Jamaican Language and Grammar
The Jamaican language, Patios, is unique and fun to
learn. It is also very funny
when we hear visitors who come
to the country trying to speak
patio.
Now the first thing we should
know is that Jamaicans speak
using a wide range of languages
and that is why if you visit the
island and is to just blend in
the local environment you may
find it hard to understand one
set of people while you can
better understand another set.
The two extremes however is the
English language and then the
other is Patio in the basolect
form.
We will look firstly at the past
tense. The past tense of
majority of the verbs is used as
the present tense, in Jamaican
patois. An example of this is
where one may give “The girl ran
quickly.”, a translation to “Di
gyal run faas.” Another example
of this is where “I went to the
beach.”, would be translated to
“Mi go a di beach.”
Now to give a lesson on how we
treat plural I will start by
saying that unlike the English
language we do not add the
letter ‘s’ at the end of the
word. What we do instead of
adding ‘s’ is to add the word ‘dem’
behind the noun we want to
pluralize. For example we would
translate ‘the cats’ to ‘di cats
dem’ or ‘the apples’ to ‘di
apple dem’.
We even add the word ‘dem’ to
words that refer to groups. For
example the phrase ‘the people’
would still translate to ‘di
people dem’. Patios in Jamaica
is about emphasizing and that is
what is done when we add ‘dem’
to plural words. To be
conflicting we sometimes use the
plural words when we mean the
singular. This is done mostly if
the object is small. So for
example when we say ‘Di bees a
bite mi’ it means ‘The bee is
stinging me.’
Lastly I will look at the words
‘is’ and ‘are’. In the English
language these words are used to
express the state of a
particular noun in a sentence.
In patois this is omitted
completely. Look at the
following phrases and words to
get a full understanding, ‘The
ball is big.’, or ‘The girls are
pretty.’ These would be
translated to ‘Di ball big’ or
‘Di gyal dem pretty.’
This is the end of a short
lesson and I hope that it have
really taken you a step closer
to better understanding patois
and knowing how it works. Patois
is a part of our culture and was
never really looked at as a
language until recently but t
has a system just like every
other language and can be learnt.
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