#problematic: Using English for social justice advocacy in Creole-speaking societies

Language advocacy in the Caribbean arguably has a fairly extensive history dating back to the colonial era when poets, storytellers, singers, and theatre practitioners started to disrupt the status quo and dared to create art using the local Creole languages in the region. This unwitting act of advocacy was bolstered by the fact that these same creatives managed to gain the approval of their communities in calling for the respect and recognition of Creole languages as "real" languages alongside their European counterparts. Once linguists took up the mantle and started to lobby the government for formal recognition of language rights, the support started to dissipate. Caribbean academics who engaged in language advocacy became seen as "elites", who were already proficient in a European language and were interested in "imposing" the local Creole languages on marginalized speakers.

This chapter investigates the dominance of the English language in matters of social justice even among societies where a Creole language is the national language. The data in this study comes from a corpus of reader responses in an online forum to newspaper articles dealing with language rights. Shielded by the veil of anonymity, and bolstered by social media style "up-votes", forum users are emboldened to be combative in their online commentary. I argue that in its attempt to seek equality and inclusion, social justice discourse instead fosters inequality and exclusion by alienating large, and sometimes vulnerable, portions of society who lack the dexterity in English to engage in social justice dialogue. I assess the #problematic implications of this paradigm for language advocacy in the Caribbean and propose a shift towards a social justice dialectic grounded in local Creole languages.