![]() Some vowels are capable of nasalization and others can be lengthened. There are between nine and sixteen vowels. Phonology Īccounts of basilectal Jamaican Patois (that is, its most divergent rural varieties) suggest around 21 phonemic consonants with an additional phoneme ( /h/) in the Western dialect. Patois and English are frequently used for stylistic contrast ( codeswitching) in new forms of Internet writing. Claude McKay published his book of Jamaican poems Songs of Jamaica in 1912. 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. 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. Mesolectal forms are similar to very basilectal Belizean Kriol. 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. The Cayman Islands in particular have a very large Jamaican Patois-speaking community, with 16.4% of the population conversing in the language. 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. Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English despite heavy use of English words or derivatives. 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. 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. 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. 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. It is spoken by the majority of Jamaicans as a native language. A majority of the non-English words in Patois come from the West African Akan language. Jamaican Patois ( / ˈ p æ t w ɑː/ 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 Jamaican Patois speaker discussing the usage of the language
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