Jamaican Super Bowl Ad
People have been asking if the Volkswagen Super Bowl ad featuring the White guys (and that one Asian dude) with the egregiously fake Jamaican accents was racist:
Well, here’s the opinion from an actual Jamaican(-American): it’s not so much racist as it is stupid. The commercial would have been so much better if they had REAL Jamaican accents. But then, if they had done that, most of the White people watching wouldn’t have been able to understand it:
The “10,000 lakes” line was funny though…
JayMan's Blog 
I could understand most of what he’s saying, but then I come from a place with it’s own form of Creole English. I have heard that Jamaica is undergoing rapid linguistic decreolization, though. Probably not as far along as Hawaii, in which it seems like traditional pidgin is so moribund among the young that they’re thinking of having college classes just to keep it from being lost.
Regional accents are dying out everywhere (cable TV and the Internet are to blame, I suspect). There are plenty of U.S. Southerners who dont seem to have the twang.
A couple of years ago I worked with a man who was from Trinidad and had a strong Caribbean accent. It sounded much like a Jamaican accent, with which I was more familiar, though I suppose a native of either country could tell the difference. The odd thing was, this Caribbean-speaker was Chinese. He said that all four of his grandparents had come to Trinidad as children or adolescents.
Peter
Many of the Black Caribbean island dialects sound similar (e.g. Virgin Islands, Barbados, etc…). In Jamaica, tourist are thrown off when they see a White or Chinese man spewing full Patois…
Eh, who de rass cyare? Me nah cyare! *Kiss teeth* Me have mar importan’ tings to warry about den dese ting wit dem white peepal selling cyars, rass.
(My dad is Sri Lankan, but my mom is Guyanese. 😉 )
Haha, that’s it… 😉