patois

The Old French word patois is of uncertain but suggestive etymology. The most widely cited derivation connects it to patte, 'paw' or 'hand,' through a verb patoier meaning 'to handle clumsily' or 'to paw at something.' Patois thus originally carried a sense of rough, clumsy, non-standard speech — the speech of people who, metaphorically, handled language the way unskilled hands handle fine material. In medieval and early modern France, patois referred to any regional dialect that deviated from the prestige variety centered in Paris. The word was a tool of linguistic hierarchy, distinguishing the educated from the provincial.

French colonizers carried patois to the Caribbean as a term for the French-based creole languages spoken by enslaved and free African-descended people on the islands. In Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia, and Dominica, the French creoles spoken by the majority population were called patois by the French-speaking elite — a term that encoded the colonial judgment that these languages were deviant, impure, lesser forms of French. The actual languages — Antillean Creole, Saint Lucian Kwéyòl — are structurally complete, historically deep, and expressive in ways that the colonial terminology was designed to obscure.

In Jamaica, patois or 'patwa' refers to Jamaican Creole (also called Jamaican Patois or Jamaican English Creole), an English-lexifier creole with deep West African substrate influence. Jamaican Patois is the mother tongue of the vast majority of Jamaicans and the vehicle for some of the most globally influential cultural production of the 20th century: reggae music, Rastafarian philosophy, dancehall, and the literary and oral poetry traditions that include Louise Bennett-Coverley, whose 'Miss Lou' poems from the 1940s onward made Patois a literary language of intellectual dignity at a time when colonial education policy was trying to suppress it.

The reclamation of patois — from colonial slur to cultural identity — is one of the defining movements in Caribbean intellectual history. Kamau Brathwaite coined the term 'nation language' in the 1970s to replace patois and dialect, arguing that these were not deviations from European standard languages but expressions of a different — African-derived — aesthetic principle: speech that breathes, that carries the rhythms of the body, that cannot be fully captured in print. Today, Jamaican Patois has a developing written standard, is recognized by linguists as a distinct language, and has been proposed for official co-recognition alongside English in Jamaica. The paw-speech of colonial condescension became a language of revolution.