The Patois words for the people who raised you

The everyday Jamaican Patois words for family are madda(mada)— mother, faada(faada)— father, bredda(breda)— brother, sista(sista)— sister and pickney(pikni)— child. Learning that list takes an afternoon. What takes longer, and matters far more if you are trying to talk to your own relatives, is that these words do not always cover the same people the English ones cover.

The words you will hear in the first hour

Most of the core terms are recognisable on sight, because they came from English even where the sounds moved away from it. The pattern doing most of the work is the unstressed ending: where English writes -er, Patois says and writes -a. One word in the table below did not come from English at all: pickney is usually traced to Portuguese pequenino, very small.

Core Jamaican Patois family vocabulary

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English	Word for word
Madda	mada	Mother
Faada	faada	Father
Bredda	breda	Brother
Sista	sista	Sister
Pickney	pikni	Child
Dawta	daata	Daughter
Granny	grani	Grandmother
Uncle	ongkl	Uncle
Yout	yuut	A young man
Di pickney dem	di pikni dem	The children	the child them

The second column is Cassidy/JLU, a phonemic spelling in which each symbol always stands for the same sound, so you can see the pronunciation without guessing. The same two columns run through the Jamaican Patois words collection.

Who counts as a madda

This is the part a word list cannot give you. In Jamaica the kinship word tends to follow the relationship that was actually performed. A grandmother who raised a child is very often that child's madda— mother, and is addressed that way for life. An aunt who took a nephew in is spoken of the same way. Nobody involved is confused about the family tree; the word is simply reporting who did the work.

The consequence for a learner is that you cannot deduce a relationship from the term you hear. Somebody introducing a woman as their madda may mean the woman who gave birth to them, the woman who raised them, or both. That elasticity is completely ordinary, and treating it as loose or approximate is the fastest way to mark yourself as someone looking in from outside.

How you address someone older

The address terms are where a learner is most likely to cause offence without noticing, because English gives you a much weaker version of the same habit. An older relative is called by the kinship term, not by a first name. A first name on its own, from someone younger, is heard as familiarity that has not been earned — not as friendliness.

The same courtesy extends well past the family. Adults who are close to a household become Auntie— aunt and Uncle to the children in it whether or not there is any blood relation, and stay so into adulthood. Older people you do not know are usually addressed with a title and their first name, in the pattern Miss Pearl or Mister Roy. It is the standard way to speak to a stallholder, a driver or a neighbour, which is why the same address terms turn up everywhere in the vocabulary of money, numbers and bargaining.

The words for children and young people

pickney(pikni)— child is the general word for a child, and it does not stop applying when the child grows up. A woman in her seventies talking about her pickney(pikni) is talking about adults in their fifties. It carries no condescension there; it is the word for the relationship.

Younger people also get yout(yuut)— a young man and dawta(daata)— daughter, young woman, both of which reach past the family — a market vendor may call an unfamiliar young man yout without any suggestion of a relationship. And the parent of your child, where the two of you are not a couple, is your baby madda or your baby faada. It is a plain descriptive term in ordinary use, and worth knowing so that you hear it as ordinary.

Terms of affection, and who they are for

Affectionate terms are used far more widely in Jamaica than a British or American ear expects, and they are mostly not romantic. Mi love, mi dear and mi darling can be said to a customer, a child, a cousin or a stranger who has just been helpful, by a speaker of any age. Read them as flirtation and you will misread the room.

The romantic vocabulary is a separate and much smaller set, so a term of endearment from a stranger is a courtesy rather than an approach. The safe default is to receive it warmly and to use the kinship words yourself until you have heard how a particular family talks.

Family words for people who are not family

A large share of Patois social vocabulary is kinship vocabulary that has been lent out. bredda(breda)— brother is used to a close male friend. bredrin(bredrin)— close friend, brethren and sistren(sistren)— close female friend name your circle rather than your siblings, and both are closely associated with Rastafari speech, which is where a lot of people outside Jamaica first met them. Cousin does the same work for people who are no relation at all.

None of this is decoration. It tells you what a Jamaican social world does with the idea of family, which is to extend it deliberately to the people who have earned a place inside it. If somebody starts calling you bredda, that is information.

Putting the words in a sentence

Two structures carry most of what you need. Possession is marked by putting the two nouns next to each other, so mi madda house is my mother's house and mi bredda car is my brother's car — no ending, no apostrophe. And where English adds -s, Patois can put dem(dem)— them, plural marker after the noun, which is why the children are di pickney dem(di pikni dem)— the children, and that pattern is set out in full in how Patois marks plurals.

The other thing to notice early is that one pronoun covers he, she, him and her, so a sentence about a relative does not tell you their gender the way English does. That, and the rest of the set, is in the guide to Patois pronouns.

Speaking it to your own family

Most people who read this page are not tourists. They grew up hearing these words at home, understand far more than they can say, and want to close the gap with relatives who are getting older.

Two things help. Use the words your own family uses, not the ones a page like this one prints — every household has settled on its own set, and yours is as good as anyone's. And expect to be laughed at a little, warmly, the first few times. Nobody in that room thinks you are getting Patois wrong. They think you are trying, in their language, and that is not a small thing to hand somebody.