Jamaican Patois: phrases

Phrases are where nearly everyone starts and where nearly everyone stops. The standard list hands you two greetings and one expression of approval and leaves you there, which is enough to be understood once and nowhere near enough to hold a conversation — or to know that you are using something your parents' generation said and nobody says now.

The guides here go further in two directions at once. They give you more: greetings and farewells, agreement and refusal, affection, complaint, and the small connective words that make speech sound like speech rather than like a phrasebook read aloud. And they give you the context around each one — who says this, to whom, in what setting, and what it signals about you if you say it in the wrong one. A phrase you can place is a phrase you can use. A phrase you have only memorised is a party trick.