|Jamaican Patois test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator|
|Native speakers||6.2 million (2010)| |Regulated by||not
regulated| Jamaican Patois, known locally as Patois (Patwa or
Patwah) or Jamaican, and called Jamaican Creole by linguists, 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 (or a linguistic
continuum)—meaning that the variety of the language closest to
the lexifier language (the acrolect) cannot be distinguished
systematically from intermediate varieties (collectively
referred to as the mesolect) nor even from the most divergent
rural varieties (collectively