyme scheme was based on the conversion of /ua/ into /au/, e.g. /nua/ ‘no’ to /nau/, /shua/ ‘show’ to /shau/, etc. In JamC speech, the form /oo/ very often varies with /ua/. The former is the equivalent vowel in JamE. The equivalent JamE front vowel, /ee/, however, is not frequent as an intrusion into speech which, otherwise, is consistently JamC in its features.