Guyana
By Charlene Wilkinson &
Kencil Banwarie
University of Guyana
Department of Language & Cultural Studies Faculty of Education &
the Humanities
In January of this year, a landmark conference in Jamaica concluded with the presentation to members of the public of the final draft of The Charter on Language Policy and Language Rights in the Creole Speaking Caribbean. Participants at this conference — linguists, educators and policy makers — from fifteen Caribbean States, the United States, the United Kingdom and France met to finalize this document which had its inception in the work of Caribbean linguists begun more than five decades earlier. Current Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana, Lawrence Carrington, world-renowned linguist, was a keynote speaker at the conference. Two Guyanese lecturers from the University of Guyana, Kencil Banwarie and Charlene Wilkinson were also participants and proud signatories to the Charter along with the other participants. They returned home to introduce it to their peers in the Faculty of Education and the Humanities with the expectation that the University would appreciate the strategic advantage of this historic document and recognise its leadership role in the re-visioning of Guyana’s language policy.
The Charter is built on the foundations of previously established Human Rights treaties: The Charter of the United Nations—The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966; and the American Convention on Human Rights of 1969. From the point of view of education, it is a promising beginning to the formulation of a response to the challenges of teaching in the Caribbean because it recognizes the Caribbean Creoles as ‘territorial languages, separate from the European languages from which they derive their vocabulary’.
