ENTITY · CONCEPT / TERM
Patois in Toronto rap
Well supported
Jamaican patois is the working vernacular of Toronto rap, and the clearest evidence that the city's music was built by Caribbean migration. Michie Mee put it in the mouth of Canadian hip hop in the late 1980s, freestyling in patois to a crowd that erupted; the Dream Warriors and Kardinal Offishall carried a Caribbean aesthetic their American contemporaries did not; and by the 2010s the words had spread past the community that brought them, into a suburban Toronto slang spoken across every ethnic background in the city and, through Drake's records, out to the world. Linguists date the blend to the relaxed immigration of the 1960s that made Toronto a Jamaican city.
At a glance
- Type
- Concept / term →
- Confidence
- Well supported
- Sources
- The Globe and Mail (2017) on patois popularization; LargeUp (12 Jul 2016); jamaicans.com, "From Toronto Gyal Dem to Drake's Wah Gwaan"; CBC (Michie Mee 25th anniversary).
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Debate & reception
What people argued about this record — two documented positions each time, kept apart from verified fact. Browse every argument in the archive →
Whose patois? Toronto argues about its own vernacular
One side
Patois going mainstream is recognition: the language and the people who brought it are finally valued
The other
Borrowed without the history, it becomes costume, and the stereotype lands back on the community that speaks it
As patois spread from Toronto's West Indian community into a general suburban slang, and from there into Drake's records on If You're Reading This It's Too Late (2015) and Views (2016), the community that brought the language found itself of two minds. The Globe and Mail put both to print in 2017. On one side, pride: a restaurant owner saying it feels good, that everybody wants to be associated with patois now, and radio host Carrie Mullings using it professionally as a matter of cultural weight. On the other, unease: a second-generation teenager saying outsiders overuse words they do not understand until she no longer wants to use them herself, and York University's Clive Forrester warning that a people already stereotyped as aggressive carry the cost when the language is worn as a costume.
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