Yardies
| Founding location | Jamaica |
|---|---|
| Years active | 1950s–present |
| Territory | Jamaica, United Kingdom, United States, Canada |
| Ethnicity | Jamaican, British Jamaican, Jamaican-American, Jamaican-Canadian |
Yardie (or Yaadi) is a term derived from the Jamaican patois for home or "yard". The term may have specifically originated from the crowded government yards of two-storey concrete homes found in Kingston and inhabited by poorer Jamaican residents. Persons of Jamaican origin thus came to be known as Yardies, particularly within the Caribbean expatriate and Jamaican diaspora community.
However, especially outside of Jamaica, "yardies" or "the Yardies" usually specifically refers to Jamaican gangs or organized crime groups and gangsters of Jamaican origin, nationality, or ethnicity. The term is often used interchangeably with the term "posse" or "Jamaican posse" to refer to crime groups of Jamaican origin, with the term "Posse" used more frequently in Jamaica, the United States, and Canada to refer to Jamaican, Jamaican-American, and Jamaican-Canadian crime groups, and "Yardies" being deployed more frequently in the United Kingdom. Yardie gangs or "posses" are involved in a wide array of criminal activity depending on their location, ranging from political corruption, political violence, and assassination in Jamaica to drug trafficking and gang violence in the U.S., Canada, and U.K.
Derived from Jamaican Patois, the term "yardie" can be ambiguous, having multiple meanings depending on context. In the most innocuous sense, "yardie" can refer to a Jamaican national; Jamaican expatriates who moved abroad to countries such as the U.K. and U.S. would often refer to themselves and other Jamaicans as "yardies". "Yardie" may also more specifically apply to those Jamaicans originating in the impoverished "yards" of Jamaican public housing, and the term was eventually applied to criminals and gang members originating from these "yards." As the term "yard" in Jamaican Patois can also refer to a territory, turf, or piece of land, "yardie" further gained gang or criminal connotations as Jamaican gangs or criminals claimed certain "territories" or "turf" and referred to such territory as their "yards." Subsequently, in the U.K. and, to a lesser extent, North America, the term "Yardie" most frequently refers to gangsters or gangs of Jamaica origin, though these gang members themselves may refer to their gangs as "posses" or "crews." The term is especially common in the U.K. to describe Jamaican or British Jamaican organized crime groups and gangs, while "posse" has become the more common term in North America.
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