Word of the week: Patois
In Jamaica, it's "patwa," and it may become an official language.
The island nation of Jamaica, which became independent from the United Kingdom in 1962, remains part of the British Commonwealth. But that relationship may change as soon as next year, when the country becomes a republic. Along with that shift, the New York Times reports, “momentum is building to make Patois Jamaica’s official language, on par with English.” (Gift link)
Patois—often spelled Patwa or Patwah in Jamaica—”is about as different from English as English is from German,” Times reporter Simon Romero writes. “It features a dizzying array of words borrowed from African, European and Asian languages.” Those words include ganja (from the Hindi word for cannabis), pikni (from the Portuguese word for “very small,” pequeninho), and nyam (from Wolof, “to eat”).1 If you’re familiar with Jamaican Patois outside Jamaica, it’s probably thanks to reggae and dancehall music, whose lyrics include many Jamaican words.
What about the word patois itself? It’s usually avoided by linguists because of its shady history. A borrowing from French, it generally means “a dialect spoken by residents of a specific region”—and in French, the assumption is that the dialect is “substandard.” In 13th-century France, patois was even more derogatory: It meant “incomprehensible, vulgar gibberish.” (The Online Etymology Dictionary says the word “probably” comes from Old French patoier, “to handle clumsily, to paw,” from pate "a paw.” The OED does not back up this assertion, but I like it.)
It’s probably more accurate to call Jamaican Patois a creole language: “a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form” (Wikipedia). Nevertheless, “Patois” is what it’s been called in Jamaica since at least the 1930s, and if they’re OK with it, so am I.
I’m also very much OK with the rich vocabulary of Jamaican swear words. One of those words, bomboclaat, was the subject of a 2020 post by James Harbeck for the Strong Language blog. James called bomboclaat semantically flexible: an all-purpose swear:
I knew what bomboclaat means because I live in Toronto. It’s not that I learned it from a member of Toronto’s fairly large Jamaican community. It’s that Rob Ford did. Do you remember him? The pasty-white crack-smoking buffoon that an inattentive electorate made mayor of Canada’s largest city? Well, in one of the quite a few videos that came out of him being an intoxicated lout, he was imitating Jamaican Patois, and one of the words he used was bomboclaat.
By the way, as long as you’re over at Strong Language, why not read my own recent post there? It has nothing to do with Jamaica; instead, it’s all about sanitized swears. It’s called “Asterisks for the F*n of It,” and I do h*pe you h*ve f*n ***ding it.