Jamaican Patois

How enslaved Africans reshaped English

Patois took shape in the 17th century, when enslaved people from West and Central Africa learned and nativised the English, Hiberno-English and Scots of slaveholders and overseers. It runs along a continuum, from rural basilect forms that English speakers cannot follow to forms close to Standard English, and speakers move along it with the social setting. Mutually intelligible varieties spread with Jamaican migrants to Limón in Costa Rica, Colón and Bocas del Toro in Panama, the Miskito Coast and San Andrés.

Which particles replace English tenses

Its tense and aspect system is unlike English. Mi run means I run, habitually, or I ran; mi a run is I am running; mi did run is I have run or I had run; and mi a go run is I am going to run. The small word fi carries several jobs: it means for, marks possession in dat a fi mi book, that is my book, and expresses obligation. In western varieties h is a full sound, so hiit, hit, differs from iit, eat.

Where its words came from

Many African loans come from Twi: duppy, ghost, from dupon, the root of the cotton tree, and obeah, witchcraft. The plural pronoun unu comes from Igbo, and de, to be somewhere, from Yoruba. Ganja is from Hindi, and pickney, child, goes back to Portuguese pequenino or Spanish pequeño.

Why spelling is still unsettled

Writers long used ad hoc respellings, so there might be de, deh or dere. The Jamaican Language Unit at the University of the West Indies, Mona, set up in 2002, adopted the phonetic Cassidy system, which writes nasal vowels with hn, as in kyaahn, can't. Most Jamaicans still use the informal Miss Lou spelling, named after the poet Louise Bennett, whom the Jamaican Poetry League once excluded from its meetings. The unit argued that state services given only in English discriminate against citizens who cannot speak it fluently.