Jamaican Patois

Patois, or Patwa, is not broken English. It is a creole that took most of its vocabulary from English and much of its grammar and sound system from West African languages, principally Akan, and it has its own consistent structure: no verb conjugation for tense, pronouns that do not change by case, and constructions like the doubling used for emphasis. It is the first language of most Jamaicans, with standard English used in formal settings, and the distance between them is wide enough that visitors often catch nothing at first. Louise Bennett-Coverley, known as Miss Lou, spent a career insisting it was a language, and dub poets and playwrights have written in it since.

History

Patois took shape in the 17th century, when enslaved people from West and Central Africa learned and made their own the English spoken by slaveholders and overseers - British English, Hiberno-English and Scots - mixed with West African languages and touches of Arawak, Spanish and French. Jamaicans carried it abroad: between the mid-17th and 20th centuries migrants who went to work on banana farms and in lumbering, and later on the Panama Canal, railways and ports, took it to Costa Rica's Limón Province, Panama, Colombia's San Andrés islands, the Miskito Coast and Belize, where related forms are still spoken. It has been written as a literary language for almost a hundred years, since Claude McKay published Songs of Jamaica in 1912 (Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois).

What to look for

• Miss Lou's work - the poetry and broadcasts that gave the language standing.
• Dub poetry - performance poetry written and delivered in Patois.
• Theatre in Kingston - the annual pantomime and the Patois stage tradition.
• The Cassidy and Cassidy-JLU spellings - the systems developed for writing it.

When to go

Year-round. The national pantomime, staged in Kingston from December, is the most accessible theatrical experience of the language. Poetry and spoken word events run through the year in Kingston.

Things to know

Visitors attempting Patois usually get it wrong and it can read as mockery rather than effort; listening is better received than imitating. Speed and vocabulary vary enormously by parish and setting, and even fluent English speakers catch little at first. Written forms are inconsistent because no single spelling system has been universally adopted.

Nearby

Kingston's theatres and the Institute of Jamaica hold the literary side.