How to Use patois in a Sentence

patois

noun

• J’Ouvert is patois [from French] for ‘the day opens,’ not the day is already open.
  — Gregory Scruggs, The Root, 2 Sep. 2017
• There is pride in Cantonese, the patois of Hong Kong, rather than the Mandarin of the mainland.
  — New York Times, 30 June 2022
• In patois and in mood, the game manages to be both dystopian and comic, dark and light.
  — Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, 14 May 2018
• He’s got the Jamaican patois down, at times so well that the movie could have used subtitles.
  — Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post, 12 Feb. 2024
• While his Jamaican patois can be a hurdle, stick with it.
  — Jeff Slate, Esquire, 6 Feb. 2018
• That means that this province, called Limon, has much more English spoken – in a Jamaican patois – than the rest of the country.
  — Marla Jo Fisher, Orange County Register, 10 Feb. 2017
• And that’s to say nothing of its salty language and the irresistible carny patois that peppers its prose.
  — David Mermelstein, WSJ, 22 May 2021
• Drake is pop music’s most famous genre burglar — from U.K. grime to drill to Afrobeats and Jamaican dub patois.
  — Los Angeles Times, 16 June 2022
• Over the past two years, Evans has mostly adapted to that patois, while nudging it further open with his own loopy, full-blooded style.
  — New York Times, 29 Oct. 2020
• What cements their union is the news that Solo can speak—or, at any rate, gurgle—the language of the Wookiees, though it must be said that the patois is less charming on the human tongue.
  — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 4 June 2017
• They weren’t meant for public consumption, and the people sitting in the audience all spoke the same fashion patois.
  — National Geographic, 7 Jan. 2020
• Sasse’s words sometimes tumble out in a kind of techno-futurist patois that can be hard to follow.
  — Michael Sokolove, New York Times, 7 Sep. 2023
• The premise is that Emily Dickinson speaks in modern teen-age patois, scored to Billie Eilish.
  — The New Yorker, 19 Mar. 2020
• Cloud spoke in a quarter-time cadence, a patois of enduring patience.
  — Niela Orr, New York Times, 22 Dec. 2023
• Such anxious candor sits oddly with Mr. St. Aubyn’s posh patois.
  — Emily Bobrow, WSJ, 28 May 2021
• Kling’s patois was developed over time, in a push and pull with aesthetic traditions and his own training.
  — Vogue, 26 Mar. 2019
• How one of the first bits of dialogue, an exchange between Bear and Elora, is spoken in a kind of intertribal patois.
  — David Treuer, The Atlantic, 1 Aug. 2022
• Amusingly, that mural is between the restrooms, so people waiting in line can brush up on their patois.
  — Susan Dunne, courant.com, 28 Jan. 2022
• Cooper excavates local details and lingers on the place’s patois.
  — Jina Moore, New York Times, 17 Mar. 2017
• The explosion of email, tweets and texting, with their patois and haiku-style snippets, has eroded what for centuries was a clear distinction between the written and the spoken.
  — Lynnley Browning, Newsweek, 28 Mar. 2015
• Should they be condemned to speak the patois of their family members, with no education in grammar?
  — Bryan A. Garner, National Review, 3 Sep. 2020
• The series nods to the Chinglish patois spoken in Chinatown, where words that have hard stops are pronounced instead with tones held as connective filler, the tenors of which can be expressions on their own.
  — Jasper Lo, The New Yorker, 12 Sep. 2023
• One tale unfolds in Jamaican patois; another dips in and out of Black American idioms.
  — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 29 Aug. 2022
• Lighter fare includes an interview with Tom Hanks’ son Chet, who went viral for spitting white-boy patois on the Emmys red carpet.
  — P.j. McCormick, Rolling Stone, 14 Sep. 2022
• There are hardly any cute comic-relief characters speaking in bleeps, grunts, or cringey patois.
  — Jon Michaud, The New Yorker, 22 Nov. 2022
• Corbin’s story comes through without self-consciousness and in his own language, a language that isn’t the vernacular of the generic streets but the patois of those of us who grew up in Black Los Angeles.
  — Jervey Tervalon, Los Angeles Times, 10 Aug. 2022
• Newell lays it on a bit thick, his thick Caribbean patois verging into caricature at times.
  — Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 2 Dec. 2021
• In the patois of insurance, the winery will go bare into this year’s burning season, which experts predict to be especially fierce.
  — New York Times, 18 July 2021
• The lawns are still manicured, the croquet balls still click-clack together, hundreds of affluent Egyptian families sip tea and chat in a patois of English, French, and Arabic.
  — Ashraf Khalil, Town & Country, 21 Dec. 2012
• The thick patois of characters throughout the series may require some American viewers to use closed captioning.
  — Los Angeles Times, 28 Feb. 2021

Last Updated: 1 Dec 2024