It's Not Just Yeah, Mon

 Language is a funny thing.  I was born and raised in Florida, an English-speaking area.  My parents are immigrants from Jamaica who were educated in England before meeting and marrying in Connecticut.  Even my relationship to my native language is complicated.  I was a star student in English classes growing up and yet my skills were still not good enough for my mother.  After all, she grew up thriving through colonial Common Entrance at home that required her to learn Latin and Greek along with the Queen's English.  Then ten years in nursing in London in the seat of the Empire meant she challenged my lazy Southern diction.  I still remember when she teased me one day on how I pronounced "controversy" like an American (with emphasis on the first syllable.)  "You Americans don't know anything," she joked and pronounced it the Commonwealth way - emphasis on the second syllable.

Where we bonded over language was the dialect she spoke with friends and family: Jamaican Patois.  Back then English was the mother tongue and anything the former colonies spoke was a vernacular.  A dialect.  Less than.  Which helps explains why my mother's mother used to dissuade my sister and I from learning it when we spent our summers with her in rural Jamaica.  The language of every street vendor, church parishioner, and distant cousin I met was clearly not book English.  Still she didn't want us to "chat the bad chat" and sound uneducated.  My mother was simnifically more liberal in her approach.  How the people spoke around her where she grew up connected her with Jamaican and other West Indians in the UK, the US, or wherever she roamed.  Her children speaking Patois bonded them to their family and a culture that wasn't around them in the Tampa Bay area.  In family-only settings and small parties where curry chicken and dominoes were present, she codeswitched between English and Patois.  If she wanted me to know she was less than serious with her admonishment in the grocery store or church, it came in whispered Patois.  In my first years at FSU, the light conversations were in Patois, the serious ones were in English.  In fact, she loved Patois because "it said just want you want to say."  

As the Internet really woke up, Jamaican music and video became more accessible.  We bonded on clips texted and emailed back and forth like Oliver Samuels comedies previously only available on VHS.  She was never an avid Internet user and social media was a bridge too far so I continued my Patois exploration alone.  My first Jamaican influencer I followed on YouTube was madwhitejamaican.  Jamaica on the Internet encouraged me to use Patois online.  Texts and Facebook status began to become bilingual.  Who was I texting in Patois?  Mom, of course.  My relatives and West Indian friends were the only ones who could respond to my social codeswitching.  I kept thinking, "I'd love to teach this."  Every article I found about people teaching Patois as a foreign language and scholarly works about Jamaican I sent my mother's way.  (Did you know they teach Patois at Harvard?) As my career arced into corporate training and instructional design, the fantasy dances in my head...wouldn't it be neat to teach Patois?  Write the definitive Jamaican-American novel with both languages standing out in a way so people could learn how we talked more.  This is before I even knew that story learning was a thing.  (Big up yourself, YouTube!)  Someday I can put some energy towards all the fiction story threads I have going to make it happen and build on traditions like Louise Bennett started.

In the meantime, YouTube has come through.  Nearly every Jamaican influencer online has some video describing their version of Jamaican Patois.  Some of them excel at using good linguistic guidance to teach people who understand English how Jamaican Patois is different.  One of my favorites is Jamaican Sinting.

Even though her channel took nearly a decade break, her mix of cultural context and academic breakdown is an accessible example of produsage for Patois learning.  I highly encourage anyone - whether you're trying to bond with a Jamaican co-worker or just don't want to pay a high price on that cruise stop - to use her channel to learn.  One note, she uses the official academic spelling of Jamaican Patois (as in how you'd see it written in a textbook) and not how many of us write it (closer to the English lettering of the words and sounds).  Either way, learning seeks to build understanding and is a noble endeavor.