Guyanese Online

Jamaican Patois becoming the youth language of choice in larger countries

In some parts of England and Toronto Canada, a dialect heavy with Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean inflections is being spoken by a significant portion of the youth population. British linguists are calling it “multicultural youth English,” or MYE.

Jamaican Creole, or JamC , what the academics are now calling the patois native to Jamaica, has become the dialect employed not just by the children of Jamaican immigrants, but also by second-generation West Indians of other national origins (i.e. of Trinidadian, Grenadian, Guyanese, etc. parentage) and simultaneously by Black youth of various African heritage. For British-born, urban Black people, JamC became a code used as a marker of Black identity with sociolinguistic functions similar to African-American vernacular English in the United States.

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