From time to time, judges are required to make decisions which hinge on questions of the degree of linguistic proficiency possessed by people involved in the judicial process. A typical scenario in which they may be called upon to make such a decision concerns the appointment of interpreters for a criminal defendant.  Another, which US judges often face, involves the assessment of whether a suspect “knowingly and intelligently” waived certain legal protective rights police officers are required to communicate to a suspect in custody[1] before interrogating him or her.  In many instances, such a determination pivots on the suspect’s ability to understand the language used by the police officer.  In other circumstances, a tribunal’s perception of a speaker’s degree of linguistic competence in a particular language may impinge on credibility evaluations of the speaker by the tribunal.

This article examines three court cases, one arising in Jamaica, another in the US and the third in Canada, which exemplify the circumstances described above.  All cases involve speakers of Caribbean English vernaculars, specifically Jamaican and Guyanese.  Using judgments, court memoranda and orders and other documentation issued by or filed in court, the article analyses the judicial treatment of Caribbean English vernacular speakers in the courts of the three jurisdictions within the sociolinguistic context of the vernacular languages.

The analysis suggests that, in two of the cases, there appears to be a judicial under-appreciation of the nature of these vernaculars.  This, in turn, seems to have an impact on the quality of decision-making by the judicial officer and arguably undermined, in these cases, notions of due process and fairness so critical in the criminal process.   The Canadian case, the third in the trilogy, presents a stark contrast to the other two in the judicial approach adopted to the trial of speakers of Jamaican in the absence of an interpreter.  It may be that fairly sustained judicial experience with Caribbean English vernacular speakers coupled with heightened social sensitivity to language issues in general within the Canadian environment help to explain the disparate judicial approaches.

I argue that the judicial sensitivity to Caribbean English vernacular speakers demonstrated in the Canadian case is instructive for English-medium tribunals interacting with these speakers.  The lessons from the Canadian case apply whether these tribunals are located in the respective home speech communities of the vernaculars or in overseas jurisdictions where Caribbean English vernaculars are foreign languages, notwithstanding their shared lexicon with English.

[1] The shorthand label for these rights is the ‘Miranda warning’ named for the US Supreme Court case, Miranda v State of Arizona 384 US 436 (1966).  They include the right against self-incrimination, the right to an have an attorney present during the interrogation and that, if the suspect chooses to speak during the questioning, what he says will be recorded and may be used against him or her in any trial of the matter.