Jamaican Word Dictionary: & Short Stories About Language

The Jamaican patois is spoken all over the world, wherever Jamaicans get together for a chat or a song. It contains elements of African languages, brought to Jamaica in the days of slavery, mixed with the Spanish and English of the early colonists and smatterings of Dutch, Portuguese and other European languages. It is very much a living language, continuing to evolve, but always retaining the expressive, lively, sunshiny characters of the Jamaican people.