‘The most striking differences between the folk speech of Jamaica and the educated speech are not in the sounds, still less in the vocabulary – they are in the grammar, the functional patterns into which the words fall. It is also in this respect that the most fundamental influence from African backgrounds is to be seen, and that is why Jamaican folk speech is not a dialect in the same sense that the rural speech of Devonshire or Lancashire, say, are dialects of English. Those who would hold that Jamaican folk speech is not to be considered a type of English at all, but a new and different language, will find their strongest arguments here ( …)’ Frederic G. Cassidy Jamaica Talk (1961)