Six pronouns, no cases, and no gender in the third person

Jamaican Patois has six basic pronouns, and not one of them changes shape for case. The word for I is the same word as me and the same word as my. That one fact removes most of what an English speaker expects to have to learn here, and it is why the pronoun system is one of the first parts of the grammar a beginner can genuinely finish rather than merely start.

There is a second difference, and it is the one people notice first: the third person singular does not tell you the gender of the person it refers to.

One word for I, me and my

English keeps three shapes of the first person and makes you pick between them by position in the sentence: I saw her, she saw me, my house. Getting that wrong is one of the loudest errors a learner of English can make, and English speakers stop noticing they are doing it at about the age of four.

Patois does not distribute the work that way. One form covers the subject, the object and the possessor, and the position in the sentence carries the rest.

The same pronoun in three positions

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English	Word for word
Mi see im	mi sii im	I saw her	I see her
Im see mi	im sii mi	She saw me	she see me
Mi madda	mi mada	My mother

Nothing was added and nothing was inflected. The pronoun sat in the subject slot, then the object slot, then in front of a noun, and each time the sentence read it correctly. This is a common arrangement across the world's languages, and it is one place where Patois asks less of a learner than English does.

The full set, in one place

Six forms. This is the whole system, and there is no second set of case forms waiting behind it.

The Jamaican Patois pronouns

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
mi	mi	I, me, my
yuh	yu	you, your — one person
im	im	he, she, him, her — and his or her
wi	wi	we, us, our
unno	unu	you, your — more than one
dem	dem	they, them, their

The second column is Cassidy/JLU, the phonemic spelling in which one letter always means one sound. It matters here because two of the popular spellings are not read the way they are written: the second person singular ends in a silent h, and the plural doubles an n that is said once. Those are conventions of writing Patois in English letters, not sounds anybody produces. The first column is what you will read in a message; the second is what you will hear.

You will also meet the third person written as him. That is ordinary. The extra h at the front of a word comes and goes in Jamaican speech in a way that is not tied to meaning, so the two spellings are the same word.

Im, and a third person that does not name a gender

The third person singular covers he, she, him and her without distinguishing them. This is a feature of the grammar, in exactly the way that not marking the verb for tense is a feature of the grammar. It is not a gap, and there is nothing missing from a sentence built with it. The same form is often used of a thing rather than a person, doing the work English gives to it — and nearer the English end of the range you will hear it itself.

A very large share of the world's languages work this way. Finnish, Turkish, Yoruba, Swahili and spoken Mandarin all have a third person pronoun that does not tell you the gender of the person, and none of their speakers has ever found a conversation impossible because of it. Context supplies what the pronoun does not, and when context will not do the job, Patois names the person instead of leaning on the pronoun — which is, if anything, clearer than the English habit of letting a pronoun three sentences back do the work.

You will also hear the English feminine forms in use, particularly in speech closer to the English end of the range, and they are as Jamaican as anything else on this page. Speakers move along that range constantly, and a speaker who uses one form with a stranger and another at home is doing something skilled.

Unno, the plural you that English gave up

English used to distinguish one you from several: thou for one person, ye for a group. It lost the distinction entirely and has been improvising ever since with you all, you guys, yous and y'all.

Patois did not lose it. There is a dedicated plural: unno(unu)— you, more than one. It is not a casual regional add-on and it is not slang. It is a full member of the pronoun set, used in the same positions as every other pronoun, and a sentence addressed to a group takes it as a matter of ordinary grammar.

It is also one of the most-cited West African retentions in the language. Igbo has a second person plural pronoun of the same shape doing the same job, and most accounts trace the Patois word to it — a derivation that is well accepted rather than proven, as etymologies in this part of the vocabulary generally are. Related forms turn up in other Caribbean creoles as well, which is the kind of pattern that makes a shared source likely.

One usage note, because it is the sort of thing a phrase list will not tell you: it is genuinely plural, and addressing one person with it is not a thing speakers do. If you are talking to a single person, the singular form is the only one on offer.

You will see it written more than one way by different people. We use a single spelling across the site so the same word always looks the same to a learner, which is a house convention rather than a ruling about how anyone else should write it.

Possession without a possessive

There is no separate possessive form to learn, because the plain pronoun in front of a noun already means possession. Put the pronoun first, put the noun second, and you are done.

The same logic runs between two nouns: no ending is added to say whose something is. My mother's house is built by putting the three words in order, and the order is the grammar.

Possession, built by word order

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
mi yaad	mi yaad	My home
im pickney	im pikni	Her child
dem taxi	dem taksi	Their taxi
fi mi	fi mi	Mine

That last row is the emphatic version. Placing a short word meaning for in front of the pronoun gives you a possessive with weight on it — the difference between saying which chair is yours and insisting on it.

One overlap is worth flagging before it catches you. The third person plural form does double duty: in front of a noun it means their, and after a noun it marks the noun as plural. Position separates them cleanly, and it is the same principle at work as everywhere else in the grammar. The plural use has its own page: Jamaican Patois plurals and how -dem works.

Putting the weight on a pronoun

Because the pronouns never change shape, emphasis has to be built rather than inflected — and Patois builds it by moving the pronoun to the front of the sentence, after a short marker: A mi tell im(a mi tel im)— It was me who told him.

English does the same thing with a whole cleft construction and four extra words. Patois does it with one syllable and a reordering, and it is used constantly, in argument, in correction and in taking credit. That marker is doing copula work, and it has its own guide: the Jamaican Patois copula.

Reflexives, and the self forms

The reflexive is regular: attach the word for self to the pronoun and it is done. There are no irregular reflexives, the pattern works for every person, and it is built on the same six forms you have already learned rather than on a seventh set.

The reflexive forms

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
miself	miself	myself
yuhself	yuself	yourself
imself	imself	himself, herself
demself	demself	themselves

Note that the plural at the bottom does not take an English -selves. The plural is already carried by the pronoun in front, so repeating it on the end would be saying the same thing twice — which is a good miniature of how the whole language distributes its work.

You have almost certainly met one of these already, because it sits inside one of the best known compliments in the language: Big up yuhself(big op yuself)— well done, respect to you.

What an English speaker reaches for first

Three habits are worth unlearning early, and none of them will stop you being understood.

The first is hunting for the object form. There is not one, so a sentence that is already complete will feel for a while as though it is missing something. It is not.

The second is adding an ending to show possession. The pronoun in front of the noun has already said it, and an extra ending is a piece of English grammar arriving where it is not needed.

The third is agreement. Patois verbs do not change for the person of the subject, so no pronoun on this page ever forces a change further along the sentence. The pronouns and the verbs can therefore be learned independently of one another — the verb markers are described in full in Jamaican Patois verb tenses.

Where the pronouns take you next

Six forms, no cases, no gender in the third person and no agreement anywhere. Learn this table and a real proportion of every sentence you hear is already accounted for, which is why it is worth doing before vocabulary.

From here the sensible next step is the verb, then plurals, then negation — in that order, which is how our guide to how to speak Jamaican Patois lays the grammar out.