Kingston Parish Culture & Language

Kingston produces culture at a rate that has no relation to its size.

The music

In roughly twenty years the city invented ska in the early 1960s, rocksteady around 1966, reggae by 1968, dub in the early 1970s and dancehall by the end of that decade. Studio One and Treasure Isle worked within a few streets of each other, engineers like King Tubby and Lee Perry invented remix culture by accident while making instrumental B-sides, and the sound system — a mobile stack of speakers, a selector and a toaster on the microphone — created the template for hip hop and most dance music that followed.

Bob Marley

He turned it into a global language, and the house on Hope Road is a place of pilgrimage. Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Jimmy Cliff, Toots Hibbert and dozens of others worked here too.

Rastafari

Emerging in the 1930s from Garveyite thought and the coronation of Haile Selassie, with its own language, dietary rules and symbolism, and an enormous influence on Jamaican art and music.

Art and writing

The National Gallery holds the Jamaican intuitive painters; Kingston has produced a strong literary tradition in both standard English and Patois.

Dance

The National Dance Theatre Company, founded at independence, built a repertoire out of Jamaican folk forms — kumina, dinki mini, bruckins — alongside modern technique, and remains one of the Caribbean’s major companies. Dancehall has its own continuously evolving vocabulary of named steps, invented in the street and spread worldwide within weeks.

Patois

An English-based creole with West African grammar, now written as well as spoken.

English is the official language, used in government, education, media and business, and every visitor will manage entirely in it.

Jamaican Patois is what people actually speak to each other: an English-lexicon creole with West African grammatical structure, its own orthography, and a growing body of literature and translation. It is not slang or broken English, and it can be genuinely hard to follow at speed.

Useful expressions: wah gwaan for what’s happening, answered with mi deh yah; irie for good or fine; likkle more for see you later; respect as a greeting and a sign-off; and soon come, which means eventually rather than soon.

Attempting Patois badly is not advised, but understanding a few phrases opens conversations.