An­noyed, ir­ri­tat­ed, and left with a feel­ing, per­haps, of an at­tempt to make them feel lan­guage in­fe­ri­or, a cou­ple of Guyanese col­leagues re­cent­ly ex­pressed their an­noy­ance on Face­book about Tri­ni na­tion­als tak­ing de­light in mak­ing fun of Guyanese pro­nun­ci­a­tions of some words and phras­es.

For­mer Guardian ed­i­tor-in-chief Orin Gor­don and for­mer CN­MG news pre­sen­ter Leeron Brumell grew tired of "Tri­nis" mim­ic­k­ing Guyanese pro­nun­ci­a­tion of words in their vo­cab­u­lary. Re­flect­ing on this kind of "ma­m­aguy" faced must be grat­ing on the nerves when oth­ers (sup­posed Caribbean brethren) seek to make fun of a na­tion­al lan­guage and pro­nun­ci­a­tion ca­pac­i­ty and prac­tice.

It must be even more ir­ri­tat­ing when the im­i­ta­tion is poor, hack­neyed and lack­ing in au­then­tic­i­ty and gen­uine hu­mour.

From the per­spec­tive of the Guyanese the ma­m­aguy is most like­ly per­ceived as be­ing in­sen­si­tive and pompous of these Tri­nis who feel they could speak the Queen’s Eng­lish bet­ter than we Guyanese—the soon to be­come the nou­veau riche of the Caribbean: "But we will catch them com­ing to George­town to go in­to the In­te­ri­or to look for we oil dol­lars," maybe a re­ac­tion.

The mock­ing al­so says that the mock­ers are them­selves ex­pert speak­ers; they be­ing good colo­nial im­i­ta­tors. As an aside, I re­cent­ly heard the Union Jack at the start of one of Eng­land’s match­es in the ICC World Cup. It sent me back to my school­boy days singing God Save the Queen…"long to reign over us", what an id­i­ot­ic thing to wish for!

In the in­stance at hand, it is un­cer­tain if the mock­ers recog­nise that what they are do­ing amounts to han­ker­ing (to use an Amer­i­can­ism) af­ter "false val­ues", a phrase used by Lancelot Layne to ed­u­cate us.

More­over, mock­ing peo­ple who have cre­at­ed their own lan­guage, ex­pres­sions and pro­nun­ci­a­tions are seek­ing to de­ny them of self.

The mock­ing miss­es too the so­ci­o­log­i­cal and lin­guis­tic cre­ativ­i­ty of all of us in the Caribbean who were thrown to­geth­er from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent lan­guage back­grounds and were forced to in­vent lan­guages, full of graph­ic il­lus­tra­tions, in the cru­cible in which we were thrown.

Think of the lan­guage chal­lenge and the need for cre­ative syn­creti­sa­tion that faced our an­ces­tors to forge means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion amongst them­selves and the planters in en­vi­ron­ments where the spo­ken word was in French, Span­ish, Dutch, Por­tuguese, Eng­lish, Ara­bic, Chi­nese, and the mul­ti­plic­i­ty of African and In­di­an lan­guages.

Out of them all has come the cre­ative syn­creti­sa­tion of the var­i­ous na­tive Cre­ole forms we use to com­mu­ni­cate in­ter­nal­ly and across the is­land chain, the edge of the con­ti­nent in Guyana, Suri­name and even Cayenne, the lat­ter ap­pro­pri­at­ed by the French.

In­stead of mock­ery, there should be won­der, en­joy­ment, fas­ci­na­tion by all of us and study by the lin­guists of the lan­guage en­vi­ron­ment of the Caribbean. When I am in the mar­ket places in Do­mini­ca and St. Lu­cia, I de­light in the Cre­ole of the mar­ket ven­dors and their cus­tomers even though I don’t un­der­stand one word of what they are say­ing.

What is eas­i­ly un­der­stood though, is the de­light, ease and flu­en­cy of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween and among a peo­ple who have cre­at­ed a lan­guage to in­ter­act with each oth­er. The lan­guage evo­lu­tion in the Caribbean is ab­solute­ly amaz­ing. Not too in­ci­den­tal­ly is the fact that we have not val­ued this lan­guage va­ri­ety and cre­ation to share with our vis­i­tors. Maybe we don’t re­gard it suf­fi­cient­ly as some­thing of great won­der in the cre­ation of the var­i­ous strands of our his­to­ry.

I sug­gest­ed, a lit­tle provoca­tive­ly, to the bruised and ir­ri­tat­ed pride of the Guyanese, maybe mock­ing is a state­ment of love and ap­pre­ci­a­tion for each oth­er. When we feel suf­fi­cient­ly com­fort­able with per­sons, we en­gage freely in mock­ing and "ma­m­aguy".

But again hu­mour is a se­ri­ous thing in Trinidad; not so much To­ba­go; our brethren there be­ing "se­ri­ous" peo­ple who do not un­der­stand the easy re­sort of the Tri­ni to find hu­mour in very se­ri­ous mat­ters.

Go­ing back 40 years when Cana ra­dio, Carib­vi­sion and Carib­scope were cre­at­ed on ra­dio and tele­vi­sion, it was ex­cit­ing to hear the voic­es and lan­guages of peo­ple from the var­i­ous lan­guage groups and all of the in-be­tweens in the Caribbean

Lan­guage de­vel­op­ment and cre­ation should be a sub­ject for Cari­com lead­ers, min­is­ters, and those aca­d­e­mics who study the lan­guage and in the process bring so­cial val­ue to it. Sure­ly, a few of our best nov­el­ists do it.