Talking Turkey's Text Analysis

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Graham Barber Text Analysis Talking Turkeys December 2009 Upon first glance, this piece of work called `Talking Turkeys` appears to be poetry, probably Jamaican Creole style embracing the sociolect Black British English. It has the hallmark of rap music in literary form, targeting a younger audience which could be white as well as black because the pace and rhythm create a rap characteristic. The purpose of this piece of poetry is to entertain. Phrases like: `who put the turkey in Christmas` would suggest that there are comical undertones. It gives out another message too; warnings of Christmas losing its tradition and becoming too commercial, people making money out of the festive period: `An business men mek a loadsa cash.` The use of non-standard English, in this case `Black British English,` is to try to reach a multi cultural and a younger listening and reading audience to promote Jamaican Creole to a much wider and untapped source as well as being entertaining. Black British English historically is from the Caribbean taken from the local dialect. The creole was brought to British shores during mass immigration post war, and its survival rests upon the need to share cultural, identity and heritage in a mainly white dominated culture (Sabba 2002). Black British English is a sociolect belonging to a particular sect of people; it is not restricted to a particular area of England. Its poetic form demonstrates originality and uniqueness. The writer uses different pronunciation and grammar of Jamaican Creole for example `d` sound replaces `th`. A good example is dem (them) dey (they). He uses `yu` to replace `you` and `your` showing the compactness of Creole’s pronoun structure (Sabba 2002). The writer omits auxiliary verbs such as `have in` and `I got` and misses off word endings to give structure such as `wanna` and `loadsa`. These are some of

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