Jamaican Patois, known locally as Patois (Patwa or Patwah)  and called Jamaican Creole by linguists, is an English-based creole language with West African influences (a majority of loan words of Akan origin)[4] spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora; it is spoken by the majority of Jamaicans as a native language. Patois 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 the slaveholders: British English, Scots and Hiberno-English.  Jamaican Creole exhibits a gradation between more conservative creole forms that are not significantly mutually intelligible with English,[5] and forms virtually identical to Standard English.[6]