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An analysis of Jamaican Creole

Article January 2016

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Francesca Prato
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Creole languages came into existence during the colonisation period, and are closely associated

with Pidgins, that is to say, speech forms employed by people who do not speak the same language.

The main difference between Creole languages and Pidgins is that the former has native speakers,

whilst the latter does not (Adone; 2012: i).

The aim of this paper is that of explaining some of Jamaican Creoles main features, as well as the

historical and socio political processes that have shaped this language.

Jamaican Creole (JamC), also known as Patwa, is the language of ethnic identification for

approximately two and a half million people on the island of Jamaica, and overseas for thousands of

native and non-native speakers (Patrick; 2003 : 1).

Jamaican, Jamaican Creole, Jamaican Patwa/Patois, Black English, broken English and baby talk or

slang are all names used to describe the Creole Language. This is the result of not being an official

language: a name to define Jamaican language has yet to be developed (Herbold; no date).

Considering patois (French term that signifies rough speech) has taken on the negative linguistic

connotations of inferiority (it is often thought to be a degenerate version of a so-called pure

language), I will refer to this language as Jamaican Creole (Appel; no date).

It is necessary to understand that in Jamaica, English is still considered the official language: the

language of education, commerce and institutions. For this reason, still today, numerous people

within Jamaica and abroad, consider the Jamaican Creole a bad English or a slang spoken mainly

by the poor and uneducated (Appel; no date).

The first interesting feature that characterises JamC, is its lack of overt morphological inflection: its

inflectional content is exceedingly meagre, so that the grammatical information is carried almost

entirely by the syntactic system (Durrleman, 2000 : 189; citing Bailey, 1966). For instance, in this

language, verbs have no inflection; therefore they do not agree in person and number (e.g.: Mi/yu/
im/wi/uno/dem nuo betta; I/you/she, he/we/you[plural]/they know better) (Durrleman; 2000 : 189

- 190). Moreover, unlike many other European languages, English nouns have no grammatical

gender and have instead acquired a natural gender. English lost grammatical gender about six or

seven hundred years ago, therefore JamC is not affected by it either (Cassidy; 2007 : 50).

As in Standard English, words in JamC are formed by compounding derivation, back formation and

so on; however, it is interesting to observe the use of reduplication of form: e.g. pitchy-patchy

(covered with patches), raw-chaw (vulgar), pinging (the penguin plant) (Cassidy; 2007 : 69).

Furthermore, simple repetition is the most popular type of reduplication in JamC: this feature is

often onomatopoeic and is used to form adjectives, nouns, prepositions, verbs, and adverbs. E.g.:

chatty-chatty, talkative; mus-mus, mouse; rong-and-rong, around; chop-chop, chop all over;

degge-degge, only (Mordecai and Mordecai; 2001 :80).

Another interesting observation is that JamC is composed by twelve phonemic oral vowels that can

be divided into five simple vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and seven complex vowels (ii, uu, ia, ai, aa, ua, au)

(Schneider; 2008 : 259), that are nasalised when near a nasal consonants. For instance farm may

be pronounced [f:m] (/faam/), moon as [m:n] (/muun/), some as [sm] (/som/), they, them,

their as [dm
] (/dem/), and so on (Schneider; 2008 : 261). However, according to a phonological

rule that applies to monosyllabic grammatical morphemes ending in nasal consonants, the vowel

can be deleted by nasalising it in order to underline its presence. Therefore, some will be

pronounced [s], they, them, their will become [d] , and he, she, him, her will be [] (Schneider;

2008 : 261).

Jamaicans have also developed conjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs by adding new meanings to

English words. Some instances of conjunctions include after (since, because), before (instead

of), so (even as), so (and thus). (Cassidy; 2007 : 65).

The syntax of Creole is characterised by: the unmarked verb, the absence of subject-verb concord,

zero copula (mi sick; I am sick), serial verbs (go see, come tell), and the same form being used as
an adjective and as a verb at the same time (dem mad mi; they made me mad) (Beverley; 2010 ;

643).

According to Alleyne (1989 : 120) (Mordecai and Mordecai; 2001), the syntax and phonology of

Jamaican Creole derives from the contact of West African and European languages (Beverley;

2010 : 643).

Although there is no proof, according to some critics, Jamaican Creole was formed within one

generation (between 1660-1700), while others affirm that it may have taken longer; however, by the

end of the XVIII century, a new language (similar, yet different in many aspects to the English

language) was born (Mordecai and Mordecai; 2001 : 80-81).

As Bob Marley sung in Buffalo Soldier (1983), Jamaicans were originally driven from the

mainland [Africa] to the heart of the Caribbean [Jamaica]: between 1674-1688, over 20,000 slaves

were shipped to Jamaica from West Africa. During the next hundred and fifty years, the number of

black people increased mostly by importation in order to keep up with the agricultural demand that

required more and more labor (by 1694 there were 7,000 whites and 40,000 blacks) (Mordecai and

Mordecai; 2001 : 81). Simultaneously, the rapid and massive import of people, who could neither

preserve a functioning African language nor learn English fully (Jettka, 2010 : 2; citing Cassidy

1971b ; 204), led to the creation of a pidgin language, used for communication between slaves, as

well as between colonisers and slaves (Jettka; 2010 : 2).

The appearance of British English in Jamaica was mainly influenced by the different English

dialects spoken by its British settlers: English, Scottish, and Irish English (Jettka; 2010: 1; citing

Cassidy., 1971a : 12). Many holdings were isolated farms, therefore slaves had little or no contact

with others elsewhere. For this reason, they would adopt the same form of English as their owners.

In Jamaicas case, it could be said that the first West Africans to arrive, tempted to speak in the same

manner as their British owners, and their imitation of what they had heard became a reference to
the next group of Africans arriving, and so on. This process brought the formation of what today we

define as Jamaican Creole (Mordecai and Mordecai; 2001 : 81).

By the late XVIII and XIX century, British-educated Jamaicans, British members of the colonial

bureaucracy, teachers and missionaries helped to keep the status of English high also thanks to the

introduction of the printing press in Jamaica (1718), along with English books and newspapers that

had a great impact on their readers (Mordecai and Mordecai; 2001 : 82).

However, Creole languages, like Jamaican, are also associated to a social and economic status

stereotype. As mentioned previously, JamC developed from a context of language contact between

suppressed population groups (slaves) with a superior group (colonisers); yet, after nearly four

centuries traditional prejudices predominate. For this reason, Standard Jamaican English (SJE) is

preferred during the interaction with people in which personal distance dominates, whilst JamC is

mainly used during the interaction with people with whom there is a closer relationship (Jettka;

2010 : 3-4). Furthermore, speakers of SJE were - and apparently still are - regarded as more

intelligent, more educated, and as having more money than JamC speakers. This reflects todays

reality in Jamaica since SJE is the official language of the island and is the classical language of

politicians and institutions of higher education (Jettka; 2010 : 4).

As stated above, Jamaican Creole, is the product of the contact between English and West African

languages during the period of Europes expansionism and international commerce (Beverley;

2004 : 642). The nature of JamC is incredibly provisional; in fact, even a classification of it as a

language can result complicated. As Beverly wrote (2004), the structure of the language briefly

described above, reflects that convergence of economic forces and echoes the synthesis of those

historically yoked cultures (especially the African culture).

 Adone, D. (2012). Creole Languages. In: Adone, D. The Acquisition of Creole Languages: How Children
surpass their Input. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Appel, H. (no date). Can you speak Jamaican? [online] Available from: <http://www.globalexchange.org/
country/jamaica/language> [Accessed 15 February 2016].

Beverley, B. (2004). Jamaican Creole: in the process of becoming. Ethnic and Racial Studies. Vol. 27; Is. 4;
pp. 641-659. Published online.

Bob Marley - Buffalo Soldier (2008). Youtube video, added by Pgoenberg. [online] Available from: <https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5FCdx7Dn0o>

Cassidy, G.F. (2007). Jamaica Talk: Three hundred years of the English Language in Jamaica. (eds.).
Kingston: University of the West Indie Press.

Durrleman, S. (2000). The Architecture of the clause in Jamaican Creole. [online] Available from: <http://
www.unige.ch/lettres/linge/syntaxe/journal/pdf_volume_one/article7_durrleman.pdf>.

Herbold, S. (no date). Jamaican Patois and the power of Language in Reggae Music. [online] Available
from: <https://debate.uvm.edu/dreadlibrary/herbold.html> (Accessed 18 February 2018).

Jettka, D. (2010). The Language Situation of Jamaica: Language Education Policy in the tension between
Standard Jamaican English and Jamaican Patwa. [online] Available from: <http://www.daniel-jettka.de/pdf/
JETTKA-The_language_situation_of_Jamaica.pdf> [Accessed 19 February 2016].

Mordecai, M. and Mordecai, P. (2001). Culture and Customs of Jamaica. London: Greenwood Press.

Patrick, P. L. (2004). Jamaican Creole morphology and syntax. In: Kartmann et al. A Handbook of Varieties
of English. Morphology an Syntax. (eds.). Vol. 2. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Schneider, E. W. (2008). Varieties of English: the Americas and the caribbean. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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