Jamaican Patois: spelling
Try to write Patois down and the first thing you hit is that there is more than one way to do it. The same word appears three or four ways across three or four websites, and none of them is exactly wrong.
Two systems are in play. The everyday spelling is English-based and improvised — it is what you will see in a message, a caption or a comment thread, and it reads easily to anybody who already knows the word being spelled. The Cassidy system, published by the Jamaican Language Unit, is phonemic: one sound, one spelling, every time. It looks unfamiliar for a day and then it tells you exactly how a word is pronounced, which the improvised spelling never quite can.
These guides explain both, show why this site prints them side by side, and make the case for learning to read the second one even if you never write in it.
2 guides
Spelling
How to spell Patois, and why the same word looks different every time
Jamaican Patois has no official spelling. Why one word turns up four ways, where English spelling misleads, and when to use the phonemic form instead.
9 min read
Spelling
How the Cassidy-JLU writing system spells Jamaican Patois
Cassidy-JLU writes Jamaican Patois phonemically: one sound, one letter. The vowels, the nasal mark, the missing letters, and a passage to decode.
11 min read