I wrote this today because someone on a board I’m in asked me about the Mauritian Creole.

One of the definitions of creole :
of or relating to a language that arises from contact between two other languages and has features of both.

We just call it Creole in Mauritius but here I said Mauritian Creole to be more precise.
We also call the Mauritians (China, Chinese…….. Mauritius, Mauritians… Get it?) of African origin ‘the Creoles’ but I’m gonna talk about the language mostly.

Mauritius is more like an island of settlers . Well, the last two rulers of the island before it became independent were the French and the British. However, our Creole language originates from the French’s rule. The French brought African slaves to the island to work.
The French settlers had to communicate with their African slaves and this fostered the emergence of a new language: Creole. The Creole language is very much derived from the French language, though words of diverse origins can be found in it.
Those slaves heard their ‘masters’ speak and tried to imitate them. They eventually got to learn some words but they didn’t manage to speak exactly like the French.
Creole of Mauritius = African-derived grammar + a European-derived vocabulary

Quoted from kreol.mu ( kreol is the same as creole)

The tiny island of Mauritius has been called a “melting pot” and its linguistic situation is very complex. While English is the official language of parliament, traffic regulations, and school administration, it is spoken by only 3% of the population. French is the native language of Franco-mauritians and is used by the mass media. Eighty percent of the newspapers are written in French, which also dominates the advertising field. Mauritian Creole, or MC, is the national language and is spoken by the majority of Mauritians. Nearly the entire population knows and uses MC for communication.
The majority of MC words are of French origin, although more than 150 are derived from English, more than 50 from Indian languages, and several from Malagasy and Chinese.

Like many French-lexicon creoles, MC words often incorporate the article as part of the form of the word. For example: “liver” (winter), derives from the French “l’hiver”, and “dilo” (water) from “de l’eau”.

Here is an example:
Si mo ekrir coumsa personn pa pou compren mwa (which means: If I write like this no one will understand me. )

The thing is, Creole does not have a definite written form so all Mauritians may not write Creole the same way but we all understand.

For example
we can write ‘moi’ or ‘mwa’ (which means me) or we can write ‘manze’ or ‘manz’ or ‘mange’ (which means eat).

When I speak Creole with my 3 Mauritian friends here at Tongji University, the French people barely understand. They catch a few French words here and there and can sometimes guess what we are talking about but usually, they think that what we speak just don’t make sense. :mrgreen: