Product Description

This easy-to-understand introduction to Afro-Jamaican grammar "explains clearly and simply the basics of Jamaican patois. Most importantly I think the book has an important role to play in helping Jamaicans take pride in their language and see that it is not second-class" (Deborah Pruitt, anthropologist, Berkeley, California). (Foreign Language Studies)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #271108 in Books
• Published on: 1991-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 120 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, Creole

Customer Reviews

The price is right
Several years back I was in Jamaica, The people there speak english well, but between each other they speak Patois. During my first trip there I spent many hours talking with bartenders and waitress' trying to learn the language. I did get down 'gimme a Red Stripe man' but I wanted to be able to understand them. At the airport on my way home I stopped in one of the book stores and picked up a copy of this book which sells there for a whopping $26 US. I read it through out the year and by the time I returned the following year I could actually understand a good bit of what they were saying, and some of the locals actually thought I worked there at one of the cruise ship terminals. It goes through sentence structure and tenses, not just a list of common phrases. In reference to the Afro-Jamaican it compares different parts of the language to where it probably came from which many times it is linked to different African languages, no reference to the different people who currently speak the language.

A Basic Introduction
For those interested in language ceolization, Understanding Jamaican Patois is a good description of the basics of the creole spoken in Jamaica. A relatively short book, it spends a good deal of time talking about orthography, which is always a problem/concern with a primarily oral language. This discussion is interestingly illustrated in the reading selection (a childhood tale by Llewellen "Dada" Adams) at the end of the book, which is written in facing pages in the two orthographies (one mixes phonetic and standard spellings; the second is purely phonetic). Ending the book is an all-too-short appendix comparing some similar features in Haitian and Jamaican patois.

Getting it wrong
I second Azucena's review and I'd add that it is clear Adams isn't a linguist as she mis-hears some important parts of Jamaican speech. For example, the short vowel in the words 'bird' and 'work' does NOT sound like that in standard English 'book,' but more like that in 'thud.'

Adams would have been better off transcribing the sounds in some standard phonetic alphabet, or, to make the book more accessible, in the same mix that Jamaicans do. Ef yuh ah goh mek it up, yuh haffi come betta dan dat!