Jamaica Culture & Language

Jamaica's national motto is Out of Many, One People, and the population is overwhelmingly of African descent with Indian, Chinese, Lebanese and European minorities that show up clearly in the food.

The music is a lineage, not a genre. Mento gave way to ska in the early 1960s, ska slowed into rocksteady, rocksteady slowed further into reggae, and reggae's instrumental B-sides became dub, which is the direct ancestor of remix culture everywhere. Dancehall came next and is what actually plays on the island now. Kingston is where all of it happened — Studio One, Trench Town, Tuff Gong.

Rastafari emerged in 1930s Jamaica, drawing on Marcus Garvey's teaching and the coronation of Haile Selassie. It has its own dietary law (ital), its own speech, and its own houses — Nyabinghi, Bobo Shanti, Twelve Tribes. Rastafarians were persecuted in Jamaica for decades. It is a faith, and treating it as a look is the most common way visitors give offence.

The food is the island's best argument. Ackee and saltfish is the national dish — ackee is a West African fruit whose cooked flesh looks and eats like scrambled egg. Jerk is a Maroon technique: meat rubbed with scotch bonnet and pimento and smoked slowly over pimento wood, and Boston Bay in Portland Parish is where it comes from. Add curry goat, escovitch fish, oxtail, patties, bammy, festival, and rice and peas cooked in coconut milk. Blue Mountain coffee and Appleton rum both leave the island at a premium; both are cheaper here.

Athletics is close to a religion. A country of 2.8 million has produced a run of world-record sprinters, and the annual schools championships in March fill the national stadium for four days.

Jamaicans are direct, funny and quick, and the conversational register is sharper than visitors expect. It is not hostility.

English is the official language and everything official is in it. Jamaican Patois — Patwa — is what people actually speak, and it is a language rather than an accent or broken English: an English-based creole with West African grammar, its own syntax, and a sound system of its own. Jamaicans switch into English for visitors as a matter of course.

You do not need to speak it, and attempting it badly lands poorly. Understanding a little helps.

Wah gwaan (what's going on — the standard greeting), everyting criss (all good), yaa man (yes), likkle more (see you later), irie (fine, good), soon come (shortly — and the timescale is elastic), big up (respect to), duppy (a ghost), bredren and sistren.

Greet people first. "Good morning" or "good evening" before a question is expected, and skipping it is the thing visitors get wrong most often. Respect works as both a greeting and a sign-off.

Note that I and I is Rastafari speech with theological meaning, not a slang first person, and is not yours to use.