Noun: Palawala
| Singular | Palawala |
| Plural | Palawala |
Sample Sentences
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Prior to her school days, my mother spoke French Patois [Antillean Creole] better than she spoke English. Her knowledge of Patois declined once she was at school as the nuns forbade the children from speaking their "Pala Wala" language in the school yard because they did not understand what the children were saying. [1999, Caribbean-Canadians Celebrate Carnival: Costumes and Inter-generational Relationships:]
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Patois is making (St. Lucians) backwards; it is nothing but palawala and it is merely a ploy to keep us back. [2013 (quoting from 1990), Crossing Cultural Boundaries: Explorations in Multilingual Teaching and Learning:]
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Such reservations were more prominent in the private high schools where teachers were vehemently opposed to the use of JC [Jamaican Creole] in education. Indeed, one teacher (Jill) expressed anger and outrage that researchers, such as myself, seem to have an obsession with this "gibberish 'palawala' nonsense". [2020, Wilton George Lodge, “What’s in a name? The power of the English language in secondary school science education”, in Cultural Studies of Science Education:]
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So many West Indians from the smaller Caribbean islands arrived... that to this day at Wismar, there is a residential area called the “Pala-Wala” section. "Pala-Wala" is the name locals call migrants from certain West Indies islands. [2011, Barbara P. Josiah, Migration, Mining, and the African Diaspora: Guyana in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Springer:]
Nouns inflected like Palawala
cement works,
Old World ROM,
mythopoetics,
zhenniao,
ichimon,
seinen,
sedoka,
semese,
sentai,
senryū,
senbei,
whapuku,
whapuka,
selbri,
Cinghalese,
sayori,
sansho,
sanies,
sanmai,
sangza, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
Probably at least partly from French parler, with repetition to make it sound like babbling. See: French Nouns '
parler'.