JAMAICAN CREOLE

'Jamaican Creole', also known locally as 'Patois (Patwa)', or simply 'Jamaican', is an English/African-based language --not to be confused with Jamaican English nor with the Rastafarian use of English-- used primarily in Jamaica and its diaspora. This language is the descendant of a 17th century creolization process which, simply put, consisted of West and Central Africans acquiring and nativizing the vernacular and dialectal British Englishes (including significant exposure to Irish and Scottish varieties), with which their enslavement brought them in contact. It must be understood that most languages are derived from more than one previously existing language. For examples, Italian, Catalan, French, Spanish, Portuguese and other Romance languages are all derived from Latin and respective local languages. Jamaican creole is what is linguists call a ''post-creole speech continuum'' or a linguistic continuum^[1][2] -- 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 language as "patois", a term without a precise linguistic definition.
Significant Jamaican-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates in Miami, New York City, Toronto, Hartford, Washington D.C., Brazil, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama (in the Caribbean coast), and London.^[3] Mesolectal forms are similar to Basilectal Belizean Creole, and a mutually intelligible variety is found in San Andres Islands, Colombia, brought to the island by descendants of Jamaican maroons (escaped slaves) in the 18th century. Jamaican creole 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. Creole and English are frequently used for stylistic contrast (codeswitching) in new forms of internet writing.^[4]
Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English, despite heavy usage of English words or derivatives. It is to the point where a native speaker of a non-Caribbean English dialect can only understand a heavily accented Jamaican speaker if he/she speaks slowly and foregoes the use of the numerous idioms that are common in Jamaican. Jamaican Creole 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 tongues. Behind the barrier of very different accents, there is actually mutual intelligibility between many of them, such as Sierra Leone's Krio and Nigerian Pidgin English, and Jamaican Creole.
This is due to the fact that many Jamaican words have their origin in various African languages and the language syntax is mostly derived from the various African languages. Pluralisation of nouns is done by either prepending a cardinal --de five bud=the five birds-- or by appending the plural indicator, "dem" --de bud dem=the birds. Similarly, verb tense is specified using prepended tense indicators --mi swim, mi a go swim, mi beh~ swim, mi a fi swim, etc.

Contents

The pronominal system

Vocabulary

Tense and aspect marking

Use of the copula (equivalent to "to be")

Negation

Phonology

Localization

Orthography

Examples

See also

Examples of other Caribbean and African creoles

References

External links

The pronominal system

The pronominal system of Standard English has a four-way distinction of person, singular/plural, gender and nominative/objective. Some varieties of Jamaican Creole do not have the gender or nominative/objective distinction, though most do; but usefully, it does distinguish between the second person singular and plural (you).

★ I, me = mi

★ you, you (singular) = yu

★ he, him = im ''or'' i~ (nasalized in the basilect variety)

★ she, her = shi ''or'' i~ (nasalized, with no gender distinction in the basilect variety)

★ we, us = wi

★ you, you (plural) = unu

★ they, them = dem
To form the possessive adjectives and the possessive pronouns, simply add "fi-" to the pronouns above. Note, though, that most varieties of Jamaican Creole use merely the nominative/objective pronouns in place of these possessive variants, which are used for emphasis.

★ my, mine = fi-mi

★ your, yours (thy, thine) = fi-yu

★ his, his = fi-im (pronounced as one syllable)

★ her, hers = fi-shi (also fi-'ar, and fi-im in basilect variety)

★ our, ours = fi-wi

★ your, yours = fi-unu (pronounced funu, one syllable)

★ their, theirs = fi-dem
Often, fi- is used in front of nouns, to indicate possession (replacing 's).
e.g. ''a fi-Anne daag dat'', that is Anne's dog.

Vocabulary

Jamaican Creole contains many loanwords. Primarily these come from English, but are also borrowed from Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Trinidadian, and African languages. Examples from African languages include "duppy" meaning 'ghost', from the Twi word ''adope''; "obeah", also from Twi, meaning a type of African spell-casting or witchcraft (and also used as a popular scapegoat for common woes); "seh" meaning 'that' (in the sense of "he told me that" = "im tel mi seh"), taken from a west African language; the pronoun "unu", used for "you (plural)", from Igbo. 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 ''pequeno'' or Spanish ''pequeño, "small".
There are lots of words referring to popular produce and food items - "ackee", "callaloo", "guinep", "bammy", "roti", "dal", "kamranga". See Jamaican cuisine.
Here are some commonly used words:

★ ''nuh'' 'not, don't, doesn't' (indicates negative)

★ ''dem'' 'them' (also indicates plural when placed after a noun)

★ ''seh'' 'that' (conjunction for relative clauses)

★ ''dissya'' 'this' (used before nouns)

★ ''ooman'' 'woman'

★ ''bwoy'' 'boy'

★ ''gyal'' 'girl'
Jamaican creole has its own rich variety of swearwords. One of the strongest is ''bloodclat'' (along with related forms ''raasclat'', ''bambaclat'', ''pussiclat'' and others). (Compare with "bloody" in Australian English, which is not considered swearing). Gay men are referred to as "batty boys".

Tense and aspect marking

The tense/aspect system of Jamaican Creole is fundamentally unlike that of English. There are no morphological marked past tense forms corresponding to English -ed -t. There are 2 preverbial particles: 'en' and 'a'. These are not verbs, they are simply invariant particles which cannot stand alone like the English ‘to be’. Their functions differs also from the English

★ 'en' is called a ‘tense indicator’

★ 'a' is called the ‘aspect marker’

★ '(a)go' is used to indicate the future

★ Mi run

★
★ I run (habitually); I ran

★ Mi a run ''or'' Mi deh run

★
★ I am running

★ A run mi dida run ''or'' A run mi ben/(w)en a run

★
★ I was running

★ Mi did run ''or'' Mi beh~/(w)en run

★
★ I have run; I had run

★ Mi a go run

★
★ I am going to run; I will run

Use of the copula (equivalent to "to be")

★ the Jamaican Creole equative verb is also 'a'

★
★ e.g. Mi a di teecha (I am the teacher)

★ Jamaican Creole has a separate locative verb 'deh'

★
★ e.g. Wi deh a London or wi deh ina London (We are in London)

★ with true adjectives in Jamaican Creole, no copula is needed; adjectives are a special class of verbs

★
★ e.g. Mi tyad now (I am tired now)

Negation

★ negator ‘no’ used in present

★
★ Wi no deh inna London (We are not in London)

★
★ Mi naah (no +a) run (I’m not running)

★ 'neba’ or ‘neva’ used only in past. But are also used as they are in English, e.g. I never eat fish - mi neba niam fish.

★
★ Mi neba knuow dat (I didn’t know that)

★
★ Nobaddy neva siim (si+im) (Nobody saw him)

★ insertion of a 'y' in a word

★
★ Mi kya~ do dat (I can do that)

★
★ Mi kyaa~ do dat (I cannot do that)

Phonology

Characteristic features include the absence of (as in British English "got"), which fell together with , as in most US Englishes. Jamaican Creole developed two palatal plosives, namely and , they derive from English palatal allophones of and . Due to African influences, and are now phonemes in Jamaican Creole. Furthermore, Jamaican Creole has no (as in Standard English "thing") phoneme; fell together with . Other features of many Jamaican dialects include:

★ /v/ being pronounced as /b/,

★ Word-initial /h/ being dropped (Have becomes 'ave) in many dialects, but may also be added to words beginning with vowel sounds: "eye" becomes "hi." (or pronounced yeye)

★ Intervocalic /t/ becoming /k/, little = likkle, bottle = bahkkle

★ Occasional metathesis; film = flim, crispy = cripsy, ask = aks

★ Deletion of word-initial /s/: 'pit=spit, 'pen'=spend, 'tumok/'tomok=stomach

Localization

Some word usage varies in different areas of Jamaica. For example, the word "something" may be pronounced as "sint'n" or as "som'n".

Orthography

Because of its status as non-standard, there is no standard or official way of writing Jamaican Creole; (for example the word 'there' can be written 'de', 'deh' or dere'; and the word for 'three' is most commonly spelt 'tree', but it can be spelt 'tri' or 'trii' to distinguish it from the noun ''tree''). Often, Standard English spellings are used even when words are pronounced differently. At other times though, 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 and in e-mail in recent years, a user-driven process of partial standardization has been taking place.

Examples

★ That man was swimming

★
★ Da man de did a swim.

★ Three men swam.

★
★ Tree man did a swim.

★ I do not like what you are saying about your girlfriend.

★
★ Mi nuh like wah yu a seh bout yu gyal.

★ I did not say anything about you.

★
★ Mi neva seh nuttn bout yu.

★ The children are making too much noise.

★
★ Di pickney, dem a mek too much nize.

★ Where are you going?

★
★ Weh yu a go?

★ What are you doing?

★
★ Weh yu a du?

★ Those boys are hungry, you should give them something to eat.

★
★ Dem de bwoy, dem belly a yawn, yu a fi gi dem sintin fi heat.
(Note that double negatives in Jamaican Creole are used as intensifiers)

★ Nyam- v. to eat ex: "Mi a go nyam" (I'm going to eat)

★ Pickney- n. a child or children ex: "Ey pickney, wha you name?" / "Dem pickney deh 'aad-ears" (Hey, child, what is your name?/ Those children are disobedient--literally are 'hard of ears,' an idiomatic expression meaning that they do not do what they are told)

★ Seh- that (as in: "'im tell mi seh you a im/har boops" (He told me that you're her sugar-daddy)

See also

★ Creole language

★ Jamaican English

★ Rastafarian vocabulary

Examples of other Caribbean and African creoles

★ Antiguan Creole

★ Belizean Creole

★ Krio language

★ Bajan

★ Guyanese Creole

★ Saint Kitts Creole

★ Virgin Islands Creole

★ Bahamian Dialect

★ Nigerian Pidgin English

References

1. John R. Rickford (1987), ''Dimensions of a Creole Continuum: History, Texts, Linguistic Analysis of Guyanese''. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
2. Peter L. Patrick (1999), ''Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect''. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
3. Mark Sebba (1993), ''London Jamaican'', London: Longman.
4. Lars Hinrichs (2006), ''Codeswitching on the Web: English and Jamaican Creole in E-Mail Communication''. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

External links

★ Langwij Jumieka Bilingual Jamaican/English website utilizing phonetic Cassidy-LePage orthography with history, grammar, idioms, dictionary, translations

★ Sound clips of Jamaican English

★ A few short stories in Jamaican English, with translations

★ Jamaican English phrase list

★ Jamaican English glossary

★ Another Jamaican English glossary

★ Basic comparison of Jamaican grammar with standard English grammar