Writing - and toasting - the Jamaican language

The Jamaican sound-system practice of talking, chanting and rhyming over instrumental records through the microphone, developed by 1950s-60s selectors and deejays to hype the dance. It is the seed form from which the recorded deejay style, and later rap, grew.

Jamaican dancehall expression of respect and acknowledgement, made from 'big yuself up', that spread through UK and US usage to become one of the most widely exported Caribbean contributions to English.

Ewart Beckford (1942-2021), the deejay who made toasting a recorded form. He had been talking over records on the sound systems for years — with Dickie Dynamic, Sir George the Atomic, and most importantly on Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat — when Duke Reid put him on the Treasure Isle rocksteady rhythms in 1970. The results took over the Jamaican charts, at one point reportedly holding the top three positions at once with "Wake the Town", "Rule the Nation" and "Wear You to the Ball", and the album Version Galore made the form permanent. What he established was that a deejay's voice over an existing rhythm was a record in its own right, not a novelty: everything from Jamaican deejaying to rap descends in part from those sessions. He ran his own Stur-Gav Hi-Fi from the late 1970s, the sound that gave Josey Wales and Charlie Chaplin their start, and recorded into his final years. He was awarded the Order of Distinction and died on 17 February 2021.

Term coined by poet-scholar Kamau Brathwaite for the African-rooted, oral, rhythm-driven Caribbean vernacular that resists the 'dialect' label; a key framework for reading dub poetry and Patois song as literature.

Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley (7 September 1919 - 26 July 2006), known universally as Miss Lou, was the writer who made Jamaican Patois a language you could publish in, broadcast in and be taken seriously in. She studied Jamaican folklore at Friends College in Highgate, and in 1945 became the first Black student admitted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London on a British Council scholarship — then spent six decades using that training on material the colonial curriculum had treated as beneath notice. Her collections run from Anancy Stories and Poems in Dialect (1944) through Jamaica Labrish (1966) to Auntie Roachy Seh (1993). She presented Miss Lou's Views on radio from 1965 and the children's programme Ring Ding on television from 1970 to 1982, on the conviction that children should be taught their own heritage; a generation grew up inside it. She was made MBE in 1960, received the Order of Jamaica in 1974, the Musgrave Medal in 1978 and the Order of Merit in 2001. The line from her to Mutabaruka, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Yasus Afari is direct and acknowledged, and every deejay who ever chatted in Patois over a rhythm works in ground she cleared first. She died in Toronto.

The New Testament translated into Jamaican Patois, published by the Bible Society of the West Indies in 2012, preceded in 2010 by a translation of Luke ('Jiizas: di Buk We Luuk Rait bout Im'); issued as a diglot alongside the King James Version and written in the Cassidy/JLU system, it is the largest body of work produced in the language and was widely debated as a step toward official recognition of Patois.

Winston 'Count Machuki' Cooper (1939-1995) is regarded as Jamaica's first deejay: he began chatting live jive over records on Tom the Great Sebastian's sound in the early 1950s and later became the voice of Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat, directly inspiring U-Roy and the toasting tradition.

A phonemic writing system for Jamaican Patois first proposed by linguist Frederic Cassidy in 1961 and later adopted and revised by the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) at the University of the West Indies; it uses the Roman alphabet without diacritics, doubled vowels for length ('aa', 'ii', 'uu') and digraphs such as 'ch', and is the system used for the Jamaican-Patois Wikipedia and the patois New Testament.

The English-lexicon creole language of Jamaica, formed from English and West African (chiefly Akan) roots, and the primary vernacular of the island's song, chat and toast. Long stigmatised as 'broken English', it is increasingly recognised as a language in its own right.

Unit established at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in 2002 to research and standardise Jamaican Creole, promoting the phonemic Cassidy/JLU writing system and language-rights advocacy.

Louise Bennett's landmark 1966 collection of Patois verse ('labrish' meaning chatter or gossip), a milestone in treating Jamaican Creole as a serious literary medium.