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 9
JAMAICAN CREOLE
Peter L. Patrick

Introduction
Jamaican Creole ( JC) is a Caribbean English-lexified creole language, spoken pri-
marily on the island of Jamaica (pop. 2.7 million people) but also in North America
and Britain. When creolists say English-lexified creole, we mean that it is a lan-
guage closely related to English in terms of vocabulary but nevertheless grammati-
cally distinct from English. A creole language is one that was created as a result of
intense language contact between a superstrate language (that is, a dominant colo-
nial language—English in this case) and less powerful substrate languages (several
West African ones). (On creole languages see also the chapter on language contact.)
JC is a language that is separate from English and is in no way inferior to English,
although many people, including some Jamaicans, think of it as a low-status lan-
guage, due in part, no doubt, to the status of Jamaica in the world political economy.
It is a language of ethnic identification: practically all Jamaicans speak di Patwa,
as it is popularly called, and practically nobody speaks it except those of Jamaican
heritage. (The word Patwa, stressed on the first syllable, derives from French patois,
but the Jamaican language itself has no French lineage and is not related to well-
known French-lexified Creoles like those spoken in Haiti or Louisiana. Indeed,
its vocabulary is almost wholly English.)

History
JC is the product of British colonialism, slavery, and the plantation economy,
leading to language contact and creolization between Africans and English
speakers. It began developing into a language after 1655, when English soldiers
captured Jamaica from Spain, and was largely formed by about 1750. This was
after a century that saw a massive increase in the African population. However,
some important grammatical features are not attested for a century after 1750.

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 Jamaican Creole 127

West and Central African sources included languages of the Kwa and Bantu
families. Jamaican Maroons, rebel slaves who defeated the English army and estab-
lished autonomous settlements by treaty in 1739, maintained knowledge of Twi,
an ancestral Akan language (spoken in Ghana). This group also developed a spe-
cial Maroon Spirit Language, which resembles Suriname creoles (Bilby 1983).
English-language input into the formation of JC included nonstandard regional
English dialects from London, Bristol, the West Midlands, and Liverpool, as well
as Scots and Irish English.
Today over 90% of Jamaicans are of African descent, often with European heri-
tage as well. Later arrivals (after 1845) claim Indian, Chinese, and Syrian heritage,
but they did not influence the birth of the language.
Since the early 1900s many Jamaicans have migrated abroad, about 10% of the
population in each decade since 1950. Over half a million Jamaican-born people
live in the U.S. today. They and their descendants live in significant numbers in
Toronto, Canada, and such U.S. urban areas as greater Miami (over 100,000) and
New York City (nearly 250,000). In certain smaller cities (Baltimore and Philadel-
phia), they make up over 5% of the foreign-born residents.
Like other Caribbean peoples, these transnational families remain in close
contact with family members back home in Jamaica. In Britain, Jamaicans have
been present since the seventeenth century but migrated in significant num-
bers after World War II, making up the largest group of the 500,000 or more
Caribbean migrants arriving in the 1960s and 1970s. While JC speakers in the
U.S. have tended to assimilate to African Americans socially and linguistically, in
the United Kingdom (including Britain and Northern Ireland), they form the
majority of African-descent people from the Western Hemisphere. New speech
varieties have emerged that linguists discuss under names such as London Jamai-
can (Sebba 1993), British Black English (Sutcliffe 1982; Edwards 1986), British
Afro-Caribbean English, and British Creole (Patrick 2004).

The Social Context

The Sociolinguistic Situation
JC was long subordinated to Standard English by an elite minority who monopo-
lized power and controlled the official culture. Limited access to Standard English
for most people resulted in the creole continuum, a chain of minimally dis-
tinct speech varieties stretching from the acrolect (varieties closest to Standard
Jamaican English [SJE]) to the most basilectal varieties (those furthest from the
standard, showing the greatest continuity with their African roots). Even the end
of the continuum closest to SJE merges subtly into SJE. This continuum model
was developed by DeCamp (1971) because discrete, categorical approaches (com-
munity bilingualism, standard plus dialect, and diglossia) proved inadequate to
describe the Jamaican language situation, as these approaches assume that there
are clearly distinguishable speech varieties and that one can always tell when
someone is speaking one as opposed to the others. (Diglossia, also discussed in the

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 128 Peter L. Patrick

language contact chapter in this volume, refers to a society where there is at least
some bilingualism and where the two [or more] languages have distinct functions
in society.)
In addition to the acrolectal and basilectal varieties, there are mesolectal vari-
eties, comprising the broad middle range of speech varieties on the continuum,
used by most Jamaicans and used in many situations (Patrick 1999).The mesolect,
then, lies between SJE (a variety of English, not a creole) and the creole varieties
that are furthest from English. It incorporates some elements of English struc-
ture into the systematic but variable JC grammar. JC grammar shows systematic
variation. Variation refers to the fact that in many cases, there are two or more
ways (pronunciations, words, phrases, etc.) to say the same thing. For example,
in English walking and walkin’ are two ways of pronouncing one and the same
word. In this respect, JC is like all languages: it shows variation. Creole-language
mesolects, however, tend to have somewhat more systematic variation than other
language varieties that do not exist in a creole continuum. Variation—the dif-
ferent ways of saying the same thing and the evaluations of each way of saying
it—is patterned in a strong and stable way. Variation of the type I am discussing
is inherent in languages. Indeed, linguists call it inherent variation (see the
language contact chapter). This variation is not produced synchronically (dur-
ing one period of time) through language mixing (of creole varieties with each
other or with English). Variation has been present in JC (and in all languages)
since they first began. Nevertheless, Jamaicans do codeswitch, for example, from
a variety of JC to English or vice versa. They also styleshift, for example, from
a more formal style of a certain variety of creole, or from SJE, to a less formal
variety (Patrick 1997). (The majority of the world’s speakers codeswitch, and
virtually all of them styleshift. See the chapter on language contact.)
SJE is a recognized national variety of English, genetically descended (in the
linguistic sense) by normal transmission, originally from British dialects and then
from one generation on to the next over the centuries. However, basilectal JC
grammar differs radically from English grammar and emerged from profound
language contact and structural mixing during the period when it was formed.
It is not genetically descended from English nor from African languages, though
elements from each merged to different extents in the creation of JC. Genetically
descended in linguistics means that a language (English, for example) has only
one language “parent” (the English of the preceding generation), which in turn
had only one, and so on. This is unlike creoles, which usually have several parent
languages—a superstrate language and several substrate languages (or, in some
cases, one superstrate and one substrate).

The Use of JC
SJE is largely the medium for education and literacy, despite JC’s increasing pen-
etration into broadcast and print media since Jamaica’s independence in 1962.

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 Jamaican Creole 129

The government has recently begun pilot bilingual education programs using JC
and SJE. Only in the twenty-first century has the Jamaican government seriously
begun exploring language planning and recognition of JC as a national language.
Yet JC remains a rich and vibrant cultural force, the language of home and family,
everyday life, and mass politics and culture. It has achieved worldwide popularity
through Jamaican vocal music (most famously reggae, especially the songs of Bob
Marley) and an internationally honored literature, with distinguished poets and
writers including Edward Baugh, Louise Bennett, James Berry, Jean Binta Breeze,
Erna Brodber, Michelle Cliff, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Claude McKay, Pamela
Mordecai, Mervyn Morris, Mutabaruka, Velma Pollard (also a creolist), Dennis
Scott, and Olive Senior. JC is also known throughout the world by the spread of
Rastafarian culture, including Rastafarians’ distinctive variety of JC, Dread Talk
(Pollard 1994).

Some Linguistic Features

Orthography
There is no popularly recognized spelling system for JC. Linguists have long
used or adapted the phonemic orthography ( Jamaican Language Unit 2001)
first devised by Frederic Cassidy (1961) and used in the Dictionary of Jamai-
can English (Cassidy and Le Page 1967). Recently, efforts have been made to
popularize it as well (e.g., author Carolyn Cooper publishes a regular newspaper
column using it).
In everyday practice, Jamaicans have long used their own idiosyncratic, often
inconsistent English-based systems (Cooper calls this “chaka-chaka spelling”). For
some aspects of JC they are quite useful and make pronunciation transparent.

Palatalization
Historically, velar stops before low vowels in English words could sometimes be
palatalized to [c] and [ɟ] and followed by palatal glides, giving [cj] and [ɟj] (in the
International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA]), so that a word such as garden could be
pronounced [ɟjɑːrdən]. This palatalization plus glide before low vowels occurred
traditionally in northern Ireland; eastern Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; and
the Midlands and Southwest of England. It was even considered essential to polite
speech in London in the 1700s. It was never phonemic in English and has gradu-
ally disappeared from many English dialects since 1800. (See Cassidy and Le Page
1967; Patrick 1999.)
The transfer of English words to JC at the time when palatalization before
low vowels was common in English led to JC having the palatalized velar pho-
nemes /kj/ and /gj/ (using IPA symbols) alongside the plain velar phonemes
/k/ and /g/. Jamaicans often spell the palatalized velar consonants using ky (or

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 130 Peter L. Patrick

cy; e.g., cyat, kyat ‘cat’) and gy (e.g., gyaadn ‘garden’), a practice adopted here. Pala-
talization also occurs before high front vowels, as in many languages, but under
different conditions—this is not considered here.The problem sets will allow you
to explore JC palatalization further.

Tense and Aspect

An important feature distinguishing Caribbean creoles from their European lexi-
fier languages is the structure of their tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) systems.
Tense has to do with the way verbs locate situations (i.e., events, actions, and
states of affairs) in time, for example, present, past, and future. (In this discussion,
I use terms that are more readily understandable than some of those used by lin-
guists in talking about tense and aspect.) Aspect treats events, actions, and states,
that is, situations, in another way. Aspect has to do with their duration, distribu-
tion through time (repeated, frequent, or habitual), or delimitation (beginning or
end) or the speaker’s point of view (e.g., looking at a situation from the inside,
as it is unfolding). The expression of mood is intimately related to that of tense
and aspect. Mood—for example, indicative and subjunctive—expresses a speaker’s
attitude toward or evaluation of the meaning a clause conveys and is expressed by
auxiliary verbs and the absence of third person singular, present tense, indicative -s
in English: he take versus he takes, for example. (Mood will not be discussed further.)
English typically marks tense and aspect through auxiliary verbs and inflec-
tional suffixes, both of which are limited in JC compared to English. JC instead
usually marks tense and aspect (and mood) by putting a tense-aspect free mor-
pheme in front of the verb—or by leaving the verb in its stem form, that is, with
neither markers in front nor affixes.The morphemes in front of the verb are called
TMA particles, since they are used to mark mood too.
In what follows, you will find a basic description of some ways to express tense
and aspect in JC. Not all grammatical subtleties are included.
One way of marking progressive aspect in JC is by putting /a/ before the
verb stem. (An example of progressive aspect in English is the sentence She is sell-
ing mangoes.) Progressive aspect indicates that a situation is ongoing at the time the
sentence refers to (present, past, etc.). Progressive aspect in JC is not influenced
by tense: it is the same for present and past actions, and /a/ itself does not convey
tense. (In English, where the verb suffix /-ɪŋ/ or /-ɪn/ serves the same function
as /a/ in JC, tense is marked on the obligatory preceding auxiliary verb be.) The
following JC examples illustrate this:

(1) a. Mi a ron ‘I am running’

b. Mi a ron ‘I was running’

(2) a. Dem a chat ‘They are talking’

b. Dem a chat ‘They were talking’

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 Jamaican Creole 131

The tense (past, present, future) of the preceding JC examples is usually figured
out by using the social context of the speaker’s remark or conversation.
Habitual aspect is like progressive aspect because it refers to an ongoing
situation. Habitual aspect expresses that an action, event, or state of affairs has
been in effect for a significantly long period of time, whereas progressive aspect
focuses just on the time when the sentence is being uttered. Whether a length
of time is significantly long or not depends on the conversational context and
expectations. The English sentence She sells mangoes signals habitual aspect. Note
that this sentence implies that it is her job. She is selling mangoes indicates only
that she is doing it now, or perhaps these days, but not for a significantly long
period of time.
Habitual aspect and also progressive aspect can be used to express uninter-
rupted situations or ones that are interrupted—in other words, ones that occur
over and over again. An example of an interrupted situation occurs in the sen-
tence He’s hitting the nail with the hammer. The hitting is interrupted, occurring
over and over again. But every time he hits the nail, it’s considered part of the
same ongoing situation.
Historically, habitual aspect used to be usually marked identically to progressive
aspect, and it is still possible—though rare—to use /a/ + verb (stem) to convey the
habitual meaning. In contemporary JC, habitual aspect is usually expressed with just
the plain verb stem, with no preceding TMA particle. Example (3) may (in some
speech contexts) express habitual meaning, as indicated by the gloss. It does so with
the optional /a/ or without it. (The parentheses indicate that /a/ is optional):

(3) Mi (a) ron ‘I run (habitually)’

(Remember that, with /a/, this sentence may also express progressive aspect, as in
the examples above.) More details about tense and aspect in JC will be provided
in the problem sets.

Further Reading
Jamaican was the first Caribbean English creole to be extensively described using
modern linguistic methods. The first generative grammar of a creole was Bai-
ley’s (1966), and the first comprehensive etymological dictionary was Cassidy and
LePage’s (1967). JC remains among the best-researched creoles, having been the
subject of language studies of many kinds, unlike most creoles.The references sec-
tion provides an idea of the range of scholarship on JC.

Problem Sets
For the problems in this chapter, when precision is required, as in Table 9.1 and in
the problem sets on palatalization, IPA is used within phonetic brackets [ ]. Where

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 132 Peter L. Patrick

phonetic detail is irrelevant, and/or phonemic representation is required, the Cas-

sidy orthography is used, enclosed in phonemic slashes / /. Occasionally, English or
JC words are marked, as in dictionary fashion, to indicate their stress patterns.They
may be given either in English spelling or in phonemic slashes with stress marking.

Palatalization
Table 9.1 illustrates English words belonging to different historical word classes.
(Word classes are simply groups of words whose pronunciations have often
changed together throughout the history of a language, in this case English.)
The third column lists the pronunciations in the prestigious southern British
“Received Pronunciation” (RP) accent (used by the royal family and other high-
status groups).Though RP was not the historical input to JC, it conveniently pre-
serves vowel distinctions made in many former and present-day British English
varieties. In regard to vowels, it is also important to note that JC has a phonemic
length distinction with low vowels: /a/ and /ːa/ (for example, in JC orthography,
/kat/ ‘cot’ contrasts with /kaat/ ‘caught’).
The table also gives the vowels for the equivalent words in JC, phonemi-
cally transcribed, indicating whether these JC words may variably occur with the

TABLE 9.1 English vowels and word classes with Jamaican Creole equivalents

Word class English Corresponding RP JC vowel JC example Palatal glide

example words vowel word

Short a cat, gas, [æ] /a/ /kyat/ y

canˊdle, short low front
Caˊnada unrounded V
Short o cot, cotˊtage, [ɒ] /a/ /kat/ –
comˊmon short low back
rounded V
Broad a can’t, cast, calf [ɑː] /aa/ /kyaan/ y
long low back
unrounded V
Long open o caught, call, [ɔː] /aa/ /kaat/ –
cawed long mid
backrounded lax V
a before r card, garˊden, [ɑː] /aa/ /kyaad/ y
garˊgle long low back
unrounded V
o before r cord, corˊner, [ɔː] /aa/ /kaad/ –
Gorˊdon long mid back
rounded lax V

Note: The Jamaican Creole material uses Jamaican Creole orthography graphemes, not the Interna-
tional Phonetic Alphabet.

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 Jamaican Creole 133

palatalized phoneme. Not every word that is eligible always has a palatalized velar,
but words that are not eligible never receive one.
Note: In JC words of two or more syllables, I will mark primary stress after
the stressed syllable, which is in bold (e.g.,’after). Notice that stress in JC does not
always fall where American English speakers might expect.
Examine the data in Table 9.1 carefully and answer the following questions:

1. To arrive at a statement of where the palatalized velar phonemes /ky/ and

/gy/ in JC show up, use one phonetic feature to fill in the blank in the fol-
lowing statement:
JC words that have the palatalized velar phonemes /ky/ and
/gy/ correspond to words in RP that have /k/ and /g/ in front of
___________________________ vowels.
2. Now, along with the data in the table, take into account the JC pronuncia-
tions of the additional words in (4), which also show a palatal glide (in JC
orthography):
(4) English word JC word
ˊgarage /ˊgyaridj/
meˊchanic /meˊkyanik/
Newˊcastle /nyuˊkyasl/
Note that these are all short-a words because the syllables beginning with the
palatalized velars belong to the short-a word class. Note also that Garage is
stressed on the first syllable in British English, rhyming with carriage. Newcastle
occurs in British English with two different stress patterns: one on the first
syllable, and one – as here in JC- on the second.
Assuming that these words conform to the statement provided in the first
question, what must the corresponding RP vowel be in these three words?
Explain your answer.
3. Now consider the following word in (5) with a variant (different) pronuncia-
tion of the JC word for mechanic:
(5) English word JC word
ˊmechanic /ˊmakanik/
If one assumes that this variant pronunciation existed in English and that it
had a low unrounded vowel in the second syllable, then what has been pre-
sented thus far about palatalization would predict that the corresponding JC
word would have /ky/. But this English model was not incorporated into JC
with /ky/. Comparing the words in (4) with the others in Table 9.1, what
about the phonology of the word in (5) could account for /k/ instead of /
ky/? (Hint: Think about where stress falls in the words.)

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 134 Peter L. Patrick

4. Now consider the following example word, assuming that the English model
had /k/ preceding a low unrounded vowel:

(6) reinˊcarnate /riiyenkaaˊniet/ but not (ungrammatical)

*/riiyenˊkyaaniet/
Taking into consideration how many syllables precede the palatalized conso-
nants in the rest of the data, explain why /ky/ does not occur in this JC word.

Tense and Aspect

Take into account what has been presented about JC tense and aspect in this
chapter and respond to the following:

5. Translate this English sentence into JC: The woman is selling mangoes. (These are
the words you will need: di = the; uman = woman; sel = sell; manggo = mango.)
6. a. What are the two ways to translate into JC The woman (habitually) sells
mangoes?
b. Which translation would one hear most of the time nowadays?

Stativity takes account of whether a verb’s meaning describes a state (stative

verbs) or an action/event (nonstative or dynamic verbs; I will use the term
dynamic). Thus, a verb itself may be stative or dynamic. These aspects inhere in the
meaning of the verb itself. Stative verbs themselves convey the meaning that a
situation is ongoing; the situation may be short, long, or even of permanent dura-
tion. For example, have is a stative verb. If you say She has brown hair, you’re talking
about a usually permanent situation. If you say He has a pimple, you’re usually talk-
ing about a situation of short duration: normally, the pimple will soon go away.
Typical stative verbs, in both English and JC, have meanings such as ‘have’, ‘know’,
‘belong’, ‘need’, ‘contain’, ‘trust’, ‘want’, ‘cost’, ‘depend’, and so on.
Just as in English, stative verbs in JC are not normally marked as having progres-
sive aspect by a word or suffix (the TMA particle /a/ in JC or the morpheme -ing
in English). So, in English, for example, one can say I belong to a club but not
*I am belonging to a club (starred because it is ungrammatical). So, in JC, stative
verbs do not appear with progressive (or habitual) /a/: their inherent meaning
already refers to an ongoing situation, as do the progressive and habitual aspects.
(There are actually some exceptions, but they won’t concern us.)

7. Is the English verb sell stative or dynamic? (Hint: Is it ungrammatical in the

progressive, for example, He’s selling mangoes?)

Only dynamic verbs can be marked as progressive. So the JC TMA marker

cannot occur with stative verbs to express progressive aspect. Remember that
stative verbs, by virtue of their meaning, refer to ongoing situations.

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 Jamaican Creole 135

8. Translate the English sentence I (habitually) want mangoes into JC, in the way
it would normally be said nowadays. (English want is waan in JC.)

Nouns and Determiners

In this section we will look at JC nouns and articles; the latter are called determiners
by linguists. Rather than getting into a rather complicated discussion of grammat-
ical details, we will simply think about how sentences can be translated between
JC and English. (For more information, see Patrick 1999 and 2004.) Keep in mind
that in this discussion, you will learn more about nouns than you were told in the
discussion above. Consider the following examples:
(7) a. Di uman waan di manggo. ‘The woman wants the mango.’
b. Di uman waan manggo. ‘The woman wants mangoes.’
c. Di uman waan di manggo-dem. ‘The woman wants the mangoes.’
d. Di uman waan wan manggo. ‘The woman wants a mango.’
e. Di uman waan manggos. ‘The woman wants mangoes.’
Note that there are two ways to translate The woman wants mangoes into JC, one
provided in (7b) and the other in (7e).

9. Morphologically, how is the JC noun manggos in (7e) more like the English
sentence’s noun than the JC noun in (7b)?
10. Which sentence, (7b) or (7e), is more basilectal (more different grammati-
cally from English)?
11. Translate the following into English in the present tense.
a. Di uman waan di chrii-dem. (chrii = tree)
b. Di uman waan di manggo chrii.
c. Di uman waan wan mekyanik. (mekyanik = mechanic)
d. Wan mekyanik waan manggo.
e. Di uman sel manggo.

References
Bailey, Beryl Loftman. 1966. Jamaican Creole syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bilby, Kenneth. 1983. How the “older heads” talk: A Jamaican Maroon spirit possession
language. Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 57.1–2: 37–88.
Cassidy, Frederic G. 1961. Jamaica talk: Three hundred years of the English language in Jamaica.
London: MacMillan.
Cassidy, Frederic G., and Robert B. Le Page, eds. 1967 (1980, 2nd ed.). Dictionary of Jamaican
English. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cooper, Carolyn. n.d. Jamaica Woman Tongue [blog using Jamaican Creole]. http://carolynjoy
cooper.wordpress.com/.

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DeCamp, David. 1971.Towards a generative analysis of a post-creole speech continuum. In

Dell Hymes, ed., Pidginization and creolization of languages, 349–370. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Edwards,Viv. 1986. Language in a black community. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
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Jamaican Creole orthography. Kingston, JA: University of the West Indies at Mona. http://
www.mona.uwi.edu/dllp/jlu/documents/spelling-jamaican-the-jamaican-way-Hand
out.pdf.
Patrick, Peter L. 1997. Style and register in Jamaican Patwa. In Edgar W. Schneider, ed.,
Englishes around the world: Studies in honour of Manfred Görlach. Vol. 2, Caribbean, Africa,
Asia, Australasia, 41–56. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Patrick, Peter L. 1999. Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the mesolect. Varieties of English
Around the World G17. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Patrick, Peter L. 2004. Jamaican Creole: Morphology and syntax. In Bernd Kortmann,
Edgar W. Schneider, Clive Upton, Rajend Mesthrie, and Kate Burridge, eds., A hand-
book of varieties of English. Vol. 2, Morphology and syntax, 407–438. Topics in English
Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Pollard,Velma. 1994. Dread Talk:The language of Rastafari. Kingston, JA: Canoe Press.
Sebba, Mark. 1993. London Jamaican: Language systems in interaction. London: Longman.
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