| Patois (Jamaican Creole) |
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|---|---|---|
| Spoken in |  Jamaica 2,665,636[1] Costa Rica 55,100[1] Panama 268,435[1] |
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| Total speakers | 3.1 million[1] | |
| Language family | Creole language
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | none | |
| ISO 639-3 | jam | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Jamaican Patois, known locally as Patois (Patwa) or Jamaican, and called Jamaican Creole by linguists, is an English–African creole language spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. It is not to be confused with Jamaican English nor with the Rastafarian use of English. The language developed in the 17th century, when slaves from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned and nativized the vernacular and dialectal forms of English spoken by their masters: British English and Hiberno English. Jamaican Patois features a creole continuum (a linguistic continuum)[2][3][4]—meaning that 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) nor even from the most divergent rural varieties (collectively referred to as the basilect). Jamaicans themselves usually refer to their dialect as patois, a French term without a precise linguistic definition.
Significant Jamaican-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates in Miami, New York City, Toronto, Hartford, Washington, D.C., Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama (in the Caribbean coast), and London.[5] 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 very Basilectal Belizean Kriol.
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.[6]
Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English, despite heavy use of English words or derivatives. A native speaker of a non-Caribbean English dialect can understand a heavily accented Jamaican speaker only if he/she speaks slowly and forgoes the use of the many 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 languages.[citation needed]
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Accounts of basilectal Jamaican Patois postulate around 21 phonemic consonants[7] and between 9 and 16 vowels.[8]
| Labial | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal2 | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||
| Stop | p b | t d | tʃ dʒ | c ɟ | k ɡ | |
| Fricative | f v | s z | ʃ | (h)1 | ||
| Approximant | ɹ | j | w | |||
| Lateral | l |
Examples of palatalization include:[14]
Voiced stops are implosive whenever in the onset of prominent syllables (especially word-initially) so that /biit/ ('beat') is pronounced [ɓiːt] and /ɡuud/ ('good') as [ɠuːd].[7]
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 /aiɡl̩/.[15]
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/ cannot occur within a syllable together (that is, /uu/ and /ii/ are allowed but */ui/ and */iu/ are not).[16] These two phenomena account for three long vowels and four diphthongs:[17]
| Vowel | Example | Gloss |
|---|---|---|
| /ii/ | /biini/ | 'tiny' |
| /aa/ | /baaba/ | 'barber' |
| /uu/ | /buut/ | 'booth' |
| /ia/ | /biak/ | 'bake' |
| /ai/ | /baik/ | 'bike' |
| /ua/ | /buat/ | 'boat' |
| /au/ | /taun/ | 'town' |
Jamaican Patois is a creole language that exhibits a gradation between more conservative creole forms and forms virtually identical to Standard English[18] (i.e. 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 were all perceived as prestigious and the use of which carried socio-economic rewards.[19] The span of a speaker's command of the continuum generally corresponds to the variety of social situations that they situate themselves in.[20]
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 two preverbial particles: en and a. These are not verbs, they are simply invariant particles that cannot stand alone like the English to be. Their function also differs 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 (i.e. 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 is not as cold as here') [21]
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').[22]
Like other Caribbean Creoles (that is, Guyanese Creole and San Andrés-Providencia Creole; Sranan Tongo is excluded) /fi/ has a number of functions, including:[23]
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, though most do; but usefully, it does distinguish between the second person singular and plural (you).
Because Jamaican Patois is a non-standard language, there is no standard or official way of writing it. For example, the word "there" can be written de, deh, or dere, and the word "three" is most commonly spelled tree, but it can be spelled tri or trii to distinguish it from the noun tree. Often, Standard English spellings are used even when words are pronounced differently. Other times, a spelling has become widespread even though it is 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 (such as in E-mail) in recent years, a user-driven process of partial standardization has been taking place.
Jamaican Patois contains many loanwords. Primarily these come from English, but are also borrowed from Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arawak 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/), also taken from Ashanti Twi; the pronoun /unu/, used for the plural form of you, is taken from the Igbo language. Red eboe describes a fair skinned black person because of the reported account of fair skin among the Igbo.[29] Soso meaning only comes from both the Igbo and Yoruba language.[30] 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 blood claat (along with related forms raas claat, bomba claat, pussy claat and others—compare with bloody in Australian English, which is not considered swearing). Homosexual men are referred to as /biips/[31] or batty boys[citation needed].
A rich body of literature has developed in Jamaican Patois. Notable among early authors are Thomas MacDermot's All Jamaica Library and Claude McKay's Songs of Jamaica (1909), and, more recently, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mikey Smith. Subsequently, the life-work of Louise Bennett or Miss Lou (1919–2006), is particularly notable in her use of the rich colourful patois, despite being shunned by traditional literary groups. "The Jamaican Poetry League excluded her from its meetings, and editors failed to include her in anthologies."[36] She argued forcefully for the recognition of Jamaican as a full language, with the same pedigree as the dialect from which Standard English had sprung:
Dah language weh yuh proud a,Weh yuh honour an respec –
Po Mas Charlie, yuh no know se
Dat it spring from dialec!
—Bans a Killin
After the 1960s, the status of Jamaican rose as a number of respected linguistic studies were published, by Cassidy (1961,1967), Bailey (1966) and others [37]. Subsequently, it has gradually become mainstream to codemix or write complete pieces in Jamaican Patois; proponents include Kamau Brathwaite, who also analyzes the position of Creole poetry in his History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984). However, Standard English remains the more prestigious literary medium in Jamaican literature. Canadian-Caribbean science-fiction novelist Nalo Hopkinson often writes in Jamaican or other Caribbean patois.
Jamaican Patois is also presented in some films, for example, Tia Dalma's speech from Dead Man's Chest.
Jamaican Patois, 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 on the island of Jamaica. Jamaican 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 Irish and Scottish varieties), with which their forced labour brought them in contact. Of course it must be understood that all languages are derived from usually more than one already existing language. In the sense that Italian, Catalan, French, Spanish, and Portuguese are all derived from Latin, no one would call any of these languages Latin creole or Patois. Modern day Jamaican creole is what is called a linguistic continuum in linguistics terms. That is, there is no cut-and-dry division between the standard language (the acrolect) and the most divergent, rural form (the basilect). The intermediate form is called the mesolect.
Significant Jamaican-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates in Miami, New York City, Toronto, Washington D.C., Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama (in the Caribbean coast), and London. There is also a very similar, mutually intelligible variety found in San Andres Islands, Colombia, brought to the island by decendants of Jamaican maroons in the 18th century. Jamaican creole 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.
Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from most other English dialects, 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 they talk slowly and forego the use of the numerous idioms that are common in Jamaican.
This is due to the fact that many Jamaican words have their origin in various African languages and the language syntax is mostly derived from the various African languages. Pluralisation of nouns is done by either prepending a cardinal—de five bud = the five birds—or by appending the plural indicator, "dem"—de bud dem = the birds. Similarly, verb tense is specified using prepended tense indicators—mi swim, mi a go swim, mi beh~ swim, mi a fi swim, etc.
Interest in Jamaican culture outside of Jamaica was heightened by the proliferation of the Rastafari movement and reggae and ska music throughout the world beginning in the 1960s.
Contents |
The pronominal system of Standard English has a four-way distinction of person, singular/plural, gender and nominative/objective. Some varieties of Jamaican Creole do not have the gender or nominative/objective distinction, though most do; but usefully, it does distinguish between the second person singular and plural (you).
To form the possessive adjectives and the possessive pronouns,
simply add "fi-" to the pronouns above. Note, though, that most
varieties of Jamaican Creole use merely the nominative/objective
pronouns in place of these possessive variants, which are used for
emphasis.
Often, fi- is used in front of nouns, to indicate possession (replacing 's).
e.g. a fi-Anne daag dat, that is Anne's dog.
Naturally, Jamaican Creole contains many words borrowed from English as well as from Spanish, Portuguese, Hindustani, and African languages. Examples of such words include "duppy" meaning 'ghost' from Twi adope, id; "pickney/pickiney" meaning 'child' (may have been taken from an earlier form "piccaninny" and ultimately borrowed from Portuguese "pequenino" or most likely from the Spanish "pequeño"); "obeah" (also from Twi) referring to a type of spell-casting, voodoo or witchcraft native to Africa (and also used as a popular scapegoat for common woes); and even "seh" meaning 'that' (in the sense of "he told me that" = "im tel mi seh") and taken from a west African dialect. Words from Hindustani include "nuh", "ganja" (marijuana), and "janga" (crayfish).
The tense/aspect system of Jamaican Creole 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 are simply invariant particles which cannot stand alone like the English ‘to be’. Their functions differs also from the English
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*'en' is called a ‘tense indicator’
*'a' is called the ‘aspect marker’
*'go' is used to indicate the future
There are no morphological marked past tense forms corresponding to English -ed -t.
Characteristic features include the absence of /ɒ/ (as in British English "got"), which fell together with /ɑː/, as in most US Englishes. Jamaican Creole developed two palatal plosives, namely /kʲ/ and /ɡʲ/, they derive from English palatal allophones of /k/ and /ɡ/. Due to African influences, /kʲ/ and /ɡʲ/ are now phonemes in Jamaican Creole. Furthermore, Jamaican Creole has no /θ/ (as in Standard English "thing") phoneme; /θ/ fell together with /t/. Other features of many Jamaican dialects include:
Because of its status as non-standard, there is no standard or official way of writing Jamaican Creole; (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 is neither phonetic nor standard (eg. 'pickney' = 'child'; in this case the spelling 'pikni' would be more phonetic).
(Note that double negatives in Jamaican Creole are used as intensifiers)
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