Patois, also known as Jamaican Creole, is spoken primarily on the island of Jamaica by over 3 million people.  The language is an important part of Jamaican culture, and is intertwined with its rich music, especially Reggae and dancehall.  

Patois evolved from the mixing of English with African languages, as well as influences from Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous Arawak languages.  Creoles are fascinating linguistic phenomena, in which speakers of disparate languages create a language that everyone can understand, known as a pidgin.  When this language is taught to a young generation as a native language, it is regularized and becomes a creole.  Creoles generally have features from multiple languages, including vocabulary, grammar, phonemes, and morphology.

Jamaican Patois exists on a continuum.  Conservative creole speakers are not always mutually intelligible with English, while some forms of the language sound almost identical to English.