Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Jumiekan Patwah or Patwa and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is a Caribbean English-based creole language with substantial admixture from predominantly West African languages, and some forms of Arawak, Spanish, French and other languages, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. Words or slang from Jamaican Patois can be heard in other Caribbean countries, the United Kingdom (especially in London, where it has heavily influenced Multicultural London English), New York City and Miami in the United States, and Toronto, Canada.Cassidy, F. G. "Multiple etymologies in Jamaican Creole". Am Speech, 1966, 41:211–215. It is spoken by most Jamaicans as their first language.
Patois developed in the 17th century when enslaved people from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned, and nativised the vernacular and dialectal languages spoken by the slaveholders and overseers: British English, Hiberno-English and Scots. Jamaican Creole exists in gradations between more conservative creole forms that are not significantly mutually intelligible with English, and forms virtually identical to Standard English.
Jamaicans refer to their language as , a term also used as a lower-case noun as a multi-use description of pidgins, creoles, dialects, and vernaculars worldwide. Creoles, including Jamaican Patois, are often stigmatised as low-prestige languages even when spoken as the mother tongue by most of the local population. Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English despite heavy use of English words or derivatives.
Significant Jamaican Patois-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates and non-Jamaicans in South Florida, New York City, Hartford, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., coastal Latin America, the Cayman Islands, Toronto, London,Sebba, Mark (1993), London Jamaican, London: Longman. Birmingham, Manchester, and Nottingham. The Cayman Islands in particular have a large Jamaican Patois-speaking community, with 16.4% of the population using it.Labor force and employment eso.ky Mutually intelligible variations are found in San Andrés y Providencia Islands, Colombia, Limón Province, Costa Rica, Colón Province and Bocas del Toro Province, Panama, the Miskito Coast of Honduras LOS NEGROS INGLESES, O CREOLES DE HONDURAS: ETNOHISTORIA, RACISMO, NACIONALISMO Y CONSTRUCCIÓN DE IMAGINARIOS NACIONALES EXCLUYENTES EN HONDURAS (in Spanish: BLACKS English, or Creoles OF HONDURAS: ETHNOHISTORY, racism, nationalism and exclusionary national IMAGINARY CONSTRUCTION IN HONDURAS). Posted by Dr. Jorge Alberto Amaya. Retrieved December 13, 2024. and Nicaragua, and Belize— brought by enslaved and emancipated Afro-Jamaicans, Creole Jamaicans and Jewish-Jamaican merchants, as well as, labourers who migrated to work in agriculture (mainly banana production and lumbering), and later to build the Panama Canal, railroads and ports, between the mid-17th and 20th centuries. Mesolectal forms are similar to very basilectal Belizean Kriol.
Jamaican Patois exists mainly as a spoken language and is also heavily used for musical purposes, especially in mento, reggae and dancehall as well as other genres. Although standard British English is used for most writing in Jamaica, Jamaican Patois has gained ground as a literary language for almost a hundred years. Claude McKay published his book of Jamaican poems Songs of Jamaica in 1912. Patois and English are frequently used for stylistic contrast (codeswitching) in forms of Internet writing.Hinrichs, Lars (2006), Codeswitching on the Web: English and Jamaican Creole in E-Mail Communication. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Phonology Accounts of basilectal Jamaican Patois (that is, its most divergent rural varieties) suggest around 21 phonemic consonants with an additional phoneme () in the Western dialect. There are between nine and sixteen vowels. Some vowels are capable of nasalisation and others can be lengthened.
+ Consonants Labial Alveolar Post-alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal () Stop()() Fricative()() Approximant/Lateral
The status of as a phoneme is dialectal: in western varieties, it is a full phoneme and there are minimal pairs ( 'hit' and 'eat'); in central and eastern varieties, vowel-initial words take an initial after vowel-final words, preventing the two vowels from falling together, so that the words for 'hand' and 'and' (both underlyingly ) may be pronounced or . The palatal stops and are considered phonemic by some accountssuch as and phonetic by others.such as For the latter interpretation, their appearance is included in the larger phenomenon of phonetic palatalisation. Examples of palatalisation include: → → ('a quarter quart (of rum)') → → ('guard') → → ('weak')
Voiced stops are implosive whenever in the onset of prominent syllables (especially word-initially) so that ('beat') is pronounced and ('good') as .
Before a syllabic , the contrast between alveolar and velar consonants has been historically neutralised with alveolar consonants becoming velar so that the word for 'bottle' is and the word for 'idle' is .
Jamaican Patois exhibits two types of vowel harmony; peripheral vowel harmony, wherein only sequences of peripheral vowels (that is, , , and ) can occur within a syllable; and back harmony, wherein and cannot occur within a syllable together (that is, and are allowed but and are not). These two phenomena account for three long vowels and four diphthongs:
Vowel Example Gloss 'tiny' 'barber' 'booth' 'bake' 'bike' 'boat' 'town'
Sociolinguistic variation Jamaican Patois features a creole continuum (or a linguistic continuum): the variety of the language closest to the lexifier language (the acrolect) cannot be distinguished systematically from intermediate varieties (collectively referred to as the mesolect) or even from the most divergent rural varieties (collectively referred to as the basilect). This situation came about with contact between speakers of a number of Niger–Congo languages and various dialects of English, the latter of which were all perceived as prestigious and whose use carried socio-economic benefits. The span of a speaker's command of the continuum generally corresponds to social context.
Grammar The tense/aspect system of Jamaican Patois is fundamentally unlike that of English. There are no morphologically marked past participles; instead, two different participle words exist: en and a. These are not verbs, but rather invariant particles that cannot stand alone (like the English to be). Their function also differs from those of English: en is a tense indicator and a is an aspect marker.
According to Bailey (1966), the progressive category is marked by . Alleyne (1980) claims that marks the progressive and that the habitual aspect is unmarked but by its accompaniment with words such as "always", "usually", etc. (i.e. is absent as a grammatical category). Mufwene (1984) and Gibson and Levy (1984) propose a past-only habitual category marked by as in ('where we used to live is not as cold as here').
For the present tense, an uninflected verb combining with an iterative adverb marks habitual meaning as in ('Tom always knows when Katy tells/has told about him'). cited in
For the future tense, (a) go is used to indicate the future. +Jamaican Patois ExampleEnglish TranslationStandardPhonemicMi runI run (habitually); I ranMi a run, Mi de run, I am runningA run mi did a run or I was runningMi did run or I have run; I had runMi a go runI am going to run; I will go on a run As in other Caribbean Creoles (that is, Guyanese Creole and San Andrés-Providencia Creole; Sranan Tongo is excluded) has a number of functions, including: +Grammatical CategoryFunctionJamaican Patois ExampleEnglish TranslationStandardPhonemicPrepositionDirectional, dative, or benefactive They are fighting for usGenitiveThat's my bookModal auxiliaryExpressing obligation or futurityHe ought to come up hereComplementiserPre-infinitiveYou have to contribute something to the Guinean People for playing their music
Pronominal system
The pronominal system of Standard English has a four-way distinction of person, number, gender and case. Some varieties of Jamaican Patois do not have the gender or case distinction, but all varieties distinguish between the second person singular and plural (you). +Jamaican Patois PronounGrammatical numberGrammatical personGrammatical genderEnglish TranslationPhonemicsingularfirst-personneuterI, mesecond-personneuterYou (singular)third-personneuterThey, them (singular)masculineHe, himfeminineShe, her/wi/pluralfirst-personneuterWe, us, oursecond-personneuterYou (plural)third-personneuterThey, them, theirNote: In basilect varieties, is pronounced and has no gender distinction. Copula
the Jamaican Patois equative verb is also a e.g. ('I am the teacher') Jamaican Patois has a separate locative verb deh e.g. or ('we are in London') with true adjectives in Jamaican Patois, no copula is needed e.g. ('I am old now')
This is akin to Spanish in that both have two distinct forms of the verb "to be" – ser and estar – in which ser is equative and estar is locative. Other languages, such as Portuguese and Italian, make a similar distinction .
Negation
is used as a present tense negator: ('If the cow knew that his throat wasn't capable of swallowing a pear seed, he wouldn't have swallowed it') translates this as "If the cow didn't know that his throat was capable of swallowing a pear seed, he wouldn't have swallowed it." is used in the same way as English can't ('It is a poor thing that can't mash an ant') is a negative past participle. ('John did not steal the money')
Orthography
Patois has long been written with various respellings compared to English so that, for example, the word "there" might be written , , or , and the word "three" as , , or . Standard English spelling is often used and a nonstandard spelling sometimes becomes widespread even though it is neither phonetic nor standard (e.g. for , 'child').
In 2002, the Jamaican Language Unit was set up at the University of the West Indies at Mona to begin standardising the language, with the aim of supporting non-English-speaking Jamaicans according to their constitutional guarantees of equal rights, as services of the state are normally provided in English, which a significant portion of the population cannot speak fluently. The vast majority of such persons are speakers of Jamaican Patois. It was argued that failure to provide services of the state in a language in such general use or discriminatory treatment by officers of the state based on the inability of a citizen to use English violates the rights of citizens. The proposal was made that freedom from discrimination on the ground of language be inserted into the Charter of Rights. They standardised the Jamaican alphabet as follows:
+ Short vowels Letter Patois English i sik sick e bel bell a ban band o kot cut u kuk cook + Long vowelsIPA Letter Patois English[iː] ii tii tea[aː] aa baal ball[uː] uu shuut shoot + DiphthongsIPA Letter Patois English/ia/ kiek cake/ua/ uo gruo grow/ai/ ai bait bite/au/ ou kou cow Nasal vowels are written with -hn, as in kyaahn (can't) and iihn (isn't it?) + Consonants Letter Patois English b biek bake d daag dog ch choch church f fuud food g guot goat h hen hen j joj judge k kait kite l liin lean m man man n nais nice ng sing sing p piil peel r ron run s sik sick sh shout shout t tuu two v vuot vote w wail wild y yong young z zuu zoo zh vorzhan version h is written according to local pronunciation, so that hen (hen) and en (end) are distinguished in writing for speakers of western Jamaican, but not for those of central Jamaican.
Vocabulary