Jamaican in Wales

The CIALL initiative is supporting the extension of the Island Voices “language capture and curation” model to new contexts, new genres, and new languages, among them the recording of aspects of UK-based Jamaican language use.

Jamaica-born, but London-raised, artist and poet Audrey West was recently filmed at her home in Wales. This has resulted in the creation of Island Voices-style short video clips in familiar “documentary” and “interview” formats, with a third category of “recitation” newly added to capture her poetry. With the welcome collaboration of Dr Joseph Farquharson from the University of the West Indies Jamaican Language Unit, the documentary script has been rendered in the institutionally preferred Cassidy-JLU orthography (recently highlighted for its contribution to the Bob Marley: One Love biopic). This will enable regularised subtitling of the clip on sound linguistic principles, and, in due course, the creation of a Clilstore transcript incorporating the new Custom Dictionary tool, as experimentally exemplified in previous contributions for Island Voices.

“Jamaican in Wales” is just the first of a short series of collections in similar style that explore new fields for Island Voices, including poetic expression, and in “displaced” or “exile” contexts. This is work in progress, but all the Jamaican clips are now available online on the Island Voices video channel, and can be accessed through the project website in either landscape or phone-friendly portrait format. The easy re-purposing of documentary footage, recently illustrated at scale with the Children’s Parliament in Barra film, has also enabled the complementary production of Welsh, Gaelic, and English versions of the original Jamaican language film.

Further detail is available on the Island Voices site.