A Hanukkah Story "Biscuit’s Hanukkah’ in Jamaican Patois
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A Christmas Story – "Rudolph’s Bag of Toys" in Jamaican Patois
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"Jaguar’s Jungleberry Jamboree" read in Jamaican Patois
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"Iguana on Ice" read in Jamaican Patois
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"Hide and Seek Hippo" read in Jamaican Patois
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Patwa in the Classroom: A Not So Far-fetched, Counter-intuitive Solution to Improving Literacy in English
There is an education crisis in this country. The Gleaner recently reported that ‘over 40 percent of the students at grade four fail to master the critical components of literacy and numeracy.’ Surely this situation is not tenable; it must be rectified with the most ambitious overhaul of primary education that we can conceive, and […]
Ivy League College Recognizes Jamaican Creole as a Language – How Patois (Patwa) Got Me A College Language Exemption
All students at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, must study a foreign language, unless they are bi or multilingual. By the time I matriculated in 2008, I was assured by research into the status of Creole languages, and the linguistic properties of Jamaican Creole in particular, that I was bilingual, and so by right, should […]
Navigating Nicaragua in Jamaican Creole
Last December I visited Nicaragua with little more than the basic Spanish I had learnt up to grade 9. While waiting to collect my luggage in Managua, I was pleasantly surprised to see the members of the Dancehall group T.O.K. I walked over to them, introduced myself, then asked, “a wa unu a du a […]
Language Discrimination and Classism Linked in Jamaica
I never liked speaking Patwa. It just sounded so, crude. By the time I was in grade ten I stopped using the ‘dialect’ altogether. My siblings often complained that ‘[mi] lov gwaan laik [mi] kyaahn chat Patwa.’ I scoffed at them, smugly retorting that we were all educated in the English language and were free […]
“We are going on a Lion Hunt” read in Jamaican Patois
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