R. B. Le Page – författare

Illiteracy problems are worldwide, and growing. Political and economic factors are often in conflict over which language to use for basic education and how it should be taught. There is increasing pressure on the resources available for using literacy in coping with the rapid population increase, the spread of disease, and poor development. The editors and contributors to this volume are members of The International Group for the Study of Language Standardization and the Vernacularization of Literacy (IGLSVL), with unrivalled direct personal experience of literacy and language problems in the second half of the twentieth century. The contributors take the UNESCO publication, The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education, as their starting point. Published in 1953, this work was optimistic about the future of literacy. The contributors assess the nature and significance of the events that have taken place since then, providing a global overview. The discussions are supported by case-studies of campaigns to promote vernacular languages and examples of how people relate to their languages in different cultures. Most importantly, they question traditional notions of, and provide a non-Western perspective on, the uses and value of literacy.

This is the second edition of the authoritative Dictionary of Jamaican English, first published in 1967. This edition includes a greatly extended supplement and offers a systematic indexing of the extent to which the lexis is shared with other Caribbean countries: Surinam, Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, Nicaragua and Belize. The method and plan of the Dictionary are basically those of the Oxford English Dictionary, but oral sources have been extensively tapped in addition to detailed coverage of literature published in or about Jamaica since 1655. A great deal of care has been taken to trace the etymologies not only of English, Scots and Irish but also of African, Portuguese and Spanish, French, Amerindian, general sea-faring and other words. The Dictionary is thus a mine of information about the Caribbean and its dialects, about the history of English and its dialects, about Creole languages and about general linguistic processes.