Welcome back to #CrucianwithMami, today I’m going to talk about Dey or They as they say it in Standard English.
In Standard English, They have five forms (They, Them, Their, Theirs, and Themselves) but in Crucian it only has four (Dey, Dem, Dey-own or Dey’s, Deyself or Demself).
No doubt you’ve noticed by now that we pronounce the th sound as d which is called Alveolar stops, it’s more than likely a carry-over from our Irish Overseers, it’s actually hilarious and interesting. The other day I was scrolling through Tiktok and came upon some Irish videos and I’ve always loved the accent so I said why not? sounds good to me. Going through several videos I landed on one of someone talking about accents from Northern Ireland and how hard it can be to understand and I paused…
What’s so hard about it? I thought to myself, I understood everything!
Anyway, here are some sample sentences:
They don’t belong here.
Dey dohn belong ya.
Are you going to the party with them?
You goin tuh deh jam wih dem?
The red one is their house.
Deh red one is dey house.
Are you going to pay for theirs too?
Yu goin tuh pay fo dey-own too?
Yu goin tuh pay for dey’s too?
His parents are going to blame themselves.
He parents dem goin blame deyself.
He parents dem goin blame demself.
Ah the lovely deyself, it is Crucian for theirselves which is a non-standard way of saying themselves. You might hear theirselves said in some dialects but it is almost never written. In Crucian it is perfectly fine to say and write deyself and I find it more natural to say deyself vs demself. Like every other nuance in Crucian, these differences just comes down to personal preferences.
Crucianize 
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