Everything about Jamaican Patois totally explained
Jamaican Patois, also known locally as
Patois (Patwa), or simply
Jamaican, and called
Jamaican Creole by linguists, is an
English/
African-based language—not to be confused with
Jamaican English nor with the
Rastafarian use of English—used primarily in
Jamaica and the
Jamaican diaspora. This language is the descendant of a 17th century creolization process which, simply put, consisted of West and Central Africans acquiring and nativizing the
vernacular and
dialectal
British Englishes (including significant exposure to Scottish varieties) and
Hiberno English, with which their enslavement brought them in contact. Jamaican Patois is what
linguists call a
post-creole speech continuum or a linguistic continuum—meaning that the variety of the language closest to the
lexifier language (the
acrolect) can't be distinguished systematically from intermediate varieties (collectively referred to as the
mesolect) nor even from the most divergent rural varieties (collectively referred to as the
basilect). Jamaicans themselves usually refer to their language as
patois, a term without a precise linguistic definition.
Significant Jamaican-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates in
Miami,
New York City,
Toronto,
Hartford,
Washington D.C.,
Brazil,
Nicaragua,
Costa Rica,
Panama (in the
Caribbean coast), and
London. A mutually intelligible variety is found in
San Andrés y Providencia Islands, Colombia, brought to the island by descendants of
Jamaican Maroons (escaped slaves) in the 18th century.
Mesolectal forms are similar to
Basilectal
Belizean Creole. Jamaican Patois exists mostly as a
spoken language. Although standard British English is used for most writing in Jamaica, Jamaican has been gaining 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 new forms of internet writing.
Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English, despite heavy usage of English words or derivatives. It is to the point where a
native speaker of a non-Caribbean English dialect can only understand a heavily accented Jamaican speaker if he/she speaks slowly and foregoes the use of the numerous
idioms that are common in Jamaican. Jamaican Patois displays similarities to the
pidgin and
creole languages of West Africa due to their common descent from the blending of African substrate languages with European tongues.
Many Jamaican words have their origin in certain African languages. Pluralization of nouns is done by either pre-posing any cardinal numeral greater than one (1) for example /di faiv bod/ ('the five birds') or post-posing the plural marker /dem/, as in /di bod dem/ ('the birds'). Similarly, verb tense is specified using pre-posed tense markers /mi suim/, ('I swam' or 'I (habitually) swim'), /mi ago suim/ ('I am going to swim'), /mi ben/did suim/ 'I had swum', /mi afi suim/ ('I ought to swim' or 'I should swim'), etc.
Phonology
Accounts of basilectal Jamaican Patois postulate around 21 phonemic consonants and between nine and sixteen vowels.
- The status of /h/ as a phoneme is dialectal: in Western varieties, it's a full phoneme and there are minimal pairs (/hiit/ 'hit' and /iit/ 'eat'); in Eastern varieties, the presence of [h] in a word is in free variation with no consonant so that the words for 'hand' and 'and' (both underlyingly /an/) may be pronounced as [han] or [an].
- The palatal stops [c], [ɟ] and [ɲ] are considered phonemic by some accounts and phonetic by others. For the latter interpretation, their appearance is included in the larger phenomenon of phonetic palatalization.
Examples of palatalization include:
- /kiuu/ → [ciuː] → [cuː] ('a quarter quart (of rum)')
- /giaad/ → [ɟiaːd] → [ɟaːd] ('guard')
- /piaa + piaa/ → [pʲiãːpʲiãː] → [pʲãːpʲãː] ('weak')
Voiced stops are
implosive whenever in the onset of prominent syllables (especially word-initially) so that /biit/ ('beat') is pronounced as [ɓiːt] and /guud/ ('good') as [ɠuːd].
Before a syllabic /l/, the contrast between alveolar and velar consonants has been historically neutralized with alveolar consonants becoming velar so that the word for 'bottle' is /bakl̩/ and the word for 'idle' is /aigl̩/.
Jamaican Patois exhibits two types of
vowel harmony; peripheral vowel harmony, wherein only sequences of peripheral vowels (that is, /i/, /u/, and /a/) can occur within a syllable; and back harmony, wherein /i/ and /u/ can't occur within a syllable together (that is, /uu/ and /ii/ are allowed but */ui/ and */iu/ are not). These two phenomena account for three long vowels and four diphthongs:
| Vowel |
Example |
Gloss |
| /ii/ |
/biini/ |
'tiny' |
| /aa/ |
/baaba/ |
'barber' |
| /uu/ |
/buut/ |
'booth' |
| /ia/ |
/biak/ |
'bake' |
| /ai/ |
/baik/ |
'bike' |
| /ua/ |
/buat/ |
'boat' |
| /au/ |
/taun/ |
'town' |
Sociolinguistic variation
Jamaican Patois is a
creole language that exhibits a gradation between more conservative creole forms and forms virtually identical to
Standard English (for example metropolitan Standard English). This situation came about with contact between speakers of a number of
Niger-Congo languages and various dialects of English, the latter of which which were all perceived as prestigious and the use of which carried socio-economic rewards. The span of a speaker's command of the continuum generally corresponds to the variety of social situations that they situate themselves in.
Grammar
The tense/aspect system of Jamaican Patois is fundamentally unlike that of English. There are no morphological marked past tense forms corresponding to English -ed -t. There are 2 preverbial particles: 'en' and 'a'. These are not verbs, they're simply invariant particles which can't stand alone like the English ‘to be’. Their function differs also from the English.
According to Bailey (1966), the progressive category is marked by /a~da~de/. Alleyne (1980) claims that /a~da/ marks the progressive and that the habitual aspect is unmarked but by its accompaniment with verbs like 'always', 'usually’, etc (for example is absent as a grammatical category). Mufwene (1984) and Gibson and Levy (1984) propose a past-only habitual category marked by /juusta/ as in /weɹ wi juusta liv iz not az kuol az iiɹ/ ('where we used to live isn't as cold as here')
For the present tense, an uninflected verb combining with an iterative adverb marks habitual meaning as in /tam aawez nuo kieti tel pan im/ ('Tom always knows when Katy tells/has told about him').
'en' is a 'tense indicator'
'a' is an 'aspect marker'
'(a) go' is used to indicate the future
/mi ɹon/
- I run (habitually); I ran
/mi a ɹon/ or /mi de ɹon/
/a ɹon mi dida ɹon/ or /a ɹon mi ben(w)en a ɹon/
/mi did ɹon/ or /mi ben(w)en ɹon/
/mi a go ɹon/
- I am going to run; I'll run
Like other Caribbean Creoles (that is, Guyanese Creole and Providence Island Creole; Sranan Tongo is excluded) /fi/ has a number of functions, including:
Directional, dative, or benefactlve preposition
- /dem a fait fi wi/ ('They are fighting for us')
Genitive preposition (that is, marker of possession)
- /dat a fi mi buk/ ('that's my book')
Modal auxiliary expressing obligation or futurity
- /im fi kom op ja/ ('he ought to come up here')
Pre-infinitive complementizer
- /unu hafi kiip samtiŋ faɹ de gini piipl-dem fi biit dem miuzik/ ('you have to contribute something to the Guinean People for playing their music')
The pronominal system
The pronominal system of Standard English has a four-way distinction of person, number, gender and case. Some varieties of Jamaican Patois don't have the gender or case distinction, though most do; but usefully, it does distinguish between the second person singular and plural (you).
I, me = /mi/
you, you (singular) = /ju/
he, him = /im/ (pronounced as [ĩ] in the basilect varieties)
she, her = /ʃi/ or /im/ (no gender distinction in basilect varieties)
we, us = /wi/
you, you (plural) = /unu/
they, them = /dem/
Copula
the Jamaican Patois equative verb is also 'a'
- for example /mi a di tiitʃa/ ('I am the teacher')
Jamaican Patois has a separate locative verb 'deh'
- for example/wi de a london/ or /wi de ina london/ ('we are in London')
with true adjectives in Jamaican Patois, no copula is needed
- for example /mi haadbak nau/ ('I am old now')
Negation
/no/ is used as a present tense negator:
- /if kau no did nuo au im tɹuotuol tan im udn tʃaans pieɹsiid/ ('If the cow didn't know that his throat was capable of swallowing a pear seed, he wouldn't have swallowed it')
/kiaan/ is used in the same way as English can't
- /it a puoɹ tiŋ dat kiaan maʃ ant/ ('It is a poor thing that can't mash an ant')
/neva/ is a negative past participle.
- /dʒan neva tiif di moni/ ('John didn't steal the money')
Orthography
Because of its status as a non-standard language, there's no standard or official way of writing Jamaican Patois (for example the word 'there' can be written 'de', 'deh' or 'dere'; and the word for 'three' is most commonly spelt 'tree', but it can be spelt 'tri' or 'trii' to distinguish it from the noun tree). Often, Standard English spellings are used even when words are pronounced differently. At other times though, a spelling has become widespread even though it's neither phonetic nor standard (eg. 'pickney' = 'child'; in this case the spelling 'pikni' would be more phonetic). However, due to increased use on the internet and in e-mail in recent years, a user-driven process of partial standardization has been taking place.
Vocabulary
Jamaican Patois contains many loanwords. Primarily these come from English, but are also borrowed from Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, and African languages. Examples from African languages include /dopi/ meaning 'ghost', from the Twi word adope; "obeah", also from Twi, meaning a type of African spell-casting or witchcraft (and also used as a popular scapegoat for common woes); /se/ meaning 'that' (in the sense of "he told me that..." = /im tel mi se/), taken from a West African language; the pronoun /unu/, used for "you (plural)", from Igbo. Words from Hindi include "nuh", "ganja" (marijuana), and "janga" (crawdad). "Pickney" or "pickiney" meaning 'child', taken from an earlier form piccaninny, was ultimately borrowed from the Portuguese pequenino (the diminutive of "pequeno" = small) or Spanish pequeño, ('small').
There are many words referring to popular produce and food items - "ackee", "callaloo", "guinep", "bammy", "roti", "dal", "kamranga". See Jamaican cuisine.
Jamaican Patois has its own rich variety of swearwords. One of the strongest is bloodclaat (along with related forms raasclaat, bomboclaat, pussyclaat and others - compare with "bloody" in Australian English, which isn't considered swearing). Homosexual men are referred to as /biips/ or batty boys.
Example words and phrases
Three men swam.
I nearly hit him
- /a didn mek dʒuok fi lik im/
He can't beat me, he simply got lucky and won.
- /im kiaan biit mi, a dʒos bokop im bokop an win/
Those children are disobedient
What are you doing?
/siin/ - Affirmative particle
/papiˈʃuo/ - Foolish exhibition, a person who makes a foolish exhibition of themself, or an exclamation of surprise.
/dem/ 'them' (also indicates plural when placed after a noun)
/se/ 'that' (conjunction for relative clauses)
/disia/ 'this' (used before nouns)
/ooman/ 'woman'
/buai/ 'boy'
/gial/ 'girl'Further Information
Get more info on 'Jamaican Patois'.
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