Comment on A Jamaican accent just makes me smile
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 7 hours agoPatois is a creole language whose vocabulary largely comes from English, and there’s a gradient of dialects between Patois and Jamaican Standard English, but pure Patois is considered mutually unintelligible with Jamaican English and thus a separate language. Moreover:
A 2007 survey by the Jamaican Language Unit found that 17.1 percent of the population were monolingual in Jamaican Standard English (JSE), 36.5 percent were monolingual in Patois, and 46.4 percent were bilingual, although earlier surveys had pointed to a greater degree of bilingualism (up to 90 percent).
red_bull_of_juarez@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
To clarify, patois is a generic term, as is creole, and can apply to any non-standardized language and is not specific to any particular location or group or language. That’s why it’s called “Jamaican patois” in the screenshot.
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 3 hours ago
Don’t they spell the specific Jamaican language “Patwa”, to differentiate it from the idea of a patois in general?