The Chayo Cant
As the English-speaking world extended its dominion across the planet, its language too spread rapidly. Never before had a single language been used in an area so vast, nor by a multitude so diverse. While it had been the leadership’s hope that English would become the international lingua franca in that way, and despite the effort valiantly put in by the media and local educational systems to promote or enforce a single-form, homogenous version of Shakespeare’s tongue, its fate was that of all languages spoken throughout an empire too great: to break apart.
History
Geographical distance, however, was not the main factor for the divergences that followed the rapidly-growing English hegemony. Australian and New Zealandic English, for instance, had never shown many signs of splitting into languages in their own right, despite having been kept separate from the kingdom’s original dialect for quite some time. Yet in a much shorter timespan, English as spoken in some parts of Madrid after the British occupation became cryptic, and mostly unintelligible to the average Londonian ear. Much to the dismay of the colonialistic ideology, the same phenomenon occurred quickly in each and every colony, especially in the lower classes, sprouting linguistic offspring that many were quick to label as wrong, barbaric, or appalling distortions of the glorious British heritage. This struggle was that of other empires’ primary language too, as German became mixed with Greek, Turkish and Arabic in its Mediterranean holdings, or new French subdialects emerged in Indochina at the intersection with local languages.
Much of the history of language in those imperialistic times could be summarised not so much by physical boundaries, but more so by social ones. As local identities were discriminated against, discouraged, eliminated, or slowly assimilated at best, survival strategies for minority cultures and languages were devised. Purposefully misleading the colonisers, or excluding them from mutual intelligibility, was one of these strategies, as it made language into a bastion that could not be taken with violence nor arms.
Of the many examples of such creoles, cants, cryptolects or otherwise hard-to-classify language variants, the Chayo Cant has become one of the most prominent. While the name may be reminiscent of Spanish, it is, in fact, as English as it gets, and is thought to have emerged in the ports of British Oceania, in particular Port Moresby, where the Tok Pisin-speaking population already had a tendency to simplify the English syllable structure. One example of this was “hand” becoming “han”, and “wild” becoming “wail”. Consonant clusters had long known little success in that part of the world.
It is in this context that the word “child” is thought to have first become “sail” or “sayo”, especially in the term “tok sail / tok sayo”, possibly referring to the speech of Port Moresby’s youth. The term might have died out if it had not been for a propaganda article commissioned from the Jakartan British Gazette to depict the way of life of the locals to people back in the home country. “Tok sayo” was therein referred to as Chayo, perhaps to make the origin of the word clearer to the readers, or as a freely-stylized contraction, or yet again because of a misunderstanding of “tok sayo” as “the Chayo”. In the article, whose focus confessedly is to belittle local customs, the term is stressed as meaning “the child language” or “the language of the children”, underlining the puerile speech of those not yet assimilated to British culture, rather than duly examining the language or the actual origin of its name.
The piece, written by one Aaron Postlethwaite, was released on April 15th, 1926 in many great cities of the commonwealth, as one of the many steps in the establishment of a worldwide news programme, intended to later extend to the radio, and whose ambition it was to inform the population of the goings-on in the colonies under a supremacist light. The article, however, was to terminate that dream of a pan-colonial news network early. Indeed, while Postlethwaite’s “investigation” enjoyed some success in the higher classes, it also resulted in great unrest in the working class at a time where the power of unions was on the rise, and within which it was largely perceived as a way to expand on the exploitable share of the empire’s population. This, along with other factors, contributed to riots in London, Manchester, Liverpool, and other major cities in April and May 1926 which were, in turn, relayed in the proletarian press.
It is a man named Ciarán McGuckin who is thought to have used this incentive to organize the counter-network, although others have meritedly shared the credit. McGuckin, a decades-long editor from Edinburgh who found himself out of a job due to his political inclinations, then formed a team of some of his close friends with the purpose of reaching out to sympathizing newspapers overseas, which were also increasing in number and influence under the international strain. By means of weeks of communications which have later been referred to as the “Million Phone Calls”, the newly-formed McGuckin & Co. (a respectable newspaper company in the books of the English bureaucracy) started to put together a network of news providers throughout the British empire that synchronously published the same denunciatory pieces, which took it to heart to shed favorable light onto each and every topic who suffered English propaganda. By the end of June, the Chayo Cant spoken in the distant Port Moresby had become a dogwhistle for the linguistic resistance throughout the English-speaking world.
By learning about its existence and purpose, proletarian readers took interest in this dialect by the thousands, for it resonated in some way with their own experience of language. For the purposes of expansion, the empire had long been adamant on the preservation of “proper English”, declaring a witchhunt on the numerous local variations and accents of the language within Great Britain. Recognizing in the Chayo Cant a dialect that was as empowered as it was deviant, much of the English lower class (whether native or colonized) adopted its accent as a sign of revolt and mutual recognition.
Linguistics
Being popularized primarily through the means of printed press, the Chayo Cant never was a singular language and displayed many different adaptations and discrepancies depending on the area of the world. However, a few facts stuck, the most prominent of which being the pronunciation of any L sound at the end of a word or before a word-final consonant as YO, IO, W, U or O, unless the word was directly followed by a vowel. Phonetic respelling was also commonplace. Thus, it was not rare to hear 1938 Cockney speakers explain to you that-
de chayod jinx miyok[də ˈt͡ʃa.jɔd d͡ʒɪŋks ˈmɪ.jɔk]
the child drinks milk
or that
de devu alone’s capabu’v turnin sin into eyo
[də ˈdɛ.vɔ əˈlaʊn‿z ˈkæɪ.pə.bɔ‿v ˈtɜːnɪn sɪn ˈɪn.tʊ ˈɛ.jɔ]
the Devil alone is capable of turning sin into Hell
There was only one rule of thumb: the more aggravating and outrageous it was for the average gentleman to read or hear, the better. Stressing the YOs became a political tool and a way to take pride in one’s status, including but not limited to the British working class.
The phonetic phenomenon involved in turning L into YO, known in linguistic terms as L-vocalization, was already present in many dialects of English prior to those events (including Cockney), but rarely ever conscious, let alone written. The Chayo Cant allowed for its instrumentalization, endowing it with an identitarian purpose to the point that it was often deliberately taken to extremes. Further examples include:
- diphthonguising the newly-formed syllable (chayowd [ˈt͡ʃa.jəʊd ~ ˈt͡ʃa.joʊd], or even the somewhat ironic chayold, chayuld [ˈt͡ʃa.jəɫd]
- the intrusive R (chayerd [ˈt͡ʃa.jɚd]
- moving stress onto the new vowel altogether (chayowd [t͡ʃəˈjəwd ~ t͡ʃəˈjoʊd].
In its native Port Moresby, the variants chayot [ˈt͡ʃa.jɔt] and jayot [ˈd͡ʒa.jɔt] would be on the rise under Tok Pisin influence.
This is how, by wanting to rid the English language of its impurities, the ones in power gave the people the means to make it precisely the opposite of a “pure” and “correct” language. And in doing so, they gave English a new life: where it was supposed to stand for unity and inflexibility, it now stood for representation and diversity. Where it was meant to signify the power of a few, it came to be the language of the people, unbending before Imperialism so long as the cant glued them together. Many such dialects emerged as a consequence of worldwide conquests, but it is the Chayo that will most likely go down in History as the leading dialect in the matter, in part due to its historical significance, but also because it is the language that you teach… your chayod.
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