Jamaican Patois - Wikipedia

Jamaican Patois (/ˈpætwɑː/; locally rendered Jamaican Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language mixed heavily with West African languages, Arawak, Spanish, French and other languages, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. Words or slang from Jamaican Patois can be heard in other Caribbean countries, the United Kingdom (especially in London, where it has heavily influenced Multicultural London English), New York City and Miami in the United States, and Toronto, Canada.^[5] It is spoken by most Jamaicans as their first language.

Patois developed in the 17th century when enslaved people from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned, and nativised the vernacular and dialectal languages spoken by the slaveholders and overseers: British English, Hiberno-English and Scots. Jamaican Creole exists in gradations between more conservative creole forms that are not significantly mutually intelligible with English,^[6] and forms virtually identical to Standard English.^[7]

Jamaicans refer to their language as Patois, a term also used as a lower-case noun as a multi-use description of pidgins, creoles, dialects, and vernaculars worldwide. Creoles, including Jamaican Patois, are often stigmatised as low-prestige languages even when spoken as the mother tongue by most of the local population.^[8] Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English despite heavy use of English words or derivatives.^[9]

Significant Jamaican Patois-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates and non-Jamaicans^[7] in South Florida, New York City, Hartford, Washington, D.C., coastal Latin America, the Cayman Islands,^[10] as well as Toronto, London,^[11] Birmingham, Manchester, and Nottingham. The Cayman Islands in particular have a very large Jamaican Patois-speaking community, with 16.4% of the population conversing in the language.^[12] Mutually intelligible variations are found in San Andrés y Providencia Islands, Colombia,^[13] Limón Province, Costa Rica,^[14] Colón Province and Bocas del Toro Province, Panama,^[15] the Miskito Coast of Honduras^[16][17] and Nicaragua,^[18] and Belize^[19]— brought by enslaved and emancipated Afro-Jamaicans,^[20] Creole Jamaicans^[21] and Jewish-Jamaican merchants,^[22][23] as well as, labourers who migrated to work in agriculture (mainly banana production and lumbering), and later to build the Panama Canal, railroads and ports, between the mid-17th and 20th centuries.^[24][25] Mesolectal forms are similar to very basilectal Belizean Kriol.

Jamaican Patois exists mainly as a spoken language and is also heavily used for musical purposes, especially in mento, reggae and dancehall as well as other genres. Although standard British English is used for most writing in Jamaica, Jamaican Patois has gained 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 (codeswitching) in new forms of Internet writing.^[26]