Is David Starkey right or has the Jamaican bible movement lost its mind?: Language and atonement.

This chapter is a critical correlation between atonement theology and the black vernacular to produce a redemptive view of the Jamaican language. The essay explores the imperial linguistics of British colonialism in the West Indies, and the evolution of Jamaican patois, centering on current debates over the validity and utility of patois in postcolonial Jamaica, and Jamaican diaspora communities in Britain. Through a critical correlation with womanist atonement theory, a redemptive view of patois is constructed, where language functions as lived experience of resistance to the structural evil of empire.