Jamaican Patois

Jamaican Patois is an English-lexified creole language with West African influences spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. It is not to be confused with Jamaican English nor with the Rastafarian use of English. The language developed in the 17th century, when slaves from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned and nativized the vernacular and dialectal forms of English spoken by their masters: British English, Scots and Hiberno-English. Jamaican Patois features a creole continuum—meaning that the variety of the language closest to the lexifier language cannot be distinguished systematically from intermediate varieties, nor even from the most divergent rural varieties. Jamaicans themselves usually refer to their dialect as patois, a French term without a precise linguistic definition. Wikipedia