The Grammar of Never Being Alone

Rastafari speech deliberately reworks standard English, and its best known change is a single pronoun. Where a conventional speaker would say I, or we, or you and I, Rastafari speech commonly substitutes I and I, and the substitution is not decorative. It carries an actual doctrinal claim. The speaker, in this usage, is never truly alone, because Jah is understood to be present within the person speaking, and because a person exists fundamentally within a community rather than as an isolated unit standing apart from other people and from the divine. The same underlying logic removes the object case from a great deal of Rastafari speech as well: to say me, in this reading, is to place oneself grammatically as the thing being acted upon rather than as the one doing the acting, a passive construction the movement reads as part of the grammar of Babylon, the system of oppression Rastafari doctrine holds responsible for the historical subjugation of Black people. Replacing me with I, wherever the sense allows it, is accordingly read as a small but real act of reclaiming agency at the level of the sentence itself. Rastafari speakers describe the practice as making the presence of the divine impossible to leave out of even the most ordinary sentence, so that theology is carried in daily speech rather than confined to formal worship alone.