Some linguists consider patois a separate language, whereas others view it as an alternate form of English. Some of the most interesting anecdotes and fables in the Caribbean are usually told in the patois, so understanding its structure can add to your insight into Jamaican culture.

Proverbs and place names express some of the vitality of Jamaican language. For "Mind your own business," there is "Cockroach no business in fowl-yard." For being corrupted by bad companions, "You lay wid dawg, you get wid fleas." And for the pretentious, "The higher monkey climb, the more him expose."

Both British and biblical place-names abound in Jamaica. Examples include Somerset and Siloah, Highgate and Horeb. One also sees Arawak names like Linguanea, Spanish ones like Oracabessa, Scottish names like Rest-and-Be-Thankful, and entirely Jamaican names like Red Gal Ring.

The patois has been embellished and altered with the growth of Rastafarianism. Rastas have injected several grammatical concepts, one of the most apparent being the repeated use of "I"—a reminder of their reverence of Ras Tafari. "I" is almost always substituted for the pronoun "me." It is also substituted for many prefixes or initial syllables. Thus, "all right" becomes "I're," "brethren" becomes "Idren," and "praises" becomes "Ises." The Rastafarian changes to Jamaica's patois are a recent phenomenon and have not always been adopted by non-Rastas.

How to Say It in Jamaican?

"How did Jamaicans come to talk as they do?" linguist Frederic G. Cassidy once asked. "The musical lilt and staccato rhythms, the mingling of strange words, the vowel sounds that go sliding off into diphthongs, the cheerful defiance of many niceties of traditional English grammar, the salty idioms, the wonderfully compressed proverbs, the pungent imagery of nicknames and epithets in the bestowal of which these islanders appear to be peculiarly adept—where do all these hail from, and how did they come to be?"