Jamaican Patois

Patois
(Jamaican Creole)
Spoken in
Total speakers 3.1 million[1]
Language family Creole language
  • English creole
    • Atlantic
      • Western
        • Patois
          (Jamaican Creole)
Language codes
ISO 639-1 None
ISO 639-2 none
ISO 639-3 jam
Linguasphere
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Jamaican Patois, known locally as Patois (Patwa) or Jamaican, and called Jamaican Creole by linguists, is an English-lexified creole language with West African influences spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. It is not to be confused with Jamaican English nor with the Rastafarian use of English. The language developed in the 17th century, when slaves from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned and nativized the vernacular and dialectal forms of English spoken by their masters: British English, Scots and Hiberno English. Jamaican Patois features a creole continuum (a linguistic continuum)[2][3][4]—meaning that the variety of the language closest to the lexifier language (the acrolect) cannot be distinguished systematically from intermediate varieties (collectively referred to as the mesolect) nor even from the most divergent rural varieties (collectively referred to as the basilect). Jamaicans themselves usually refer to their dialect as patois, a French term without a precise linguistic definition.

Significant Jamaican-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates in Miami, New York City, Toronto, Hartford, Washington, D.C., Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama (in the Caribbean coast), and London.[5] A mutually intelligible variety is found in San Andrés y Providencia Islands, Colombia, brought to the island by descendants of Jamaican Maroons (escaped slaves) in the 18th century. Mesolectal forms are similar to very Basilectal Belizean Kriol.

Jamaican Patois exists mostly as a spoken language. Although standard British English is used for most writing in Jamaica, Jamaican has been gaining 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.[6]

Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English, despite heavy use of English words or derivatives. A native speaker of a non-Caribbean English dialect can understand a heavily accented Jamaican speaker only if he/she speaks slowly and forgoes the use of the many idioms that are common in Jamaican. Jamaican Patois displays similarities to the pidgin and creole languages of West Africa, due to their common descent from the blending of African substrate languages with European languages.

Contents

Phonology

Accounts of basilectal Jamaican Patois postulate around 21 phonemic consonants[7] and between 9 and 16 vowels.[8]

Consonants[9]
Labial Alveolar Post-
alveolar		 Palatal2 Velar Glottal
Nasal m n ɲ ŋ
Stop p   b t   d tʃ   dʒ c   ɟ k   ɡ
Fricative f   v s   z   ʃ (h)1
Approximant ɹ j w
Lateral l
  1. The status of /h/ as a phoneme is dialectal: in Western varieties, it is a full phoneme and there are minimal pairs (/hiit/ 'hit' and /iit/ 'eat'); in Eastern varieties, the presence of [h] in a word is in free variation with no consonant so that the words for 'hand' and 'and' (both underlyingly /an/) may be pronounced [han] or [an].[10]
  2. The palatal stops [c], [ɟ][11] and [ɲ] are considered phonemic by some accounts[12] and phonetic by others.[13] For the latter interpretation, their appearance is included in the larger phenomenon of phonetic palatalization.

Examples of palatalization include:[14]

Voiced stops are implosive whenever in the onset of prominent syllables (especially word-initially) so that /biit/ ('beat') is pronounced [ɓiːt] and /ɡuud/ ('good') as [ɠuːd].[7]

Before a syllabic /l/, the contrast between alveolar and velar consonants has been historically neutralized with alveolar consonants becoming velar so that the word for 'bottle' is /bakl̩/ and the word for 'idle' is /aiɡl̩/.[15]

Vowels of Jamaican Patois. from Harry (2006:128)

Jamaican Patois exhibits two types of vowel harmony; peripheral vowel harmony, wherein only sequences of peripheral vowels (that is, /i/, /u/, and /a/) can occur within a syllable; and back harmony, wherein /i/ and /u/ cannot occur within a syllable together (that is, /uu/ and /ii/ are allowed but */ui/ and */iu/ are not).[16] These two phenomena account for three long vowels and four diphthongs:[17]

Vowel Example Gloss
/ii/ /biini/ 'tiny'
/aa/ /baaba/ 'barber'
/uu/ /buut/ 'booth'
/ia/ /biak/ 'bake'
/ai/ /baik/ 'bike'
/ua/ /buat/ 'boat'
/au/ /taun/ 'town'

Sociolinguistic variation

Jamaican Patois is a creole language that exhibits a gradation between more conservative creole forms and forms virtually identical to Standard English[18] (i.e. metropolitan Standard English). This situation came about with contact between speakers of a number of Niger-Congo languages and various dialects of English, the latter of which were all perceived as prestigious and the use of which carried socio-economic rewards.[19] The span of a speaker's command of the continuum generally corresponds to the variety of social situations that he situates himself in.[20]

Grammar

The tense/aspect system of Jamaican Patois is fundamentally unlike that of English. There are no morphological marked past tense forms corresponding to English -ed -t. There are two preverbial particles: en and a. These are not verbs, they are simply invariant particles that cannot stand alone like the English to be. Their function also differs from the English.

According to Bailey (1966), the progressive category is marked by /a~da~de/. Alleyne (1980) claims that /a~da/ marks the progressive and that the habitual aspect is unmarked but by its accompaniment with verbs like 'always', 'usually’, etc (i.e. is absent as a grammatical category). Mufwene (1984) and Gibson and Levy (1984) propose a past-only habitual category marked by /juusta/ as in /weɹ wi juusta liv iz not az kuol az iiɹ/ ('where we used to live is not as cold as here') [21]

For the present tense, an uninflected verb combining with an iterative adverb marks habitual meaning as in /tam aawez nuo kieti tel pan im/ ('Tom always knows when Katy tells/has told about him').[22]

Like other Caribbean Creoles (that is, Guyanese Creole and San Andrés-Providencia Creole; Sranan Tongo is excluded) /fi/ has a number of functions, including:[23]

Pronominal system

The pronominal system of Standard English has a four-way distinction of person, number, gender and case. Some varieties of Jamaican Patois do not have the gender or case distinction, but all varieties distinguish between the second person singular and plural (you).

Copula

Negation

Orthography

Because Jamaican Patois is a non-standard language, there is no standard or official way of writing it. For example, the word "there" can be written de, deh, or dere, and the word "three" is most commonly spelled tree, but it can be spelled tri or trii to distinguish it from the noun tree. Often, Standard English spellings are used even when words are pronounced differently. Other times, a spelling has become widespread even though it is neither phonetic nor standard (eg. pickney = child. =In this case the spelling pikni would be more phonetic). However, due to increased use on the Internet (such as in E-mail) in recent years, a user-driven process of partial standardization has been taking place.

Vocabulary

Jamaican Patois contains many loanwords.

Primarily these come from English, but are also borrowed from Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arawak and African languages.

Examples from African languages include /se/ meaning that (in the sense of "he told me that...." = /im tel mi se/), taken from Ashanti Twi, and /dopi/ meaning ghost, from the Twi word adope. The pronoun /unu/, used for the plural form of you, is taken from the Igbo language. Red eboe describes a fair skinned black person because of the reported account of fair skin among the Igbo.[29] Soso meaning only comes from both Igbo and Yoruba.[30] From Igbo comes Obeah, a form of African shamanism (and also used as a popular scapegoat for common woes) originating from the Igbo dibia or obia ('doctoring') herbalists and spiritualists.[31]

Words from Hindi include nuh, ganja (marijuana), and janga (crawdad). Pickney or pickiney meaning child, taken from an earlier form (piccaninny) was ultimately borrowed from the Portuguese pequenino (the diminutive of pequeno, small) or Spanish pequeño ('small').

There are many words referring to popular produce and food items—ackee, callaloo, guinep, bammy, roti, dal, kamranga. See Jamaican cuisine.

Jamaican Patois has its own rich variety of swearwords. One of the strongest is blood claat (along with related forms raas claat, bomba claat, pussy claat and others—compare with bloody in Australian English, which is not considered swearing).

Homosexual men are referred to as /biips/[32] or batty boys.

Example phrases

Literature and film

A rich body of literature has developed in Jamaican Patois. Notable among early authors are Thomas MacDermot's All Jamaica Library and Claude McKay's Songs of Jamaica (1909), and, more recently, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mikey Smith. Subsequently, the life-work of Louise Bennett or Miss Lou (1919–2006), is particularly notable in her use of the rich colourful patois, despite being shunned by traditional literary groups. "The Jamaican Poetry League excluded her from its meetings, and editors failed to include her in anthologies."[39] She argued forcefully for the recognition of Jamaican as a full language, with the same pedigree as the dialect from which Standard English had sprung:

Dah language weh yuh proud a,

Weh yuh honour an respec –

Po Mas Charlie, yuh no know se

Dat it spring from dialec!

—Bans a Killin

After the 1960s, the status of Jamaican rose as a number of respected linguistic studies were published, by Cassidy (1961,1967), Bailey (1966) and others [40]. Subsequently, it has gradually become mainstream to codemix or write complete pieces in Jamaican Patois; proponents include Kamau Brathwaite, who also analyzes the position of Creole poetry in his History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984). However, Standard English remains the more prestigious literary medium in Jamaican literature. Canadian-Caribbean science-fiction novelist Nalo Hopkinson often writes in Jamaican or other Caribbean patois.

Jamaican Patois is also presented in some films, for example, Tia Dalma's speech from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Gordon (2005)
  2. ↑ Rickford (1987:?)
  3. ↑ Meade (2001:19)
  4. ↑ Patrick (1999:6)
  5. ↑ Mark Sebba (1993), London Jamaican, London: Longman.
  6. ↑ Lars Hinrichs (2006), Codeswitching on the Web: English and Jamaican Creole in E-Mail Communication. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Devonish & Harry (2004:456)
  8. ↑ Harry (2006:127)
  9. ↑ Harry (2006:126-127)
  10. ↑ Harry (2006:126)
  11. ↑ also transcribed as [kʲ] and [ɡʲ]
  12. ↑ such as Cassidy & Le Page (1980:xxxix)
  13. ↑ such as Harry (2006)
  14. ↑ Devonish & Harry (2004:458)
  15. ↑ Cassidy (1971:40)
  16. ↑ Harry (2006:128-129)
  17. ↑ Harry (2006:128)
  18. ↑ DeCamp (1961:82)
  19. ↑ Irvine (2004:42)
  20. ↑ DeCamp (1977:29)
  21. ↑ Gibson (1988:199)
  22. ↑ Mufwene (1984:218) cited in Gibson (1988:200)
  23. ↑ Winford (1985:589)
  24. ↑ Bailey (1966:32)
  25. ↑ Patrick (1995:244)
  26. ↑ Lawton (1984:126) translates this as "If the cow didn't know that his throat was capable of swallowing a pear seed, he wouldn't have swallowed it."
  27. ↑ Lawton (1984:125)
  28. ↑ Irvine (2004:43-44)
  29. ↑ Cassidy, Frederic Gomes; Robert Brock Le Page (2002). A Dictionary of Jamaican English (2nd ed.). University of the West Indies Press. p. 168. ISBN 9-766-40127-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=_lmFzFgsTZYC&pg=PA168. Retrieved 2008-11-24. 
  30. ↑ McWhorter, John H. (2000). The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages. University of California Press. p. 77. ISBN 0-520-21999-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=czFufZI4Zx4C&pg=PA77. Retrieved 2008-11-29. 
  31. ↑ Eltis, David; Richardson, David (1997). Routes to slavery: direction, ethnicity, and mortality in the transatlantic slave trade. Routledge. p. 88. ISBN 0-714-64820-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=kuXEzQZQmawC&pg=PA88. 
  32. ↑ Patrick (1995:234)
  33. ↑ Patrick (1995:248)
  34. ↑ Hancock (1985:237)
  35. ↑ Patrick (1995:253)
  36. ↑ Hancock (1985:190)
  37. ↑ Cassidy & Le Page (1980:lxii)
  38. ↑ Devonish & Harry (2004:467)
  39. ↑ Ramazani (2003:15)
  40. ↑ The Routledge reader in Caribbean literature, Routledge 2003, ed. Alison Donnell, Sarah Lawson Welsh, Introduction, p. 9

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

Caribbean English-based creole languages
Anguilla · Antigua and Barbuda · Bahamas · Barbados · Belize · Cayman Islands · Grenada · Guyana · Jamaica · Limón, Costa Rica · Montserrat · Mosquito Coast · Panama · Rama Cay · Roatán · Saint Kitts and Nevis · San Andrés-Providence · Saint Vincent and the Grenadines · Tobago · Trinidad · Turks and Caicos Islands · Virgin Islands