Jamaican Patois: culture
A language does not sit apart from the people who speak it, and Patois less than most. It was made under slavery, out of English and West African languages, by people who needed to talk to one another and were denied every easy way of doing it. It survived two centuries of contempt from every institution on the island, and it is now spoken by very nearly everybody in Jamaica and heard wherever Jamaicans have settled.
That history is still inside the language: in which words came from where, in what gets said proudly and what still gets said quietly, and in the long public argument about whether Patois is a language or broken English — an argument linguists settled decades ago and Jamaican public life has not.
These guides give a learner the background needed to speak without causing offence, and the context that makes the grammar make sense.
4 guides
Culture
Patois is a language, and the argument is about history rather than grammar
Jamaican Patois is an English-lexifier creole with its own grammar: a language, not a dialect of English. The evidence, and why the question survives.
10 min read
Culture
There is no single Patois — there is a range, and speakers move along it
Jamaican speech runs from deep creole to near-standard English. What the continuum is, what shifts along it, and where a learner is best off starting.
10 min read
Culture
Thirty Jamaican proverbs, grouped by the job they do
Thirty Jamaican Patois proverbs grouped by what they are for — caution, consequence, patience — with the meaning and the moment each one is used.
9 min read
Culture
The African words in Jamaican Patois, and the ones that only look African
Which Jamaican Patois words really come from Akan, Igbo and Kikongo, which are misattributed, and what the African inheritance is beyond vocabulary.
9 min read