Understanding Jamaican Patois: An Introduction to Afro-Jamaican Grammar

Rating:
Summary: Don't categorize us Jamaicans
Review: I haven't read this book, let me just get that out of the way.

However, as a degree-holder in linguistics and a Jamaican, I must say that the title alone emphasizes what must be an ineptness by the author to understand the Jamaican dynamic. There are no "Afro-Jamaicans." We are Jamaicans. Period. Some of us are black, some are white, some are Chinese, Syrian, etc. My mother is white, born in Sav-La-Mar, Jamaica, her grand-parents were from Ireland and Wales. She grew up speaking Jamaican Creole but that doesn't make her "Afro-Jamaican." Not all Jamaicans use this dialect, and not all users of this dialect are black.

Furthermore, although the Jamaicans loosely define their language as "patois", that is not what their language is called. A patois is defined as "uneducated speech" or "a dialect different from but based upon the main spoken language of the region." What the Jamaicans speak is certainly not uneducated speech, and any qualified linguist knows that every dialect and every language is complex and complete in its own way. Linguistically speaking, what we speak in certain areas of Jamaican can be called a creole, which is one of the final stages of a birth of a new language created from the pidgin of other languages.

Maybe the author utilized the words "afro" and "patois" to reach a broader audience, but at the expense of perpetuating false perceptions of the Jamaican people and language?

Rating:
Summary: Getting it wrong
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: The price is right
Review: 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.