Linguistic racism and antiblackness, internalized or otherwise, always rear its head in conversations surrounding the language spoken in the Caribbean. Namely, Jamaica.
Patois has its own grammatical structure which is separate from English and is accompanied by its own lexicon (which yes, does include English loanwords.. we were colonized and enslaved for a few hundred years so that happens).
Patois is not to be confused with a Jamaican person with an audible accent speaking English.
The sheer disrespect people give it because it’s a language born from colonization is ridiculous at best, and these same people are the ones who claim to love vacationing in our country and consuming our arts.
Jamaican Patois contains many loanwords, most of which are African in origin, primarily from Twi.
To reiterate:
Patois is not to be confused with a Jamaican person with an audible accent speaking English.
Let’s look at some hard examples.
Examples from African languages include /se/ meaning that (in the sense of “he told me that…” = /im tel mi se/), taken from Ashanti Twi, and Duppy meaning ghost, taken from the Twi word dupon (‘cotton tree root’), because of the African belief of malicious spirits originating in the root of trees (in Jamaica and Ghana, particularly the cotton tree known in both places as “Odom”).
Let’s keep it going.
The pronoun /unu or unnu/, used for the plural form of you, is taken from the Igbo language.
Let’s look at some real world examples of linguistic discrimination and trivialization of culture and denial of right to call a language what it is: a language.
Rihanna, a Bajan artist, released a song entitled “work”. On the track, she used quite a bit of Jamaican patois in the song, which was a dancehall/pop fusion.
People went bananas. The first thing to happen was the demotion of the language to “gibberish”.
Now, I want to take a step back here and actually rewind about 20 or so years.
Dancehall, a Jamaican music genre, has been in the international eye in a major way since the 90s, with artists like Shabba Ranks and Beenie Man holding the culture torch.
We’ve been scrutinized as a people for our language that exists in our music since then (and of course before that as well, but we won’t go into that for now).
From jokes about gibberish in movies and television (In Living Color did a skit on Shabba Ranks, mocking patois and Shabba’s prominent Black features. Thus, reducing a key bearer of popular Jamaican culture to an ugly (read: Black with Black features) gibberish spouting comedy crutch), we’ve been perceived as a caricature for so long, that blatant disrespect of our culture seems trivial.
Here’s the video for “Mr. Loverman” by Shabba Ranks: (xxx)
Here’s the parody video by the cast of In Living Color: (xxx)
So here we are in present day. We’ve watched dancehall in the 90s and early 2000s get “othered” in the American and European eye, and we’ve seen the caricaturization of Caribbean (in this case, Jamaican) culture so much that we are desensitized.
In comes Rihanna and her dancehall hit of 2016.
The language is demoted.
It went from “broken English” (which is problematic in and of itself, as the use of the term has been used to point to English being a default language worthy of respect and humanization for most of its speakers) to “gibberish” in a matter of seconds, with memes to match.
My language isn’t a broken dialect of your default language.
My language is an act of rebellion and is a middle finger to colonization and antiblack violence.
I’m proud of it and how my language and my people have influenced the world around us. Be more critical, because I watch a lot of you take part in this sort of behavior and it’s a shame.
ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK‼️
Unnu ah guh put soom bloodclat respec pon mi language.💯💯
There is….Twi in Patois?
That makes so much sense
Many of us were stolen from modern day Ghana.
My grandmother is of a group of people called the Maroons. They fought for our liberation in Jamaica and even fought in other countries like neighboring Haiti.
My grandma, like many Maroons, speaks a language called Kromanti that is spoken among many elders on one of the settlements called Moore Town in Jamaica.
For some Ghanaian people, Kromanti and Twi are mutually intelligible, meaning they can understand us!
Reblogging for the nice education on what patois actually is.
You see the “broken English” (or “broken [whatever]”) prejudice wherever related languages are spoken, with one associated with higher status, whether this is due to colonization or regional dominance. As well as Jamaican Patois and a lot of other creoles, you see it with Scots, the regional languages of France, even the various mutually unintelligible Chinese topolects (with Mandarin as the “standard” prestige language).
Oh, definitely, and it sometimes ties into prejudice against accents/dialects that are lower class and/or associated with minorities. Look at the way people talk about AAVE. And I can’t talk my native accent/dialect unless I’m with my family because in America people don’t understand me and in Britain it’s “common.” Which it is, but…
I’ve found it ‘interesting’ that most of the ‘we white people shouldn’t say that, it’s from AAVE and that’s cultural appropriation!’ declarations I’ve seen involve things inherited from southern dialects in general – y’all, ain’t, the basic form of ‘fixing to’. AKA ‘poor white Southerners and poor white Appalachian people need to stop sounding black’ to put it in very blunt terms. The same things that would have gotten ‘that’s not proper English, I know you know better’ two decades ago.
The complaints I’ve seen from actual AAVE speakers tend to be about borrowed slang and not grammatical features. The ‘you made fun of us for saying bae and now you’re making how much money by printing it on everything’ phenomenon.
IF IT HAS BEEN A VERY LONG DAY, YOU ARE ‘WEARY’. IF SOMEONE IS ACTING IN A WAY THAT MAKES YOU SUSPICIOUS, YOU ARE ‘WARY’.
ALL IN ‘DUE’ TIME, NOT ‘DO’ TIME
‘PER SE’ NOT ‘PER SAY’
THANK YOU
BREATHE – THE VERB FORM IN PRESENT TENSE
BREATH – THE NOUN FORM
THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE
WANDER – TO WALK ABOUT AIMLESSLY
WONDER – TO THINK OF IN A DREAMLIKE AND/OR WISTFUL MANNER
THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE (but one’s mind can wander)
DEFIANT – RESISTANT DEFINITE – CERTAIN
WANTON – DELIBERATE AND UNPROVOKED ACTION (ALSO AN ARCHAIC TERM FOR A PROMISCUOUS WOMAN)
WONTON – IT’S A DUMPLING THAT’S ALL IT IS IT’S A FUCKING DUMPLING
BAWL- TO SOB/CRY
BALL- A FUCKING BALL
YOU CANNOT “BALL” YOUR EYES OUT
AND FOR FUCK’S SAKE, IT’S NOT “SIKE”; IT’S “PSYCH”. AS IN “I PSYCHED YOU OUT”; BECAUSE YOU MOMENTARILY MADE SOMEONE BELIEVE SOMETHING THAT WASN’T TRUE.
THANK YOU.
*slams reblog*
IT’S ‘MIGHT AS WELL’. ‘MIND AS WELL’ DOES NOT MAKE GRAMMATICAL SENSE.
IT’S NOT ‘COULD OF’, THAT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE WHATSOEVER. IT’S ‘COULD HAVE’. SAME APPLIES TO ‘SHOULD HAVE’.
And this is why my students look at me as though I’m the devil when I try to tell them that no i’m not lying this really is a thing
IT’S ‘COULDN’T CARE LESS’ NOT ‘COULD CARE LESS’ IF YOU COULD CARE LESS THAT MEANS YOU CARE
VOILA – ROUGHLY TRANSLATES AS “LOOK AT THAT” (VOI-LA)
VIOLA – AN INSTRUMENT SIMILAR TO THE VIOLIN
WALLAH – MEANINGLESS GIBBERISH AND YOU JUST MADE SOMEONE CRY
HOW ABOUT THESE?
CLOTH – A PIECE OF MATERIAL LIKE COTTON
CLOTHE – TO PUT CLOTHES ON SOMEONE
CLOTHES – THE THINGS TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE NOT NAKED
ALSO IT’S FREAKING “REIN IN YOUR EMOTIONS” LIKE WHAT YOU WOULD DO TO A HORSE NOT “REIGN IN YOUR EMOTIONS” BECAUSE THAT IS THE TIME OF A RULING FOR ROYALTY THE IDIOM IS BASED OFF OF HORSE STUFF!
oh we doing this?? bet!
fiancé/fiancée are loan words from french and are therefore gendered (yeah i know it sucks, blame latin). the former is masculine, so used for male/masc people. femmes use the latter.
in the same vein, widow = femme, widower = masc
(sorry, i’m not currently aware of any gender neutral terms for either of the above terms except maybe betrothed or affianced for engaged people or the bereaved for the Left Behind, but they sound so horribly outdated so idk)
speaking of veins!
vein = blood vessel that carries blood back to the heart, or, in the way i used it above, having a distinctive style or tendency
vain = self-absorbed, conceited
conceited = self-absorbed, vain
conceded = withdrew, gave up, forfeited (i.e., “conceded the point”)
ancestors = those who came before (harriet tubman is my ancestor)
descendants = those who came after (i am a descendant of harriet tubman)
supine = face up, prone = face down
affect = to impact or change (or, in a psychological context, one’s expression of emotion as demonstrated through facial expression, tone of voice, or body language)
effect = the result of a change (or, in verb form, to influence, as in “to effect change”)
preceded = went before (”she preceded him into the room” means she went into the room before he did)
proceeded (i happen to loathe this word but whatever, it’s my issue) = to move forward or to begin or continue a course of action (”she proceeded to jump” is a horrible and jarring way–my issue, sorry–to say she began to jump)
rein = to curb, as in “rein in your emotions”
reign = to rule, like a king (also, a ruler’s period of rule, i.e., beyoncé’s reign is far from over)
shudder = like a shiver, usu. in revulsion or fear
shutter = to close, as in a business when it’s bankrupt. also, a type of window covering
bear with me = be patient with me (alternatively, there is a large ursine animal with me)
bare with me = naked with me
“no one” is two words
so is “a lot”
it is “deep-seated,” not “deep seeded.” the latter applies to gardening.
it was mentioned above, sort of, but the abbreviation of could have is “could’ve.” see also “should’ve,” and “would’ve.”
crap i forgot:
discreet = inconspicuous, low key
discrete = separate, individual
WRITERS THIS IS FOR YALL
Drawer = box insert in furniture that holds items
Draw = verb that can mean to create a picture or to pull something behind you
TAUNT = to tease or goad
TAUT = without any slack or give; drawn tight
TAUGHT = the past tense of “teach”
Fabric, muscles, skin, etc. are not “taught” or “taunt” – they’re taut
And, while we’re on the “aw” sound….
FLAUNT = to show off in an obvious or gaudy manner
FLOUT = to scorn or deride
You don’t “flout” good looks, talent, or money – you “flaunt” them.
AND
While this should probably have its own post because it’s a phrase and not a single word, and is just flat-out wrong instead of a homonym or spelling error, I’m just gonna piggyback it on this one, since it’s making the rounds.
“CROCODILE TEARS” DOES NOT MEAN HUGE, ROUND, FAT TEARS. IT MEANS FAKE, INSINCERE TEARS.Ihave NO idea how fandom got this so wrong and spread it around, but I see it in a LOT of fanfiction.
A man has blond or brunet hair.
A woman has blonde or brunette hair.
They’re French loan words with genders. An “e” at the end means it’s feminine. No “e?” Masculine.
You POUR milk over cereal. Or rain might pour from the sky.
You PORE over something you’re studying closely, like a book or a map. You might also pick at your pores in the mirror.
If your character wants to lie down in bed, he lies down in the present tense, and he lay down if it happened in the past.
Lied applies only to telling a lie, in the past. “I lied when I said I had ten thousand a year.”
In the present, you would lay your belongings down someplace… or set or place them. If you forgot where your gloves were, you would ask if someone recalled where you laid your gloves.
Skip “lain”, unless you really, really need that participle.
If I may add-
THERE: a place, or a gesture in indicate the exsistance of something.
“Her wallet is over there,”
“There are seven candies left”
THEIR: a possession, or used in titles
“Their book is on the table”
“How are Their Majesties?”
THEY’RE: a contraction of they are
“They’re filling water balloons in the back”
(They are filling water balloons in the back)
THESE ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE.
I have a good one. PLEASE REMEMBER IT’S A BOWL OF SOUP.
YOU DO NOT WANT TO EAT A BOWEL OF SOUP.
SIEZE: TO TAKE CONTROL.
SEAS: LARGE BODY OR BODIES OF WATER.
CEASE: TO STOP OR TERMINATE
More common offenders:
BARE: UNCOVERED OR UNADORNED
BEAR: WANTS YOUR PICNIC BASKET, BOOBOO
BEAR: TO ENDURE, ALSO TO GIVE BIRTH TO A CHILD, WHICH IS A FEAT OF ENDURANCE.
YOU DO NOT GRIN AND BARE IT THIS IS NOT A STRIPTEASE
***
EFFECT: SPECIAL EFFECTS, ETC. ALSO TO CAUSE SOMETHING TO HAPPEN.
AFFECT: TO ACT LIKE SOMETHING YOU’RE NOT. USUALLY USED THIS WAY IN ‘SHE AFFECTED A FRENCH ACCENT.’
YOU DO NOT AFFECT A CHANGE, AND YOU DO NOT EFFECT AN ACCENT.
Linguistic racism and antiblackness, internalized or otherwise, always rear its head in conversations surrounding the language spoken in the Caribbean. Namely, Jamaica.
Patois has its own grammatical structure which is separate from English and is accompanied by its own lexicon (which yes, does include English loanwords.. we were colonized and enslaved for a few hundred years so that happens).
Patois is not to be confused with a Jamaican person with an audible accent speaking English.
The sheer disrespect people give it because it’s a language born from colonization is ridiculous at best, and these same people are the ones who claim to love vacationing in our country and consuming our arts.
Jamaican Patois contains many loanwords, most of which are African in origin, primarily from Twi.
To reiterate:
Patois is not to be confused with a Jamaican person with an audible accent speaking English.
Let’s look at some hard examples.
Examples from African languages include /se/ meaning that (in the sense of “he told me that…” = /im tel mi se/), taken from Ashanti Twi, and Duppy meaning ghost, taken from the Twi word dupon (‘cotton tree root’), because of the African belief of malicious spirits originating in the root of trees (in Jamaica and Ghana, particularly the cotton tree known in both places as “Odom”).
Let’s keep it going.
The pronoun /unu or unnu/, used for the plural form of you, is taken from the Igbo language.
Let’s look at some real world examples of linguistic discrimination and trivialization of culture and denial of right to call a language what it is: a language.
Rihanna, a Bajan artist, released a song entitled “work”. On the track, she used quite a bit of Jamaican patois in the song, which was a dancehall/pop fusion.
People went bananas. The first thing to happen was the demotion of the language to “gibberish”.
Now, I want to take a step back here and actually rewind about 20 or so years.
Dancehall, a Jamaican music genre, has been in the international eye in a major way since the 90s, with artists like Shabba Ranks and Beenie Man holding the culture torch.
We’ve been scrutinized as a people for our language that exists in our music since then (and of course before that as well, but we won’t go into that for now).
From jokes about gibberish in movies and television (In Living Color did a skit on Shabba Ranks, mocking patois and Shabba’s prominent Black features. Thus, reducing a key bearer of popular Jamaican culture to an ugly (read: Black with Black features) gibberish spouting comedy crutch), we’ve been perceived as a caricature for so long, that blatant disrespect of our culture seems trivial.
Here’s the video for “Mr. Loverman” by Shabba Ranks: (xxx)
Here’s the parody video by the cast of In Living Color: (xxx)
So here we are in present day. We’ve watched dancehall in the 90s and early 2000s get “othered” in the American and European eye, and we’ve seen the caricaturization of Caribbean (in this case, Jamaican) culture so much that we are desensitized.
In comes Rihanna and her dancehall hit of 2016.
The language is demoted.
It went from “broken English” (which is problematic in and of itself, as the use of the term has been used to point to English being a default language worthy of respect and humanization for most of its speakers) to “gibberish” in a matter of seconds, with memes to match.
My language isn’t a broken dialect of your default language.
My language is an act of rebellion and is a middle finger to colonization and antiblack violence.
I’m proud of it and how my language and my people have influenced the world around us. Be more critical, because I watch a lot of you take part in this sort of behavior and it’s a shame.
ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK‼️
Unnu ah guh put soom bloodclat respec pon mi language.💯💯
There is….Twi in Patois?
That makes so much sense
Many of us were stolen from modern day Ghana.
My grandmother is of a group of people called the Maroons. They fought for our liberation in Jamaica and even fought in other countries like neighboring Haiti.
My grandma, like many Maroons, speaks a language called Kromanti that is spoken among many elders on one of the settlements called Moore Town in Jamaica.
For some Ghanaian people, Kromanti and Twi are mutually intelligible, meaning they can understand us!
Reblogging for the nice education on what patois actually is.
You see the “broken English” (or “broken [whatever]”) prejudice wherever related languages are spoken, with one associated with higher status, whether this is due to colonization or regional dominance. As well as Jamaican Patois and a lot of other creoles, you see it with Scots, the regional languages of France, even the various mutually unintelligible Chinese topolects (with Mandarin as the “standard” prestige language).
Oh, definitely, and it sometimes ties into prejudice against accents/dialects that are lower class and/or associated with minorities. Look at the way people talk about AAVE. And I can’t talk my native accent/dialect unless I’m with my family because in America people don’t understand me and in Britain it’s “common.” Which it is, but…
That explains Snorlax (snot salmon) and Surskit (sour shit)
The Household Swede was laughing about Snot Salmon earlier–but, I hadn’t even thought about Surskit in that light, in spite of knowing both words. Had to introduce him to Surskit, as well. 😅
One of the things that I like about having an accent is that you’re carrying a bit of your native language with you in the languages you speak, in every single word, and every single letter without even realizing it. Although some people might not like their own accents because they keep comparing themselves to the native speakers and what the pronunciation should be, but in reality, it’s beautiful.
For example the letter “r” in French is different that the ر in Arabic, and the “r” in English, or “r” in Spanish. The ت in Arabic is different than the t in English and so on. This difference is what makes languages diverse and wonderful.
my french prof: if you’re talking about a girl cat, you still have to use the masculine. “une chatte” is something… related to cats, but it’s inappropriate and you don’t have any reason to be using it in the context of this class. don’t use it anymore please
everyone for the next 10 minutes: pussy? oh, pussy? pussy? is it pussy? pussy? pussy? pussy? pussy? pussy?
Un chat, une chatte. Masculine, feminine. That professor doesnt know what they’re talking about -_-
Oh, no. That teacher knows exactly what they are talking about.
“une chatte” has pretty much the exact same meaning as “a pussy”.
Exemple: I, a female person, have two female cats.
Should anyone ask me if I have pets, the grammatically correct way to answer would be. “Oui, j’ai deux chattes.” (”Yes, I have two female cats(/pussies)”).
Do you know what I’m opening myself up for when saying that? Because I do. “Oh, mais t’es une fille? Donc t’as trois chattes!” (”Oh, but you’re a girl, so you have three pussies!”)
Such fine humour, right?
So, even as a native French speaker, if I talk about them, I’ll always prefer saying “J’ai deux chat, elles sont sœurs.” (I have two cats, she/they are sisters) Because you just don’t use a word which primary meaning has been supplanted into a sexually connoted one in everyday conversation.
tl/dr: Just because a word has a normal grammatical sense doesn’t mean it hasn’t been corrupted into something else over time, and no female person will ever use any version of “pussy” to talk about their cat, because the same gallows joke gets tiring after the fiftieth time.
My boss’s first language isn’t English. However, she loves giving inspirational speeches to everyone. I think today she was trying to tell us “don’t just stand around looking pretty”, but what she actually said was “WE DONT HAVE TIME TO BE SEXY”.
It reminds me of my Russian boss at the bakery. I didn’t wrap the bread correctly so she told me to “Snuggle like baby. Bread is your baby, Shelly. It’s sweet and gentle. Fragile, Italian.”
Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be “-burger”: the original food item is named after the German city, [Hamburg]+[er], but got semantically reinterpreted as [ham]+[burger]. Now it’s used as a suffix indicating a type of sandwich.
The -burg in Hamburg refers to a fortress, it’s actually very common for place names in German speaking countries to end in -burg if there is or was a fortress there.
Add the suffix -er, which in German denotes a person affiliated to whatever word you have suffixed.
So basically, somewhere along the line, someone started calling sandwiches people of a fortress.
Want to hear something more ridiculous? The German language went and borrowed it right back.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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