Jamaican Patois
Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with West African influences, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. A majority of the non-English words in Patois come from the West African Akan language. It is spoken by the majority of Jamaicans as a native language. Patois 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 the slaveholders: British English, Scots, and Hiberno-English. Jamaican Creole exhibits a  gradation between more conservative creole forms that are not significantly mutually intelligible with English, and forms virtually identical to Standard English. Jamaicans refer to their language as "Patois", a term also used as a lower-case noun as a catch-all description of pidgins, creoles, dialects, and vernaculars worldwide. Creoles, including Jamaican Patois, are often stigmatized as a low-prestige language even when spoken as the mother tongue by the majority of the local population. Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English despite heavy use of English words or derivatives, but the writing system shows commonalities with the  English alphabet. Significant Jamaican Patois-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates in South Florida, New York City, Toronto, Hartford, Washington, D.C., Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Cayman Islands, and Panama, as well as London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Nottingham. The Cayman Islands in particular have a very large Jamaican Patois-speaking community, with 16.4% of the population conversing in the language. 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 mainly  as a spoken language and is also heavily used for musical purposes, especially in reggae and dancehall as well as other genres. Although standard British English is used for most writing in Jamaica, Jamaican Patois has gained 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. Phonology. Accounts of basilectal Jamaican Patois (that is, its most divergent rural varieties) suggest around 21 phonemic consonants with an additional phoneme () in the  Western dialect. There are between nine and sixteen vowels. Some vowels are capable of nasalization and others can be lengthened. Examples of palatalization include: Voiced stops are implosive whenever in the onset of prominent syllables (especially word-initially) so that ('beat') is pronounced and ('good') as . Before a syllabic , the contrast between alveolar and velar consonants has been historically neutralized with alveolar consonants becoming velar so that the word for 'bottle' is and the word for 'idle' is . Jamaican Patois exhibits two types of vowel harmony; peripheral vowel harmony, wherein only sequences of peripheral vowels (that is, , , and ) can occur  within a syllable; and back harmony, wherein and cannot occur within a syllable together (that is, and are allowed but and are not). These two phenomena account for three long vowels and four diphthongs: Sociolinguistic variation. Jamaican Patois features a creole continuum (or a "linguistic continuum"): 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) or even from the most divergent rural varieties (collectively referred to as the basilect). 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 benefits. The span of a speaker's command of the continuum generally corresponds to social context. Grammar. The tense/aspect system of Jamaican Patois is fundamentally unlike that of English. There are no morphologically marked past participles; instead, two different participle words exist: "en" and "a". These are not verbs, but rather invariant particles that cannot stand alone (like the English "to be"). Their function also differs from those of English. According to Bailey (1966 ), the progressive category is marked by . Alleyne (1980) claims that marks the progressive and that the habitual aspect is unmarked but by its accompaniment with words such as "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 as in ('where we used to live is not as cold as here'). For the present tense, an uninflected verb combining with an iterative adverb marks habitual meaning as in ('Tom always knows when Katy tells/has told about him'). As in other Caribbean Creoles (that is , Guyanese Creole and San Andrés-Providencia Creole; Sranan Tongo is excluded) has a number of functions, including: 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. This is akin to Spanish in that both have two distinct forms of the verb "to be" – "ser" and "estar" – in which "ser" is equative and "estar" is locative. Other languages, such as Portuguese and Italian, make a  similar distinction. (See Romance Copula.) Orthography. Patois has long been written with various respellings compared to English so that, for example, the word "there" might be written , , or , and the word "three" as , , or . Standard English spelling is often used and a nonstandard spelling sometimes becomes widespread even though it is neither phonetic nor standard (e.g. for , 'child'). In 2002, the Jamaican Language Unit was set up at the University of the West Indies at Mona to begin standardizing the language, with the aim of supporting non-English-speaking Jamaicans according to their constitutional guarantees of equal rights, as services  of the state are normally provided in English, which a significant portion of the population cannot speak fluently. The vast majority of such persons are speakers of Jamaican Patois. It was argued that failure to provide services of the state in a language in such general use or discriminatory treatment by officers of the state based on the inability of a citizen to use English violates the rights of citizens. The proposal was made that freedom from discrimination on the ground of language be inserted into the Charter of Rights. They standardized the Jamaican alphabet as follows: Nasal vowels  are written with "-hn", as in "kyaahn" (can't) and "iihn" (isn't it?) "h" is written according to local pronunciation, so that "hen" (hen) and "en" (end) are distinguished in writing for speakers of western Jamaican, but not for those of central Jamaican. Vocabulary. Jamaican Patois contains many loanwords, most of which are African in origin, primarily from Twi (a dialect of Akan). Many loanwords come from English, but are also borrowed from Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Arawak and African languages as well as Scottish and Irish dialects. Examples from African languages include meaning "that" (in the sense of "he  told me that..." = ), taken from Ashanti Twi, and Duppy meaning "ghost", taken from the Twi word "dupon" ('cotton tree root'), because of the African belief of malicious spirits originating in the root of trees (in Jamaica and Ghana, particularly the cotton tree known in both places as "Odom"). The pronoun , 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 in the mid 1700s. "De" meaning "to be" (at a location) comes from Yoruba. From the Ashanti -Akan, comes the term "Obeah" which means witchcraft, from the Ashanti Twi word "Ɔbayi" which also means "witchcraft". Words from Hindi include "ganja" (marijuana). "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 "bloodclaat" (along with related forms "raasclaat", "bomboclaat", "pussyclaat" and others—compare with "bloody" in Australian  English and British English, which is also considered a profanity). Homosexual men may be referred to with the pejorative term , fish or "battyboys". Literature and film. A rich body of literature has developed in Jamaican Patois. Notable among early authors and works are Thomas MacDermot's "All Jamaica Library" and Claude McKay's "Songs of Jamaica" (1909), and, more recently, dub poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mikey Smith. Subsequently, the life-work of Louise Bennett or Miss Lou (1919–2006) is particularly notable for her use of the rich colorful 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." Nonetheless, 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: After the 1960s, the status of Jamaican Patois rose as a number of respected linguistic studies were published, by Frederic Cassidy (1961, 1967), Bailey (1966) and others. Subsequently, it has gradually become mainstream to codemix or write complete pieces in Jamaican Patois; proponents include Kamau Brathwaite, who also analyses 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 Trinidadian and sometimes Jamaican Patois. Jean D'Costa penned a series of popular children's novels, including "Sprat Morrison" (1972; 1990), "Escape to Last Man Peak" (1976), and "Voice in the Wind" (1978), which draw liberally from Jamaican Patois for dialogue, while presenting narrative prose in Standard English. Marlon James employs Patois in his novels including "A Brief History of Seven Killings" (2014). In his science fiction novel "Kaya  Abaniah and the Father of the Forest" (2015), British-Trinidadian author Wayne Gerard Trotman presents dialogue in Trinidadian Creole, Jamaican Patois, and French while employing Standard English for narrative prose. Jamaican Patois is also presented in some films and other media, for example, the character Tia Dalma's speech from "", and a few scenes in "Meet Joe Black" in which Brad Pitt's character converses with a Jamaican woman (Lois Kelly Miller). In addition, early Jamaican films like "The Harder They Come" (1972), "Rockers" (1978), and many of the films produced by Palm Pictures in the mid-1990s (e.g. "Dancehall Queen  and Third World Cop") have most of their dialogue in Jamaican Patois; some of these films have even been subtitled in English. It was also used in the second season of "Marvel's Luke Cage" but the accents were described as "awful" by Jamaican Americans. Bible. In December 2011, it was reported that the Bible was being translated into Jamaican Patois. The Gospel of St Luke has already appeared as "". While the Rev. Courtney Stewart, managing the translation as General Secretary of the West Indies Bible Society, believes this will help elevate the status of Jamaican Patois, others think that  such a move would undermine efforts at promoting the use of English. The Patois New Testament was launched in Britain (where the Jamaican diaspora is significant) in October 2012 as "Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment", and with print and audio versions in Jamaica in December 2012. A comparison of the Lord's Prayer The system of spelling used in "Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment" is the phonetic Cassidy Writing system adopted by the Jamaica Language Unit of the University of the West Indies, and while most Jamaicans use the informal "Miss Lou" writing system, the Cassidy Writing system is an effort at  standardizing Patois in its written form.