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Jamaican Patois, known locally as Patois (Patwa or Patwah) and called Jamaican Creole by linguists, is an English-based creole language with West African influences (a majority of loan words of Akan origin)〔Cassidy FG: Multiple etymologies in Jamaican Creole. Am Speech 1966, 41:211-215〕 spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. The language developed in the 17th century, when slaves from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned and nativized the vernacular and dialectal forms of English spoken by their masters: British English, Scots and Hiberno-English. It exhibits a gradation between more conservative creole forms and forms virtually identical to Standard English (i.e. metropolitan Standard English). Some Jamaicans refer to their language as patois. The term ''patois'' comes from Old French, ''patois'' "local or regional dialect" (earlier "rough, clumsy, or uncultivated speech"), possibly from the verb ''patoier'', "to treat roughly", from ''pate'' "paw", from Old Low Franconian *''patta'' "paw, sole of the foot" + ''-ois'', a pejorative suffix. The term may have arisen from the notion of a clumsy or rough manner of speaking. Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English, despite heavy use of English words or derivatives. Jamaican Patois displays similarities to the pidgin and creole languages of West Africa, due to their common descent from the blending of African substrate languages with European languages. Significant Jamaican-speaking communities exist among Jamaican expatriates in Miami, New York City, Toronto, Hartford, Washington, D.C., Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama (in the Caribbean coast), also London,〔Mark Sebba (1993), ''London Jamaican'', London: Longman.〕 Birmingham, Manchester, and Nottingham. A mutually intelligible variety is found in San Andrés y Providencia Islands, Colombia, brought to the island by descendants of Jamaican Maroons (escaped slaves) in the 18th century. Mesolectal forms are similar to very basilectal Belizean Kriol. Jamaican Patois exists mostly as a spoken language. Although standard British English is used for most writing in Jamaica, Jamaican Patois has been gaining ground as a literary language for almost a hundred years. Claude McKay published his book of Jamaican poems ''Songs of Jamaica'' in 1912. Patois and English are frequently used for stylistic contrast (codeswitching) in new forms of internet writing.〔Lars Hinrichs (2006), ''Codeswitching on the Web: English and Jamaican Creole in E-Mail Communication''. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.〕 ==Phonology== Accounts of basilectal Jamaican Patois postulate around 21 phonemic consonants and between 9 and 16 vowels. : The status of as a phoneme is dialectal: in western varieties, it is a full phoneme and there are minimal pairs ( 'hit' and 'eat'); in central and eastern varieties, the presence of in a word is in free variation with no consonant so that the words for 'hand' and 'and' (both underlyingly ) may be pronounced or . : The palatal stops 〔also transcribed as and 〕 and are considered phonemic by some accounts〔such as 〕 and phonetic by others.〔such as 〕 For the latter interpretation, their appearance is included in the larger phenomenon of phonetic palatalization. Examples of palatalization include: * → → ('a quarter quart (of rum)') * → → ('guard') * → → ('weak') Voiced stops are implosive whenever in the onset of prominent syllables (especially word-initially) so that ('beat') is pronounced and ('good') as .〔 Before a syllabic , the contrast between alveolar and velar consonants has been historically neutralized with alveolar consonants becoming velar so that the word for 'bottle' is and the word for 'idle' is . Jamaican Patois exhibits two types of vowel harmony; peripheral vowel harmony, wherein only sequences of peripheral vowels (that is, , , and ) can occur within a syllable; and back harmony, wherein and cannot occur within a syllable together (that is, and are allowed but and are not). These two phenomena account for three long vowels and four diphthongs: 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jamaican Patois」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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