Jamaican Patois
Patois (Jamaican Creole) |
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Spoken in | Jamaica 2,665,636[1] Costa Rica 55,100[1] Panama 268,435[1] |
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Total speakers | 3.1 million[1] | |
Language family | Creole language
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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. 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.[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] Phonology
Accounts of basilectal Jamaican Patois postulate around 21 phonemic consonants[7] and between 9 and 16 vowels.[8]
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 |
- 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]
- 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]
- /kiuu/ → [ciuː] → [cuː] ('a quarter quart (of rum)')
- /ɡiaad/ → [ɟiaːd] → [ɟaːd] ('guard')
- /piaa + piaa/ → [pʲiãːpʲiãː] → [pʲãːpʲãː] ('weak')
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]
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' |
[edit] 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]
[edit] 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]
- en is a tense indicator
- a is an aspect marker
- (a) go is used to indicate the future
- /mi ɹon/
- I run (habitually); I ran
- /mi a ɹon/ or /mi de ɹon/
- I am running
- /a ɹon mi dida ɹon/ or /a ɹon mi ben(w)en a ɹon/
- I was running
- /mi did ɹon/ or /mi ben(w)en ɹon/
- I have run; I had run
- /mi a ɡo ɹon/
- I am going to run; I will run
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]
- Directional, dative, or benefactlve preposition
- /dem a fait fi wi/ ('They are fighting for us')[24]
- Genitive preposition (that is, marker of possession)
- /dat a fi mi buk/ ('that's my book')
- Modal auxiliary expressing obligation or futurity
- /im fi kom op ja/ ('he ought to come up here')
- Pre-infinitive complementizer
[edit] 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).
- I, me = /mi/
- you, you (singular) = /ju/
- he, him = /im/ (pronounced [ĩ] in the basilect varieties)
- she, her = /ʃi/ or /im/ (no gender distinction in basilect varieties)
- we, us = /wi/
- you (plural) = /unu/
- they, them = /dem/
[edit] Copula
- the Jamaican Patois equative verb is also a
- e.g. /mi a di tiitʃa/ ('I am the teacher')
- Jamaican Patois has a separate locative verb deh
- e.g. /wi de a london/ or /wi de ina london/ ('we are in London')
- with true adjectives in Jamaican Patois, no copula is needed
- e.g. /mi haadbak nau/ ('I am old now')
[edit] Negation
- /no/ is used as a present tense negator:
- /if kau no did nuo au im tɹuotuol tan im udn tʃaans pieɹsiid/ ('If the cow knew that his throat wasn't capable of swallowing a pear seed, he wouldn't have swallowed it')[26]
- /kiaan/ is used in the same way as English can't
- /it a puoɹ tiŋ dat kiaan maʃ ant/ ('It is a poor thing that can't mash an ant')[27]
- /neva/ is a negative past participle.[28]
- /dʒan neva tiif di moni/ ('John did not steal the money')
[edit] 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.[citation needed]
[edit] 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.
[edit] Example phrases
- Three men swam.
- /tɹi man did a suim/
- I nearly hit him
- /a didn mek dʒuok fi lik im/[33]
- He can't beat me, he simply got lucky and won.
- /im kiaan biit mi, a dʒos bokop im bokop an win/[34]
- Those children are disobedient
- /dem pikni de aad iez/
- What are you doing?
- /we ju a du/
- /siin/ - Affirmative particle[35]
- /papiˈʃuo/ - Foolish exhibition, a person who makes a foolish exhibition of themself, or an exclamation of surprise.[36]
- /dem/ them (also indicates plural when placed after a noun)
- /se/ that (conjunction for relative clauses)
- /disia/ this (used before nouns)
- /uman/ woman[37]
- /buai/ boy[38]
- /ɡial/ girl
[edit] 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.
[edit] See also
- African American Vernacular English
- English-based creole languages
- Haitian Creole
- Jamaican English
- Rastafarian vocabulary
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d Gordon (2005)
- ^ Rickford (1987:?)
- ^ Meade (2001:19)
- ^ Patrick (1999:6)
- ^ Mark Sebba (1993), London Jamaican, London: Longman.
- ^ Lars Hinrichs (2006), Codeswitching on the Web: English and Jamaican Creole in E-Mail Communication. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
- ^ a b Devonish & Harry (2004:456)
- ^ Harry (2006:127)
- ^ Harry (2006:126-127)
- ^ Harry (2006:126)
- ^ also transcribed as [kʲ] and [ɡʲ]
- ^ such as Cassidy & Le Page (1980:xxxix)
- ^ such as Harry (2006)
- ^ Devonish & Harry (2004:458)
- ^ Cassidy (1971:40)
- ^ Harry (2006:128-129)
- ^ Harry (2006:128)
- ^ DeCamp (1961:82)
- ^ Irvine (2004:42)
- ^ DeCamp (1977:29)
- ^ Gibson (1988:199)
- ^ Mufwene (1984:218) cited in Gibson (1988:200)
- ^ Winford (1985:589)
- ^ Bailey (1966:32)
- ^ Patrick (1995:244)
- ^ 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."
- ^ Lawton (1984:125)
- ^ Irvine (2004:43-44)
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Patrick (1995:234)
- ^ Patrick (1995:248)
- ^ Hancock (1985:237)
- ^ Patrick (1995:253)
- ^ Hancock (1985:190)
- ^ Cassidy & Le Page (1980:lxii)
- ^ Devonish & Harry (2004:467)
- ^ Ramazani (2003:15)
- ^ The Routledge reader in Caribbean literature, Routledge 2003, ed. Alison Donnell, Sarah Lawson Welsh, Introduction, p. 9
[edit] Bibliography
- Alleyne, Mervyn C. (1980). Comparative Afro-American: An Historical Comparative Study of English-based Afro-American Dialects of the New World.. Koroma.
- Bailey, Beryl, L (1966). Jamaican Creole Syntax. Cambridge UP.
- Cassidy, Frederic (1971). Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of English Language in Jamaica. London: MacMillan Caribbean.
- Cassidy, Frederic; Le Page, R. B. (1980). Dictionary of Jamaican English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- DeCamp, David (1961), "Social and geographic factors in Jamaican dialects", in Le Page, R. B., Creole Language Studies, London: Macmillan, pp. 61–84
- DeCamp, David (1977), "The Development of Pidgin and Creole Studies", in Valdman, A, Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press
- Devonish, H; Harry, Otelamate G. (2004), "Jamaican phonology", in Kortman, B; Shneider E. W., A Handbook of Varieties of English, phonology, 1, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 441–471
- Gibson, Kean (1988), "The Habitual Category in Guyanese and Jamaican Creoles", American Speech 63 (3): 195–202, doi:10.2307/454817
- Gordon, Raymond G. Jr. (2005). "Languages of Jamaica". Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.org/show_country.asp?name=JM.
- Hancock, Ian (1985), "More on Poppy Show", American Speech 60 (2): 189–192, doi:10.2307/455318
- Harry, Otelemate G. (2006), "Jamaican Creole", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 36 (1): 125–131, doi:10.1017/S002510030600243X
- Ramazani, Jahan; Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair, eds., Richard (2003.). The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Third Edition. 2: Contemporary Poetry. Norton. ISBN 0-393-97792-7,.
- Irvine, Alison (2004), "A Good Command of the English Language: Phonological Variation in the Jamaican Acrolect", Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 19 (1): 41–76, doi:10.1075/jpcl.19.1.03irv
- Lawton, David (1984), "Grammar of the English-Based Jamaican Proverb", American Speech 2: 123–130, doi:10.2307/455246
- Meade, R.R. (2001). Acquisition of Jamaican Phonology. Dordrecht: Holland Institute of Linguistics.
- Patrick, Peter L. (1995), "Recent Jamaican Words in Sociolinguistic Context", American Speech 70 (3): 227–264, doi:10.2307/455899
- Patrick, Peter L. (1999). Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
- Rickford, John R. (1987). Dimensions of a Creole Continuum: History, Texts, Linguistic Analysis of Guyanese. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Winford, Donald (1985), "The Syntax of Fi Complements in Caribbean English Creole", Language 61 (3): 588–624, doi:10.2307/414387
[edit] Further reading
- Adams, L. Emilie (1991). Understanding Jamaican Patois. Kingston: LMH. ISBN 976-610-155-8.
[edit] External links
Wikibooks has more on the topic of |
- Speak Jamaican
- The Jamaican Language Unit
- Wiwords.com A cross-referencing West Indian dictionary with substantial Jamaican content
- Langwij Jumieka Bilingual Jamaican/English website utilizing phonetic Cassidy-LePage orthography with history, grammar, idioms, dictionary, translations
- Jamaican Patois phrase list