The reggae vocabulary that left Jamaica, and what happened to it

Most of the Patois that reached the rest of the world arrived on a record. Some of those words are ordinary Jamaican speech that happened to be sung — everybody in Jamaica uses them, and always did. Others belong to Rastafari, a religious movement that deliberately rebuilt parts of English for its own reasons, and those are the words most likely to be used abroad with a meaning they never had at home.

Two kinds of word, and the difference matters

The distinction runs through everything below, so it is worth fixing first.

The first kind is everyday Jamaican vocabulary. yaad(yaad), meaning — yard, home, likkle(likl), meaning — little, pickney(pikni), meaning — child and nyam(nyam), meaning — to eat are used by Jamaicans of every belief and every generation, in kitchens and offices and school corridors, and they were in the language long before anybody recorded them. A song is simply where an outsider first heard them.

The second kind is movement vocabulary — the coinages of Rastafari, made on purpose, carrying a theology. These words came out of Jamaica in the same songs, and they arrived without the theology attached, which is where nearly all the confusion comes from.

Rastafari, and the language it built

Rastafari emerged in Jamaica in the early 1930s, after the coronation of Haile Selassie I as Emperor of Ethiopia in November 1930 — an event its first teachers read as the fulfilment of prophecy. It is a religion and a way of living, with its own dietary practice, its own reading of scripture and its own account of history. Its adherents also did something unusual: they audited the English language they had been given, decided that a good deal of it encoded a view of the world they rejected, and rebuilt the parts they objected to.

The result is often called Iyaric or Dread Talk, and the logic is consistent once you see it. Where a sound inside a word contradicts what the word means, the sound is corrected. Understand puts a person beneath the thing they know, so overstand, meaning — to understand is used instead. Oppression opens with a syllable that sounds like up, which is the opposite of what the word means, so downpression, meaning — oppression corrects it. Vital gives Ital, meaning — natural, unprocessed — used of food and of a way of living, the name for food prepared simply and without processing. livity, meaning — the conduct of a life names how a person lives, in the sense of a practice rather than a lifestyle.

Two more carry most of the weight. Babylon, meaning — the oppressive system; also the police names the structures the movement stands against, borrowed from scripture and applied to the modern state. Jah, meaning — God is the name of God, shortened from a scriptural form.

What the I is doing

The most distinctive feature of Iyaric is the pronoun. The account usually given traces it to the name: Haile Selassie I was the First, the Roman numeral was read as the English letter, and that letter was read as the pronoun. Other accounts give the I a wider theological life that does not depend on the name, and the two explanations are not exclusive. Either way the form is I and I — used where English would say me, us or we, and asserting that the speaker is never alone and never merely an object of somebody else's sentence.

That is a theological claim built into a grammatical form, which is why it does not translate. English speakers who use it as a stylish way of saying I are using a creed as decoration, and Rastafari speakers hear that clearly. The same I seeds a great many other words, replacing a first syllable throughout the vocabulary of anyone speaking that way seriously.

The words that changed on the way out

A word that travels without its context arrives meaning whatever the new listeners need it to mean. Several of the best-known reggae exports drifted exactly that way.

irie, meaning — good, well, at peace is the clearest case. In Jamaica it means something closer to at peace or all is well than to happy, and it is strongly associated with Rastafari speech, though its origin is not settled and it is used well beyond the movement. Abroad it became a generic marker for a relaxed mood, printed on merchandise and used as a greeting by people with no connection to the movement at all. The word did not change in Jamaica; the copy that travelled changed.

Dread went the same way. It named the seriousness of a Rastafari life, and by extension the locks worn by people living it; abroad it became the name of a hairstyle, sold in salons, detached from any of that. Ital is now a marketing word on menus. Babylon is used loosely by people who could not say what it refers to. And one love, which carried the movement's insistence on unity in the music that exported it, is now largely a slogan.

None of this is a scandal, and words have always done it. It is simply useful to know which of the words you like came with freight, because the people they came from still carry it.

Why a word drifts when it travels

The mechanism is not mysterious, and knowing it makes the drift predictable rather than surprising.

A song delivers a word without a setting. A listener in Birmingham or Toronto hears it inside three minutes of music and has no access to the conversation, the belief, or the room the word normally belongs to — so they infer a meaning from the mood of the record, and the mood of a record is a very coarse instrument. What survives the crossing is the feeling. What gets left behind is the reference.

Then the inferred meaning becomes the meaning, because that is what everyone around the new listener also believes. Within a decade the exported sense is stable abroad and the original sense is stable at home, and the two have very little to do with each other. Neither group is making a mistake. They are simply using two different words that happen to be spelled the same way.

The vocabulary of the music itself

Some of the exported words are the names of the forms. Mento came first, then ska in the early 1960s, then the slower rocksteady around 1966. Reggae took its name at the end of the decade — Toots and the Maytals cut a record in 1968 whose title is generally credited with naming the genre — and it was reggae that carried everything else out.

Dub followed in the early 1970s, when engineers began stripping vocals from a mix and rebuilding it as an instrumental with effects: King Tubby, Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo made an art of it. It built on the version — the reworked B-side of a single — which had become the standard second half of a Jamaican record by the end of the 1960s. Talking over those versions is toasting, which U-Roy and Big Youth turned into a form of its own, and which is the direct ancestor of the deejay conventions in dancehall.

The export routes are worth naming too. Millie Small had a British hit in 1964, Desmond Dekker topped the British chart with Israelites in 1969, and Jimmy Cliff reached a much larger audience with the film The Harder They Come in 1972. Bob Marley and the Wailers, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear and Third World did the rest through the decade, and lovers rock and Steel Pulse carried it onward in Britain.

Words that are just Jamaican

Set the movement vocabulary aside and a large, entirely ordinary lexicon is left. These belong to the language, not to any faith or era.

Everyday Jamaican words the music carried abroad

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
yaad	yaad	Yard; home; Jamaica itself
likkle	likl	Little
pickney	pikni	A child
nyam	nyam	To eat
duppy	dopi	A ghost or spirit
bredda	breda	Brother
nuff	nof	Plenty of
respec	rispek	Respect
tallawah	talawa	Small but strong

Several of these are traced to West African languages rather than to English, and their histories are considerably older than any record — nyam(nyam), meaning — to eat and duppy(dopi), meaning — a ghost among them, though which African language a given word came from is often argued over. That inheritance is set out in the Patois words from Twi, Yoruba and Igbo. More of the general vocabulary, with pronunciation, is in the Jamaican Patois words collection.

What to be careful with

Three honest cautions, none of them about permission.

Iyaric is the first. Using I and I, or Jah, or livity, when you do not hold the belief they express, reads as costume — and it is the kind of costume that is noticed instantly by the people it belongs to. The vocabulary in the table above carries none of that risk.

The second is the accent. Nothing marks an outsider faster than a performed Jamaican voice, and a word said in your own accent is always better received than the same word said in somebody else's.

The third is the strongest end of the vocabulary. Jamaican Patois has a set of expletives that appear frequently in music and that are considerably heavier than they look on a page — heavier than their nearest English equivalents, and capable of ending a conversation. They are not written here. If you meet one in a song, treat it as loud until somebody who speaks the language tells you otherwise.

Praise, by contrast, travels well and costs nothing, which is why big up yuhself is the export a visitor is most likely to get right.