Jamaican Patois


Jamaican Patois, known locally as Patois and called Jamaican Creole by linguists, is an English-based creole language with West African influences spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora; it is spoken by the majority of Jamaicans as a native language. Patois 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 the slaveholders: British English, Scots, and Hiberno-English. Jamaican Creole exhibits a gradation 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 Patois, a term also used as a lower-case noun as a catch-all description of pidgins, creoles, dialects, and vernaculars. Creoles, including Jamaican Patois, are often stigmatized as a "lesser" language even when the majority of a local population speaks them as their mother tongue.
Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English despite heavy use of English words or derivatives, but their writing system shows commonalities with the English alphabet.
Significant Jamaican Patois-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates in Miami, New York City, Toronto, Hartford, Washington, D.C., Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, also London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Nottingham. A mutually intelligible variety is found in San Andrés y Providencia Islands, Colombia, brought to the island by descendants of Jamaican Maroons in the 18th century. Mesolectal forms are similar to very basilectal Belizean Kriol.
Jamaican Patois exists mostly as a spoken language and is also heavily used for musical purposes, especially in reggae and dancehall as well as other genres. Although standard British English is used for most writing in Jamaica, Jamaican Patois 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 in new forms of Internet writing.

Phonology

Accounts of basilectal Jamaican Patois 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 nasalization and others can be lengthened.
Examples of palatalization include:
Voiced stops are implosive whenever in the onset of prominent syllables so that is pronounced and as.
Before a syllabic, the contrast between alveolar and velar consonants has been historically neutralized with alveolar consonants becoming velar so that the word for 'bottle' is and the word for 'idle' is.
s of Jamaican Patois. from
Jamaican Patois exhibits two types of vowel harmony; peripheral vowel harmony, wherein only sequences of peripheral vowels can occur within a syllable; and back harmony, wherein and cannot occur within a syllable together. These two phenomena account for three long vowels and four diphthongs:
VowelExampleGloss
'tiny'
'barber'
'booth'
'bake'
'bike'
'boat'
'town'

Sociolinguistic variation

Jamaican Patois features a creole continuum : the variety of the language closest to the lexifier language cannot be distinguished systematically from intermediate varieties or even from the most divergent rural varieties. 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 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 simply invariant particles that cannot stand alone like the English to be. Their function also differs from English.
According to Bailey, the progressive category is marked by. Alleyne claims that marks the progressive and that the habitual aspect is unmarked but by its accompaniment with words such as "always", "usually", etc.. Mufwene and Gibson and Levy propose a past-only habitual category marked by as in .
For the present tense, an uninflected verb combining with an iterative adverb marks habitual meaning as in .
As in other Caribbean Creoles has a number of functions, including:
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.
This is akin to Spanish in that both have 2 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

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.
In 2002, the Jamaican Language Unit was set up at the University of the West Indies at Mona to begin standardizing 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 standardized the Jamaican alphabet as follows:
LetterPatoisEnglish
isiksick
ebelbell
abanband
okotcut
ukukcook

LetterPatoisEnglish
kiekcake
uogruogrow
aibaitbite
oukoucow

Nasal vowels are written with -hn, as in kyaahn and iihn
LetterPatoisEnglish
bbiekbake
ddaagdog
chchochchurch
ffuudfood
gguotgoat
hhenhen
jjojjudge
kkaitkite
lliinlean
mmanman
nnaisnice
ngsingsing
ppiilpeel
rronrun
ssiksick
shshoutshout
ttuutwo
vvuotvote
wwailwild
yyongyoung
zzuuzoo
zhvorzhanversion

h is written according to local pronunciation, so that hen and en are distinguished in writing for speakers of western Jamaican, but not for those of central Jamaican.

Vocabulary

Jamaican Patois contains many loanwords, most of which are African in origin, primarily from Twi.
Many loanwords come from English, but are also borrowed from Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arawak and African languages as well as Scottish and Irish dialects.
Examples from African languages include meaning that, taken from Ashanti Twi, and Duppy meaning ghost, taken from the Twi word dupon, because of the African belief of malicious spirits originating in the root of trees. The pronoun, 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 in the mid 1700s. De meaning to be comes from Yoruba. From the Ashanti-Akan, comes the term Obeah which means witchcraft, from the Ashanti Twi word Ɔbayi which also means "witchcraft".
Words from Hindi include ganja, and janga. Pickney or pickiney meaning child, taken from an earlier form was ultimately borrowed from the Portuguese pequenino or Spanish pequeño.
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.
Homosexual men may be referred to with the pejorative term, fish or batty boys.

Example phrases

A rich body of literature has developed in Jamaican Patois. Notable among early authors and works are Thomas MacDermot's All Jamaica Library and Claude McKay's Songs of Jamaica, and, more recently, dub poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mikey Smith. Subsequently, the life-work of Louise Bennett or Miss Lou is particularly notable for her use of the rich colorful 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." Nonetheless, 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:
After the 1960s, the status of Jamaican Patois rose as a number of respected linguistic studies were published, by Frederic Cassidy, Bailey and others. Subsequently, it has gradually become mainstream to codemix or write complete pieces in Jamaican Patois; proponents include Kamau Brathwaite, who also analyses the position of Creole poetry in his History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. However, Standard English remains the more prestigious literary medium in Jamaican literature. Canadian-Caribbean science-fiction novelist Nalo Hopkinson often writes in Trinidadian and sometimes Jamaican Patois. Jean D'Costa penned a series of popular children's novels, including Sprat Morrison, Escape to Last Man Peak, and Voice in the Wind, which draw liberally from Jamaican Patois for dialogue, while presenting narrative prose in Standard English. Marlon James employs Patois in his novels including A Brief History of Seven Killings. In his science fiction novel Kaya Abaniah and the Father of the Forest, British-Trinidadian author Wayne Gerard Trotman presents dialogue in Trinidadian Creole, Jamaican Patois, and French while employing Standard English for narrative prose.
Jamaican Patois is also presented in some films and other media, for example, the character Tia Dalma's speech from , and a few scenes in Meet Joe Black in which Brad Pitt's character converses with a Jamaican woman. In addition, early Jamaican films like The Harder They Come, Rockers, and many of the films produced by Palm Pictures in the mid-1990s have most of their dialogue in Jamaican Patois; some of these films have even been subtitled in English. It was also used in the second season of Luke Cage but the accents were described as "awful" by Jamaican Americans.

Bible

In December 2011, it was reported that the Bible was being translated into Jamaican Patois. The Gospel of St Luke has already appeared as: . While the Rev. Courtney Stewart, managing the translation as General Secretary of the West Indies Bible Society, believes this will help elevate the status of Jamaican Patois, others think that such a move would undermine efforts at promoting the use of English. The Patois New Testament was launched in Britain in October 2012 as "Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment", and with print and audio versions in Jamaica in December 2012.
A comparison of the Lord's Prayer

Citations

General sources

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