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Writing - and toasting - the Jamaican language

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How Patois travelled from playground stigma to page, pulpit and microphone.

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The arc of Jamaican Creole from a scorned 'dialect' to a written and performed language, carried by Miss Lou, the Cassidy spelling, the deejay's toast and the dub poet's line.

A language with no spelling

For generations the everyday speech of Jamaica - Jamaican Creole, or Patois - was dismissed as 'broken English', a thing to be corrected out of children rather than written down. Yet it was the language of the market, the yard, the dancehall and the church clap-and-response, dense with African-rooted grammar and its own proverbs and imagery.

Louise Bennett spent a career refusing that verdict. Performing and publishing in Patois - her 1966 collection Jamaica Labrish took its title from the word for chatter - she treated the language as fully capable of poetry, satire and news of the nation.

The tongue on the microphone

While the poets worked the page, the sound systems worked the mic. Toasting - the rhythmic talk-over pioneered by Count Machuki and turned into hit records by U-Roy - showed that Jamaican Creole could carry an entire performance art, one that would seed rap a generation later. From it came a whole lexicon of the dance, from 'big up' to the hail of the crowd.

First they said it could not be written. Then they built a spelling for it.

Naming it, spelling it

Scholars supplied the theory: Kamau Brathwaite's nation language reframed the vernacular as literature rather than dialect. Institutions supplied the standard: the Jamaican Language Unit at the UWI promotes the phonemic Cassidy/JLU orthography, the system used to render the Jamaican New Testament, Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment. What had no respectable spelling now had a grammar of its own on the page and on the riddim.

example · concept · Well supportedToasting

The Jamaican sound-system practice of talking, chanting and rhyming over instrumental records through the microphone, developed by 1950s-60s selectors and deejays to hype the dance. It is the seed form from which the recorded deejay style, and later rap, grew.

example · concept · Well supportedBig up

Jamaican dancehall expression of respect and acknowledgement, made from 'big yuself up', that spread through UK and US usage to become one of the most widely exported Caribbean contributions to English.

artist path · person · Well supportedU-Roy

Toasting pioneer who brought the sound-system deejay's live-mic style onto record.

argument · concept · Well supportedNation language

Term coined by poet-scholar Kamau Brathwaite for the African-rooted, oral, rhythm-driven Caribbean vernacular that resists the 'dialect' label; a key framework for reading dub poetry and Patois song as literature.

profile · person · Well supportedLouise Bennett-Coverley

Jamaican poet, folklorist and broadcaster whose public use of Jamaican language helped legitimize folk speech and performance.

evidence · publication · Well supportedDi Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment

The New Testament translated into Jamaican Patois, published by the Bible Society of the West Indies in 2012, preceded in 2010 by a translation of Luke ('Jiizas: di Buk We Luuk Rait bout Im'); issued as a diglot alongside the King James Version and written in the Cassidy/JLU system, it is the largest body of work produced in the language and was widely debated as a step toward official recognition of Patois.

artist path · person · Well supportedCount Machuki

Winston 'Count Machuki' Cooper (1939-1995) is regarded as Jamaica's first deejay: he began chatting live jive over records on Tom the Great Sebastian's sound in the early 1950s and later became the voice of Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat, directly inspiring U-Roy and the toasting tradition.

evidence · concept · Well supportedCassidy / JLU orthography

A phonemic writing system for Jamaican Patois first proposed by linguist Frederic Cassidy in 1961 and later adopted and revised by the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) at the University of the West Indies; it uses the Roman alphabet without diacritics, doubled vowels for length ('aa', 'ii', 'uu') and digraphs such as 'ch', and is the system used for the Jamaican-Patois Wikipedia and the patois New Testament.

argument · concept · Well supportedJamaican Creole (Patois)

The English-lexicon creole language of Jamaica, formed from English and West African (chiefly Akan) roots, and the primary vernacular of the island's song, chat and toast. Long stigmatised as 'broken English', it is increasingly recognised as a language in its own right.

example · producer org · Well supportedJamaican Language Unit (Di Jamiekan Langwij Yuunit)

Unit established at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in 2002 to research and standardise Jamaican Creole, promoting the phonemic Cassidy/JLU writing system and language-rights advocacy.

evidence · publication · Well supportedJamaica Labrish (Louise Bennett)

Louise Bennett's landmark 1966 collection of Patois verse ('labrish' meaning chatter or gossip), a milestone in treating Jamaican Creole as a serious literary medium.

Story · Well supportedFrom toasting to chatting: how the deejay took over

The Jamaican deejay grew from a hype-man behind the selector into the star of the record.

Story · ProbableFrom Kingston to the Bronx: DJ Kool Herc and the Sound-System Roots of Hip-Hop

How a Jamaican teenager carried the logic of the dancehall sound system into a South Bronx rec room and helped set hip-hop in motion.

Story · ProbableToasting and the mic

How the sound-system deejay's live talk-over became recorded art.

Story · Well supportedApprenticed to the sound: the deejay ladder

Every great Jamaican deejay of the 1960s and 70s served an apprenticeship on a named sound system.