Linguistic ideologies and the historical development of language use patterns in Jamaican music

- Development of folk music and folk language were interconnected in Jamaica.
- Reggae's linguistic subversion is a soft revolution given its use of English.
- Jamaican Creole indexes national identity in dancehall music.
- Music is a space for scripting and performing national identity in Jamaica.
- Language practice, language ideologies, and music are interconnected in Jamaica.

This paper presents Jamaica as a case study of the intersections between language practice, language ideologies, and music, using a historically grounded descriptive approach spanning a period of more than three and a half centuries. It describes secular and religious Jamaican music(s) and ideologies connected to them through different periods of the country's history characterised by different social and socio-political configurations (e.g., slavery, colonial rule, Independence). These systems and the emergent socialities to which they gave rise influenced the creation of new musical genres and determined to varying extents how linguistic codes were distributed by genre, and in the lyrics themselves.