I went to a Jamaican Patois class. Why was I so scared to speak it?

‘As a child, I would only hear my relatives fleetingly lapse into Creole’. Photograph: David Levene/The GuardianView image in fullscreen‘As a child, I would only hear my relatives fleetingly lapse into Creole’. Photograph: David Levene/The GuardianI went to a Jamaican Patois class. Why was I so scared to speak it?Centuries of historical baggage surrounds this form of speech. But I’m vowing to overcome shame and connect with this part of my culture

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Recently, my sister sent me and my mum a graphic promoting a Jamaican Patois (or Patwa) class on Instagram, organised by British teacher and author Naia Lewis. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before – Patois and other Caribbean Creole forms of speech are rarely treated as legitimate languages.

As a descendant of Caribbean migrants to the UK, I grew up surrounded by Patois, but had never practised speaking it. I wanted to go, but felt terrified of embarrassing myself. This week, I conquered that fear and explored why learning Patois and other Creole languages is so fraught and controversial across the diaspora.

View image in fullscreenHard to pin down … there is sometimes a stigma that follows Caribbean Creole languages. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian“In Jamaica, when it comes to speaking Patois, it’s seen as ‘chatting bad’,” says Naia Lewis, who runs classes in the language aimed at a beginner level. Patois developed during the transatlantic slave trade and functioned as a means for enslaved people to speak to one another and their slavers, combining African, Indigenous Caribbean, European and later, Chinese languages. Still broadly associated with the lower classes, it is often dismissed as a form of “broken English”, and regulations still prohibit Jamaican MPs from speaking the language in their parliament. “It’s seen as a lesser form of communication,” Lewis tells me.

Patois belongs to a broader family of Caribbean Creole languages, and after the Windrush generation of Caribbean people migrated to Britain, many of their children were told off or mocked for speaking in them. This stigma and silence around these languages has trickled down to subsequent generations – I know some young British Caribbeans who mainly engage with Patois in the form of isolated slang words. As a child, I heard Creole in music, but would only hear my relatives fleetingly lapse into it when they wanted to express something particularly passionate, to impersonate their parents, or to cuss someone out.

A widespread perception that Creoles are illegitimate languages also makes them hard to pin down. For example, I have Antiguan and Jamaican heritage, and grew up around descendants from numerous other Caribbean islands – who likely spoke in a mix of different Caribbean Creoles. But Jamaican Patois is the best known, and in Britain – where a large proportion of post-war Caribbean migrants were of Jamaican heritage – it is often used as a catch-all term.

With centuries of cultural and historical baggage surrounding the Patois language, I notice I am very scared to try speaking it, and that the threshold for shame and embarrassment feels high. In Lewis’ class, it dawns on me that I have never actually uttered more than a word or two – and now I am doing it in front of a group of strangers.

View image in fullscreenMortifying … the way I hear sounds in my head is notably different to the way they come out of ‘mi mout’. Photograph: David Levene/The GuardianI don’t say this lightly: due to my lack of language skills, there are moments in this class that are among the most mortifying of my life. I realise, only after I join the Zoom call with four others, that this is going to be incredibly interactive, and I am called on within the first five minutes for an exercise on prepositions – translating “on” to “pan” and so on.

“Weh yuh fuon de?” (where is your phone?) prompts my teacher, followed by “Weh yuh remote deh?” (where is your remote?). I pass, knowing that I’m only safe for so long.

We move on to phonics, and are presented with some clear rules for pronunciation in Patois. In words that begin “sk”, you broadly drop the “s” – we practise saying kin instead of “skin”, kratch for “scratch”. The same goes for words beginning “sp” in English. Try saying ponge instead of “sponge”, paida instead of “spider”.

This is harder than I thought it would be. I notice that years of family exposure means I can understand almost everything, but the way I hear sounds in my head is notably different to the way they come out of mi mout. I am frustrated by how heavily my English accent inflects my speech, and I feel that I should be better at this than I actually am.

Then comes the improvisation portion, and my time is truly up.

Yu jos kom ina di ruum an evribadi jos staat fi ak wierd (you’ve just walked into a room and everyone has started acting weird). Our job is to have a conversation with one other person, in front of the group, to establish why everyone is behaving strangely in this imaginary scenario.

When I’m called on, I buckle – telling Lewis that I don’t think I can do it off the cuff. She swaps with the student who is paired with me, asks me a question in front of the group: wagwan? There is a long, excruciating silence. I mentally scramble around for any of the phrases or terms I would hear my mum use around the house. But the problem is that I don’t know how to construct a full sentence with them. I smile blankly, and my face flushes.

Then, I remember a previous exercise on duppies (or ghosts) – and ad lib that I’ve seen a ghost in the room. The following couple of minutes are painful, but we get through them, and no one laughs at me, or even really flinches. We’re all in the same boat here, self-conscious and exposed.

Should we all be learning Afro-Creole languages?

View image in fullscreen‘The more you practise, the easier things get’ … consuming Patois from family interactions is not enough. Illustration: Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba/The GuardianAfter the class, I notice there are unexpected moments in which I feel a huge amount of anger and grief. The resentment is not so much about the loss of my people’s language to colonialism and enslavement. It’s the fact that, all these years, I hadn’t even thought that I had a language – that when people would speak to me in my people’s native tongues, it didn’t even register as a possibility to speak it back. Now, when I am asked to, I draw a blank.

Still, I come away from the class feeling that more of us should be engaging with our native Creole languages – and that consuming them through music, or listening to family members, isn’t enough. “The more you practise, the easier things get,” Lewis says. “The more you make a sound, the easier your brain knows how to make that sound.”

“Learning Patois is important so we don’t feel like a deer in headlights when people speak Jamaican Patois to us,” Lewis tells me. Whether it’s in the Caribbean or the UK, most of us encounter Patois speakers in our lives but, as Lewis says: “Some people don’t know how to respond appropriately, or don’t want to offend by saying it wrong, or get laughed at.”

This shaming and discouragement sometimes even comes from people across the Caribbean diaspora who are proponents of the language and embrace it. While the adverts for Lewis’ classes received a broadly positive and excited response from those interested in learning, the reaction from fluent speakers was more mixed. “Some people have said that I’m exposing the language to too many people,” she tells me. While Lewis understands this perspective, she sees it as a form of gatekeeping of languages that are already precarious and policed.

View image in fullscreenOn a mission … Naia Lewis teaches Caribbean Creole classes at beginner level. Photograph: Naia Lewis“There need to be people who can speak and teach Patois, so that people do not take advantage of the Jamaican culture and language and use it in inappropriate ways,” Lewis says. “When you don’t have any teachers of the language who are teaching the correct way of how to speak it, and the correct way of showing respect to Jamaican Patois as a language, then people will take it for a joke, or take it for dress up.” Lewis points to the fact that the Patois words that are the best-known among non-speakers are often swear words, used as a punchline.

There is a real risk here of words falling out of use – phrases losing their meaning through co-option and parody by those who don’t truly respect our communication and culture. As Afro-Creole linguist Ìfẹ́ Shakur has pointed out, the silence, taboo and shaming around the language, which is so entrenched even within Caribbean communities, is “doing the work of the coloniser”. I vow to go back, and to be embarrassed again.

What is your relationship to Caribbean Creole languages? Share your thoughts by replying to this, or emailing us at thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue.