Iyaric, also called Dread Talk, is a pseudo-dialect of English consciously created by members of the Rastafari movement. African languages were lost among Africans when they were taken into captivity as part of the slave trade, and adherents of Rastafari teachings believe that English is an imposed colonial language. Their remedy for this situation has been the creation of a modified vocabulary and dialect, reflecting a desire to take language forward and to confront what they see as the confusion of a corrupt and decadent society they call "Babylon". 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 Rasta Talk, 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