Translating All School Books To Patwa!!!

Sometimes people believe that things make economic sense because it sounds good.

As a bookseller at the time when the Patois Bible idea was conceived of, I gave the BS people my opinion based on the sociocultural realities of my people. Christianity in Patois was considered ungodly. I nevertheless stocked some which hardly ever sold. Call It embedded racism if you will,  'The King James Version', is the people's mass choice to date.

Patios Bible sounded good but it made little economic sense.

The global population is just over 7 billion. 2 billion speak English, 1.5 speak Mandarin approximate 900 million speak Spanish. Other significant languages are Arabic, Russian and French.

Patois both at home in Jamaica and in the diaspora is about 5 million which is a tiny percentage of the world population, therefore has insignificant  economic impact on science, mathematics for example.

If you force patois on the people via educational institutions would be a regressive move and economic waste in a sense. I do agree though, for all institutions being able to communicate with all citizens whether in Patois or in English and that should be made official.

Teachers are already trained in colleges to use either mode to communicate with students. The courts in the administration of Justice do same. Even Courts in Canada, USA and UK sometimes employ  interpreters in the system.

Money would be better spent to make Jamaicans multilingual in English, and in Spanish,

Mandarin compulsory  with French ,Russian and Arabic available. That would make economic sense for trading, tourism, manufacturing. The foregoing pragmatism is what should be applied instead of handing money to friends for translating books which may all end up like the patois Bible - unused.

Don't get mi wrong mi luv mi Patwa.

Fr micspen 🖊️