Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The African Lexis In Jamaican: Its Linguistic And Sociohistorical Significance, Joseph T. Farquharson

Joseph T. Farquharson

This thesis presents a fresh and comprehensive treatment of the putative lexical Africanisms in Jamaican with a view to assessing the volume and nature of this aspect of the grammar of Jamaican.

The work draws on a set of best practices in the field of etymology and outlines a set of transparent guidelines for assigning etyma. These guidelines are put to work by conducting careful etymological analyses of the over 500 putative Africanisms that have been identified for Jamaican. The analyses produce a list of 289 words whose African etymologies have been fairly well established. An entire chapter is devoted …