Iyaric, also called Dread Talk or Rasta Talk, is a form of language constructed by members of the Rastafari movement through alteration of vocabulary. When Africans were taken into captivity as a part of the slave trade, English was imposed as a colonial language and their traditional African languages were lost. In defiance, the Rastafari movement created a modified English vocabulary and dialect, with the aim of liberating their language from its history as a tool of colonial oppression. This is accomplished by avoiding sounds and words with negative connotations, such as "back", and changing them to positive ones. Iyaric sometimes also plays a liturgical role among Rastas, in addition to Amharic and Ge'ez.

Features

Phonology

Iyaric shares phonological features with Jamaican Creole, with certain sounds, such as /a/, being stressed for the purpose of group identification distinct from Jamaican Creole. In 2015, Doctor of linguistics Havenol M. Schrenk adapted a phoneme inventory from the President Emeritus of the International Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Rocky Ricardo Meade, as follows:

Pronominal system

Iyaric's lexical departure from the pronominal system of Jamaican Creole is one of the dialect's defining features. Linguistics researcher Benjamin Slade comments that Jamaican Creole and Standard English pronoun forms are all acceptable in Iyaric, but speakers almost always use the I-form of first-person pronouns, while I-form usage for second-person pronouns is less frequent. He details his findings in the table below:

Vocabulary

Some Rastas avoid using certain words in the English language because they contain phonetic sounds that invoke negative connotations. Iyaric vocabulary developed in response to this, resulting in a dialect that challenged the negative colonial framework Rastas perceive in Jamaica's vernacular English.

Morphology

The base word forms for Iyaric are imported from Jamaican Creole, and the constituent phonemes for those words are analyzed for positive or negative connotation against an English lexifier. Words whose phonetic connotations conflict with the word's overall semantics are called the "Babylon" (colonial English) form of the word, and Iyaric uses a system called "Iformation" ("I" + transformation) to substitute those incongruously connoted phonetic matches with new phonemes that match the connotation of the overall word. This process of phono-semantic matching results in a lexicon containing only Zionic word forms, which exclude negative phonemes from positive words and positive phonemes from negatively connoted words. The purpose for favoring Zionic word forms over Babylonic word forms is to influence the speaker's cognition through the structure of the dialect, with the intent to challenge colonial biases that may be inherent in the structures of English. For example, the word "hello" is not used because they see it as containing phonetic matches for the negatively connoted English words "hell" and "low". Instead, expressions such as 'wa gwaan', 'yes I' and 'cool nuh lyah' (or 'cool alyuh'. 'alyuh'-all of you) are used because they uplift people. If at a Rastafari church, they would use their formal church greetings. For instance, the Rastafari branch known as the Twelve Tribes of Israel would say, "Greetings in that Most Precious and Divine Name of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who has revealed Himself through the wonderful personality of H.I.M. Emperor Haile Selassie the 1st of Ethiopia".

I words

Other words

Popular impact

The earliest origin of Iyaric is debated, though it is generally agreed that the dialect was deliberately created by Rastas as an argot. Despite the dialect's secretive beginnings, Iyaric words and meaning have migrated outside of Rasta communities into wider usage around the globe through reggae music and media. The term dreadlocks, for example, is used worldwide for the hairstyle that was popularized by the Rastafari movement. Rastafari metaphors like Zion and Babylon, as well as the Iyaric words "overstand" and "politricks" have entered hip hop culture through Caribbean-American and Caribbean-British rappers/musicians. In Europe, perhaps influenced by popular culture depictions of or actual encounters with Afro-Caribbean "rude boy" gangs, the term Babylon is sometimes used to refer to the police.