Jamaican Patwa Phrases for Various Occasions

Second of a series

By E. Osborne

Photo by aboodi vesakaran on Unsplash

A Note About Patwa Grammar

This brief discussion of Patwa’s grammatical structure will be useful in helping you understand the logic behind how words and phrases are strung together.

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The definite article in Jamaican is di (from English “the”), which in rapid speech often is reduced to i. Example: Gi mi di moni = Gi mi i moni, “Give me the money.”

Indefinite articles equivalent to English a and an do not exist in Jamaican. To compensate, some speakers of intermediate forms of the language employ standard English a. More frequently used, however, is the numeral wan (“one”), which occurs before count nouns except when they include the plural suffix -dem (“them”): Mi si wan daag, “I see a dog.”

Demonstratives

The demonstratives in Jamaican are dis (“this”), dat/da (“that”), and dem (“these/those”). Although they may be used alone to modify nouns, most often they are coupled with ya (“here”) and de (“there”) to indicate more precisely the relative proximity of the speaker to the person or thing being referred to.

Singular (near): dis-ya maan or da maan ya “this man”