The three jobs English gives to the verb to be, and how Patois splits them

English gives one verb, to be, four of the commonest jobs in the language. Jamaican Patois hands those four jobs to three different things: a(a)— is, as a link between two nouns before a noun phrase or a verb, deh(de)— is, in a place before a place, and nothing at all before an adjective. Getting those three apart is the single change that most alters how a learner hears a Patois sentence, because once you stop listening for is, you stop hearing gaps that were never there.

What English hides inside one verb

Say four English sentences out loud. She is a nurse. She is in the kitchen. She is tired. She is working. One verb form, four completely different jobs: it equates two things, it locates something, it attaches a quality, and it props up another verb.

English fuses all four into a single word and lets you stop thinking about it. Plenty of languages do not, and Patois is one of them. It uses one word for the first job, a different word for the second, no word at all for the third, and — this is the part that repays attention — the same word as the first job for the fourth. Four English uses, three Patois answers.

Grammarians call the linking verb a copula, which is worth knowing only because it makes the rest of this page shorter to describe. The useful idea behind the term is that a copula carries no meaning of its own. It is a joint. A language is free to build a different joint for each kind of join, or to leave the joint out where the two halves already fit together — and both of those are what Patois does.

The mistake worth heading off now is to file this under things Patois leaves out. Nothing is missing. Three distinct structures are being kept apart, where English marks all of them the same way and relies on you to work out which is which from context.

a: joining a thing to what it is

When you want to say that one thing is another thing — a person is a teacher, a place is home, that is my brother — the linking word is a single letter, and it sits between the two noun phrases.

The linking word between two noun phrases

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English	Word for word
Mi a teacha	mi a tiicha	I am a teacher	I is teacher
Im a mi bredda	im a mi breda	He is my brother	he is my brother
Dat a mi yaad	dat a mi yaad	That is my home	that is my yard
A mi dat	a mi dat	That is me	is me that

The condition to hold on to is what follows the link: a noun phrase. A noun, or a noun with an article or a possessive in front of it. If what comes next is not a noun phrase, this word is not the one you want, and that single test will carry you a long way.

The last row does something extra. Putting the linking word at the front and the noun straight after it throws emphasis onto that noun — it is me, that — which is how Patois foregrounds the thing it wants you to notice. English needs a whole cleft sentence for the same effect.

deh: saying where something is

For location, Patois uses a different word entirely, and English has no separate word of its own to map it onto. It means, roughly, is situated, and it is followed by a place: here, there, at home, on something.

The locating word, followed by a place

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English	Word for word
Mi deh yah	mi de ya	I am here	I there here
Im deh a yaad	im de a yaad	He is at home	he there at yard
Weh im deh?	we im de	Where is he?	where he there
Weh yuh deh pon?	we yu de pan	What are you up to?	where you there on

The first row is one of the most-used sentences in the language, because it is also the standard reply to a greeting: asked how you are, you answer that you are here, and everybody understands that to mean you are fine. The last row shows the locating word being pushed past physical space into what somebody is occupied with — where are you on? — which is a question about your day rather than your address.

Notice what does not happen in the third and fourth rows: nothing inverts. The question word goes to the front and the rest of the sentence keeps its ordinary order, which is true of Patois questions generally.

Adjectives take nothing at all

Here is the part that looks like an omission and is not. Before an adjective, Patois puts no linking word, because a Patois adjective does not need one — it behaves like a verb in its own right.

Adjectives standing on their own

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English	Word for word
Mi hungry	mi hongri	I am hungry	I hungry
Dat easy	dat iizi	That is easy	that easy
Di bwoy tallawah	di bwai talawa	The boy is strong	the boy strong
Mi did hungry	mi did hongri	I was hungry	I did hungry

That fourth row is the evidence. The adjective takes a tense marker directly, in the slot a verb would take it in, with nothing standing between the two. If the adjective were the kind of word that needed a linking verb, the tense would have landed on the linking verb instead — as it does in English, where hungry never carries tense and was always does. The markers themselves are set out in our guide to Patois verb tenses.

Why the linking word does not turn up before an adjective

English speakers reach for one here anyway, because English puts is in front of an adjective and the habit is decades old by the time anybody meets Patois. Two things rule it out rather than one. The linking word joins a subject to a noun phrase, and an adjective is not a noun phrase. The other reading is unavailable too: the same word in front of a verb marks an action as running, and an adjective describes a state rather than an action. Neither of the two jobs the word does has anything here to attach to.

A speaker hearing that extra word will understand you without difficulty and will place the sentence instantly as one built by somebody thinking in English. The fix is not to learn a new word but to delete one.

The same a that marks an action in progress

The linking word has a second job: put it in front of a verb and it marks the action as ongoing, doing the work of English -ing.

The same form, in front of a verb

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English	Word for word
Mi a go	mi a guo	I am going	I -ing go
Mi a nyam	mi a nyam	I am eating	I -ing eat
Wah yuh a do?	wa yu a du	What are you doing?	what you -ing do

Whether that is one word doing two jobs, or two words that fell together long ago, is a question linguists still argue over. For a learner it makes no odds, because the rule reads the same either way: one form, one position — immediately before whatever it governs — and what it governs decides which reading you get. A noun phrase after it, and it links. A verb after it, and it marks the action as running.

The two are rarely confused in practice, because a listener already knows whether the next word is a noun or a verb. English does something comparable without noticing: she is a nurse and she is working both use is, and nobody has to be told which is which.

The third job the same letter does

Look back at the second row of the location table and you will find the same single vowel again, this time between the locating word and home. There it is neither a link nor an ongoing-action marker. It is a preposition, meaning at or to, and it introduces the place.

So one letter does three things: it joins two nouns, it marks an action as running, and it points at a place. That sounds like a recipe for chaos and is not, for the same reason as before — position and company settle it. Between two noun phrases it links. Before a verb it is progressive. After the locating word, or after a verb of motion, it is a preposition and a place is coming.

This kind of hard-working small word is normal in creole languages and normal in English too, once you look: that is a demonstrative, a relative pronoun and a complementiser, and no English speaker has ever been confused by it. What makes the Patois case feel harder is only that it is unfamiliar.

Negating all three

The negative word goes straight in front of whatever is being negated, and the three structures stay recognisably themselves: Mi nuh deh yah(mi no de ya)— I am not here, Mi nuh hungry(mi no hongri)— I am not hungry, and — with the linking word pulled to the front for emphasis, so that the negative lands behind it rather than in front of it — A nuh mi(a no mi)— it is not me. The full system, including the stacked negatives that English speakers misread, is in our guide to how negation works.

Hearing the three apart

Give it enough listening and the pattern separates on its own. What you are listening for is the word immediately after the subject: a single vowel means a link or an ongoing action, a short syllable beginning with a d means a location, and nothing at all means an adjective is coming.

You will also hear English is and are turn up in Jamaican speech, and often. Speakers move along a range that runs from deep creole at one end to something very close to English at the other, shifting according to who they are speaking to and what about, and the linking verb is one of the first things to shift. Somebody saying she is tired rather than the form in the table above has not left Patois behind; they have moved along that range, which is a thing skilled speakers do constantly and deliberately.

This page is also the answer to the commonest misreading of Patois — that it drops the verb to be. It drops nothing. It distributes one English word across three structures, and it draws a line between them that English leaves undrawn.

The pronouns are the other place where the two languages part company early. Our guide to Patois pronouns takes those apart, and the wider set of side-by-side differences is collected on our Patois and English page.