Jamaican Patois

Jamaican Patois (ˈpætwɑː; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with West African, Taino, Irish, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Chinese and German influences, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. Words or slangs from Jamaican Patois will be heard in other Caribbean countries, the United Kingdom and Toronto, Canada. The majority of non-English words in Patois derived 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 enslaved people 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 low-prestige languages 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. Significant Jamaican Patois-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates and non Jamaican 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.