The greeting everybody has heard, and the reply nobody teaches

Wah gwaan?wa gwaan, meaning what is going on

It means what is going on — literally what going-on, with the second word descended from English go on. It is not a translation of hello. It is a question, which is why the part that matters is the reply, and the reply is the part almost nobody is taught.

What does wah gwaan mean?

Word for word it is what going-on, and the sense sits close to what is happening with you. English has the same construction in what's going on? — the difference is that in Patois this is the ordinary, unmarked way for two people on easy terms to open, rather than a slightly concerned enquiry about a situation.

The grammar underneath it is worth seeing, because it recurs everywhere. There is no verb to be in the phrase and none is missing. English builds what is going on out of an auxiliary and a participle; Patois puts the verb there on its own. Where Patois does want to mark an action as ongoing, it uses a separate short word in front of the verb rather than a form of be — and in this phrase it does not need to. Separate words doing the work English hands to auxiliaries and endings is one of the first real structural differences a learner meets.

Why it is a question, not a greeting

Treat it as a salutation and you will use it the way an English speaker uses hi: say it, expect it back, move on. That is the single commonest mistake, and it produces a small dead moment in the conversation every time.

It expects an answer. Not a long one — three or four words is plenty, and the answer is often close to meaningless in content — but something. An answer signals that you heard the question as a question and that you are willing to be in the exchange. Without one, the greeting stops where it started: something has been asked, and the person who asked it is still waiting.

Wagwan, wah gwan, whagwan: why the spelling is unsettled

You will meet this phrase written at least four ways: wagwan, wah gwan, whagwan and the two-word form used on this site. None of them is a misspelling, because Patois is spoken far more than it is written and no single spelling is in general public use.

What is going on is that everybody who writes it is improvising an English-based spelling for a sound, and English spelling offers several plausible routes to the same sound. The compressed one-word forms are commonest online and in song titles, where speed and shape matter. The spaced form makes the two words visible, which is why a page trying to explain the phrase tends to use it.

Underneath all of them sits one pronunciation, and that is what the Cassidy writing system in the second column of every table on this site records. It is phonemic: one sound, one spelling, every time. That is why we print both — the everyday spelling so you recognise the phrase, and the phonemic one so you know what it sounds like without having to guess which English spelling convention the writer had in mind.

Who says it, and to whom

This greeting lives between peers. Two friends, two people of roughly the same age, colleagues who are on comfortable terms, a driver and a passenger who have met before. It is warm, and it assumes equality between you.

That assumption is what makes a much older stranger the wrong target. Nothing bad happens — you will not cause offence — but the greeting claims a familiarity that is not there yet, and the person hearing it registers that. For someone considerably older than you, or anyone in a formal setting, the time-of-day greetings do the job without claiming anything, and they are set out in our guide to greetings through the day.

There is a different kind of greeting that raises the person you are speaking to instead of levelling with them, which is why that one works upward as well as sideways — what it actually means is worth reading alongside this.

The replies, and what each one signals

Here is the half of the phrase that phrase lists leave out.

The standard replies, and what each conveys

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English	Word for word
Mi deh yah	mi de ya	I am here — I am fine	I there here
Everyting criss	evriting kris	Everything is fine
Same way	siem wie	Much the same
Nutten much	notn moch	Not much
Mi cool	mi kuul	I am all right

The first is the default and it is close to untranslatable: it says I am present, I am getting on with it, and most people say it whether or not anything is happening. The second is brighter and more emphatic — a small piece of good news about the state of things. The third is dry, faintly resigned and very funny in the right mouth. The fourth is the flattest and the safest. The fifth is relaxed and slightly younger-sounding.

Any of them can be followed by returning the question, and often is. That is the full shape of the exchange: question, short answer, question back.

What happens if you say nothing

Two failures are worth naming, because visitors produce both.

The first is silence. Met with a question, no answer reads as a snub — not as shyness, which is how an English speaker tends to assume it will be read. The second is a bare repetition: you are greeted, you say the same three syllables back, and you stop. That is not a reply, it is an echo, and it lands the same way silence does with one extra beat of awkwardness.

How the phrase travelled

This is one of the Jamaican phrases that left the island. Jamaicans have been settling in Britain since the late 1940s, and reggae and then dancehall carried the language a good deal further than the migration on its own would have. Somewhere along that road the compressed one-word spelling became ordinary in British urban speech, and plenty of the people using it now have no Jamaican family at all and hear it as ordinary British English rather than as borrowed. Something similar happened, at its own speed, in Toronto, New York and Miami.

That has a consequence back home. A Jamaican hearing a visitor use it is aware that the phrase has been in wide international circulation for a long time, and that hearing it from a stranger says very little about how much Patois that stranger actually knows. It has become, in a small way, a phrase that carries its own travel history with it.

Saying it yourself, without it being a move

Be honest about what it looks like. A visitor who opens the first ten seconds of an interaction with this greeting is doing something recognisable, and the person on the other side has seen it before — probably several times that week. It is not offensive. It is just legible.

What changes the reading is timing and reciprocity. Used second, after somebody has greeted you, it is unremarkable. Used to someone you have already spoken to twice, it is warm. Used as an opening gambit at a stranger, it is a performance, and everybody involved knows it. The safer first move is the neutral opener in our guide to saying hello.

More phrases of this kind, grouped by the situation you would use them in, are gathered on our Jamaican Patois phrases page.