I was lucky to have caught Ife Thompson, a proud ‘Brixtonian’, last week. As a full-time criminal defence lawyer and community organiser, she is extremely busy. Ife is the founder and director of the charity Black Learning Achievement and Mental health (BLAM UK), which focuses on Black history, racial wellness and advocates against anti-blackness and exclusion in schools. They also hold community focussed events around Black history and culture. Last November, BLAM organised the event ‘An Exploration Of Black Languages: Pidgin & Patois’, focussing on languages spoken by Black people in the UK, so I wanted to speak to Ife about how she experiences London ways of speaking that are associated with Black speakers.
As part of her work at BLAM, Ife is a linguistic justice activist which has led to her mapping first-hand experiences of the ways in which ‘Black British English, or BBE, is criminalised’ in the courtroom. She gives the example of the term ‘the plug’, ‘a BBE term which the prosecution and the police believe is the person supplying drugs.’ But Ife notes that in Black British English, it can be used to explain a variety of situations. ‘It can be used for someone that connects you with things, for a person that’s always the go-to person, who has all the answers. But if a Black person on trial is using it in a text message, the prosecution and police will say that he’s using the language of drug dealers and therefore the language is automatically criminalised.’ ‘This position is then used to justify suggestions that the defendant must be a roadman or a drug dealer’, she tells me. ‘It’s criminalising a whole community who use that language’. She adds, ‘of course, roadmen or persons engaging in alternative economies that have been criminalised can use that language, because language is not restricted to any one person, but the state must, like with any other language, ensure it is using Black British language speakers to understand the wider context and to see what a word actually means.’
Ife says she is now consciously using and campaigning for the term ‘Black British English (BBE)’ for what ‘white sociolinguists have termed ‘Multicultural London English’’. ‘Five years ago, I would have called it slang, but now I don’t call it slang at all’. ‘I always knew it was a language, but I didn’t have the tools and the political language theory to describe the ways in which I and many others around me spoke. Reading books about anti-Black linguistic discrimination helped me to situate my experiences as a Black person and to make more language-conscious choices.’ As a speaker and researcher, she notes that there is one Black British English language that originated in London but with slight variations in different UK cities with large Black communities such as Manchester or Birmingham.
In courts across the UK, Ife often sees ‘Black British English’ dismissed as not a language or improper English. She tells me about another case where a girl giving evidence used the BBE term ‘bali’ for ‘balaclava’. Being a speaker of Black British English, she had never heard of the word used in its other form, which led to a misunderstanding that ‘could have led to bias creeping in about the person’s ability to speak mainstreamed English when, in fact, they are a speaker of another language and this should have been acknowledged in open court’. ‘With all other language speakers, you don’t want to start assuming what they’re saying, you would get an interpreter. But because it’s a language that Black people created, there’s an indifference towards it’, she says.
As a speaker of ‘Black British English, mainstreamed English, and Yoruba’, Ife understands herself as a ‘Creole polyglot’. ‘What really hit it home for me’, she says, ‘is when we started going to schools with BLAM, I was hearing the kids speaking how I spoke! I was like: Hold on, you sound like me! It was for me quite reaffirming. And it made me realise that this language is also way more intergenerational. I wanted them as BBE speakers to feel affirmed. Because sometimes you think it’s just in your little bubble but seeing the young children speak BBE showed me that this was not the case.’ This has become one of her missions at BLAM, ‘to create a culture from the ground up where young people don’t feel ashamed or embarrassed to speak Black British English’. She says, ‘language is such an active space in which imperialism and colonialism are upheld, so people internalise these negative narratives about BBE speakers. Even if they are themself a BBE speaker, they will say they aren’t speaking proper English, rather than understanding that that they’re bilingual in BBE and mainstream English.’
‘Black British English like any other language has rules, there is a certain way of speaking Black British English and if you are a speaker of Black British English you know what sounds right’, she says. Ife explains that she doesn’t use the term ‘Multicultural London English’: ‘The basis of Black British English is African and Caribbean languages like Pidgin and Patois. It would be dishonest to suggest that it’s some sort of multi-cultural language, when it is inherently Black. ‘Multicultural’ means everything and nothing. And I think it’s contributing to an erasure of Black heritage and cultural production.’
LONDON TALKS 